Q3 books 2026

Saga of the Volsungstranslated by Jesse Byock. Read this on a plane flight. It's been a long time (decades) since I read the Sagas, and the last one was Beowulf which isn't as savage as this one. Lots of blood and guts. Lots of war and vengeance. Of course I had seen the Wagner Opera, but I had no idea what he took from the original stuff, so it's a whole new experience. I should probably go back and read more of this stuff; I remember Aegil's Saga was a lot of fun. Apollo: The Race To The Moonby Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox. Yes, the same Charles Murray. Interesting account of the designers and engineers and managers involved in the Apollo program beyond Von Braun and the Astronauts. Lots of them are people you never heard of:Max Faget,Rocco Petrone,Joe Shea,George Low,Caldwell Johnson,George Mueller. The Apollo program probably involved a half million people; this book is mostly ultimately about theirmanagement. From the management of the engineering and contractors to the detailed management of the spacecraft from the control room. Lots of it is stories of buzzcut engineers in short sleeve white shirts making monkey threat displays at each other, which isn't exactly gripping reading unless you do that for a living. It did manage to give some important takeaways into how to manage a giant project like this. You can tell Elong read this book for example, in the way SpaceX conducts its business. It's also a book on changing organizations; the original NACA (a pure aeronautics scientific organization) was a very different group of people, and this goes into how the organization evolved into the thing that shot men into space, how the people from the original group contributed to the larger goal. The stuff on the actual missions is in the latter third of the book; they manage to put quite a bit of dramatic tension in it, which is a considerable writing achievement. It isn't a HBS case study, but one could read it and write a good one (which would make everyone at HBS mad: lots of square young white dudes, no girl bosses and almost zero non-technical bureaucracy). Invaluable historical account, apparently the interviews were done in the 1980s while most of the characters involved were still alive and had relatively fresh memories. Absolutely read it if you're a manager of technologists who needs to put lightning in a bottle. Skip it if you sell underpants on the internet, or skip ahead to the exciting stuff. Path Signatures and Rough Path Theory for Quantitative Trading in Python: A Practical Guide to Geometric Feature Engineering and Signature Modelsby 'James Preston.' I quote the 'author' who is some kind of LLM thing which has like400 other books on related topics. First time I got owned by trash Amazon books (Amazon graciously gave me my money back). It's hilarious in that an initial thumb through it indicated some promising stuff. This book contains things I've figured out on my own that you only can figure out from experience; stuff decidedly not in the literature and which an LLM would be hard pressed to come up with unless it was talking to people who know these things (look at your terms of service). It also contains a whole bunch of insane gibberish and retarded anecdotes about the use of quantum computards in executing high frequency trades. Written in a very plausible trader-like declarative fashion, except actual quant traders never talk like this. I'm not going to tell you which are the hard earned insights (which I guess LLMs know about; might as well as one of those) and which are the gibberish, so this book is useless to anyone who doesn't know these things already: don't buy this book. Path signatures are cool though. Instead buy:Signature Methods in Financeedited by …. Beyer, Horvath, dos Reis and Oberhauser. Downloadable from Springerhere. This is not a book which purports to be directly relating to trading, though it has a chapter/paper in it which does. It's a funny sort of book, which seems to be becoming more common in technical books; it's a fairly coherent textbook on the subject consisting of various chapters written by different people as standalone papers. It has a very readable introduction to path signatures, as well as sections on feature generation, option pricing and a whole lot of other useful stuff. By contrast, the textbook by Friz and Hairer (downloadablehere) is basically unreadable for non-mentats, and arguably worthless for people who want to use it for anything other than making proofs aboutregularity structures.They don't even use the words 'path signatures' (I think they call these things 'lift' or something), which is pretty annoying as that's the main thing I give a damn about. Anyway the various forms of rough path signature are tremendously useful mathematical objects. I'd rank them at least Wavelet tier, possibly Fourier transform tier. You can think of them as a sort of Taylor series expansions of timeseries which blows out the dimensionality (yes it increases dimensionality -so do wavelets) in an extremely useful way. It's obvious the deeper math behind it is godawful important.Hairerwon a Fields medal for the regularity structures thing, which is a kind of generalization of path signatures with renormalization. Path signatures are defined for 'controlled differential equations' (ordinary diff eqs in the presence of noise); the regularity structures are extending the idea to partial differential equations in the presence of noise. I'm happy just fooling around with my new doodad as there are plenty of interesting systems which are effectively ordinary differential equations in the presence of noise. This involves reminding myself how tensor math works and glancing at real analysis proofs and stochastic calculus books. It's like a mathematical result from the 19th century (when everything was awesome and changing every day) showing up in the 21st. It is mostly the invention ofTerry Lyons, who I assume is too busy kicking ass to write a book like this; his lectures on youtube(for example)are excellent and will give you an idea of what it ends up being used for. Anyway if you have no idea what I'm talking about, don't buy this book. Otherwise, this is the book to buy. I was also able to get through a chunk of Friz and Hairer after reading this and 10 review articles on the topic and making a sort of glossary to decode what they were saying. Hairer was trained as a physicist and Friz was a quant, so you'd think it would be easier to grok what they're on about, but I guess they're deep in the badlands of abstraction. The Light AgesSeb Falk. Contrary to reddit, there was plenty of science going on in the so called 'dark ages.' I've known this since reading Spengler's Man and Technics, where he traces ourFaustiancivilization to these times. It's one of those things where, if you know some names from those days, and look at their wiki-pages it is self evidently true. The procedure known as the scientific method was invented by an English monk namedGrossetestein the 13th and greatest of centuries. Later explained better in the same century byRoger Bacon. I won't attempt to give a history of the great men of that era, look atMan and Technicsfor a good list. Falk give us a peek into some of the great men of the day, but through the eyes of a sort of central figure, John of Westwyk -an obscure astronomer-monk of St. Albans Cathedral. A lot of it is dry, but important: things like how they thought about the diameter of the earth, how numbers were encoded with multiple systems, how astrolabes work…. I have to admit, something about the style of the thing made it a tough read to get through. This is a subject I've always found interesting, but it took me months to get through the volume. I can't explain what is wrong with his prose exactly, but it was tougher to get through than, say, Homer. A Pocket Mirror for HeroesBaltasar Gracian. Gracian's'Art of Worldly Wisdom'is probably my favorite book; I carry a dog-eared copy of it around with me everywhere. This book, unfortunately is not up to those standards. I suspect it's mistranslated, but I don't care enough to look at a Spanish edition. At least some of it isn't the translators fault: Gracian takes obscene liberties with the reader's attention in various places, telling long (incredibly dry) allegorical tales about peacocks in an attempt to communicate what is ultimately a trivially simple idea: if you're excelling at something, distract the jealous with your defects (the peacock has ugly feet). Others contain interminable dialogues between various unfamiliar personages. Perhaps this sort of thing was beloved of 16th century Spanish Jesuits, but it gave me a headache. Overall, Gracian is trying to communicate the same kind of thing as in his better known book, but fails at doing so as concisely and clearly. This one I've probably picked up a half dozen times, but only managed to finish the thing recently on force of will. Would not recommend. Will hang onto the book until it's way out of print and probably be able to sell it for bitcoin tier prices to people who haven't read my criticism of it. The Discovery of the Mindby Bruno Snell. Snell's thesis is that the Ancient Greeks invented the intellectual concept of the self reflecting individual; people before them did not have this concept, which came to take over Western Civilization. This can be seen as a sort of moderate take on Julian JaynesOrigin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes book, which I read at the suggestion of an experimental physics professor in my undergrad junior year, is one of those mind-blowing works of scholarship that changes the way you look at the past forever. Jaynes idea is effectively that ancient man were effectively paranoid schizophrenics, regularly talking with 'the gods' the way contemporary schizophrenics hear voices. It's a compelling idea well backed up by his scholarship; as others have pointed out, it is either a work of consummate genius or total bullshit. Snell's book (1948) predates Jaynes (1975), though according to the index in Jaynes book, he had only heard of Snell after completing his overall argument in chapter 2 of his book. In any case I had only heard of Snell's book this year. Unlike the two books reviewed before this one, I found it an excellent book in its structure and style and powered through it quickly (I was beginning to wonder if I needed to visit the brain doctor). His argument is compelling in that he traces a history of ways of thinking and being from Homeric times to later antiquity using linguistic ideas, historical religious ideas, literature and so on …. From my stale memory of Jaynes book, he uses similar arguments to the ones Jaynes did, but wasn't as radical in his conclusions. It's one of those books which provokes thought; makes the ideas dance in your head. For myself I had the thought that maybe the Homeric Greeks had a better understanding of how consciousness actually works, dividing the soul up intothumos,psycheandnoos. The way Snell breaks down their contextual meanings, maybe they refer to distinguishable things. We don't give the ancients enough credit: they had a lot of time to think about things (sort of like with astronomy which was both television and supercomputer to the ancients), lacking the ridiculous distractions we have today, and it wouldn't surprise me if the ancients had better insights into how the mind words. No urban distractions to confuse; perhaps the later ideas we inherited about how the self-reflective mind works are the faulty ones; a sort of mirage of culture and language. The obvious counterpoint to Snell and Jaynes is that people may have had the same basic mental structure as today, but lacked the ability to speak about it. I'll have to give Jaynes a reread soon as well. Excellent thought provoking work of the highest quality for those interested in Greks or ideas about consciousness in general. The Popesby John Julius Norwich. Norwich has shown up in my book lists multiple times now; pretty much everything he writes is a treasure. Often the kind of thing that leads one to very amusing primary materials, such as Anna Comnena'sdiariesor Villehardouin's memoir of theFourth Crusade. His historical interests mostly lie within the Adriatic sea; Byzantium, Venice, the Norman freebooters, though he has a book I read half of in the summer of 2021 on France. This one, obviously is about the Popes. Norwich was an agnostic Protestant, and so he wrote this as a political history rather than from any religious perspective. This is arguably the most valuable perspective one could take on the topic; if you're a Catholic, it gives you some perspective on what the papacy has meant over the millennia. It also gives you some perspective on recent Popes in comparison to the Saints, Freebooters and Monsters who have inhabited the institution over the centuries. The Rise and Evolution of BJJby Robert Drysdale. We all know the story of Carlos Gracie learning from Count Maeda and developing the family martial art he taught to his brothers. If you dig a little deeper, this is known to be more or lesstotal bullshit. Drysdale (a high ranking BJJ practitioner) focuses on the less well known contributions of Carlson Gracie, as well as his friendly rivalry with Rolls. By Drysdale's telling Carlson (who was a frequent Vale Tudo competitor) was a crucial piece of the puzzle, opting for a more broad audience of students and a ruthless concentration on 'what works' in something resembling a real fight. I studied a bit with Carley Gracie, and he said similar things. He considered it a more direct lineage to the original art as developed by his father Carlos (also father to Rolls and Carlson: Carlos had like 20 kids with various women). It's a fairly interesting book, though a bit repetitive, with large chunks of it consisting of interviews with people from the Carlson and Rolls dojo. Quite a lot of interesting trivia, origins of stuff like the americana lock (byBob Anderson) and the complicated interplay between various kinds of Catch wrestling, Judo and other kinds of wrestling active in Brazil back in the day. This isn't a sport I was ever particularly active in, and I have no plans on becoming active in it in the future, but it is a cool sport, especially in the early days. How the World Really Works(2022) Vaclav Smil. Pretty much everyone involved in any kind of sustainability racket needs to read this. I don't respect anybody who has opinions on 'green' whatevers who hasn't internalized the facts contained in this book. Basically everything you do and see is crystalized hydrocarbons. Including stuff like windmills, tomatoes, bread, electric cars …. Smil estimates if you got rid of the Haber Bosch process half the population would starve. I'm kind of OK with that because I know which half it would be. That's the problem with reading books like this. Because it actually tells you how the world works. More or less, it does contain some blunders: for example, I clock wood in as almost as important as concrete and more important than plastic in terms of tons per year, but it escapes Smil's attention. It's true plastic is more interesting and serves more essential purposes, but wood is kind of a big deal. Anyway the book focuses on important materials for modernity and the actual mechanisms pretty much everyone is blissfully unaware of when talking of glorious green futures and electric airplanes. Smil wrote this as covid hysteria peaked and seems extremely bitter throughout at all the dumb shit touted in the media and online. The 'technocrat' class should be as in command of basic facts as Smil is, but obviously isn't, and is as enamored of wacky ideas as barbarians with bones in their noses. While Smil doesn't go all 'covid denialist' with how the vile technocracy handled that crisis, he does point out that the places ruled over by people convinced we're going to have solar powered steel mills are the places where the most people died. I didn't realize Smil is a boomer so we might not get so many more books out of him, but his accounts of technocracy predictions over the years and how the world physically, thermodynamically functions are invaluable, if only as a record of how bad our technocracy is at virtually everything it attempts. Poiluby Louis Barthas. I'm a sucker for war autobiographies; one of my all time favorites is by another Frenchman; theMemoires of Sergeant Bourgogne-about the happenings during the Napoleonic Russian campaign. Barthas unlike any other WW-1 autobiographer was an uneducated (though very intelligent) man: a wine barrel maker by trade (in Peyriac-Minervois: nice wine region). They only came to light in 1978 when his grandson made them available for publication. Barthas was relatively old at 35 when drafted. He was also a socialist as many thoughtful types were back in his day. He somehow lasted the entire war and was at many key battles; the kinds of details he presents are almost beyond belief. Unlike many memoirs of the war, this was never polished for literary effect; it's just diaries he reworked after the war with postcards, newspaper clippings, maps and other such ephemera for his family (some of which are reproduced in the book). Not a cheerful book, but a nice book to read if you're ever experiencing minor inconveniences and need a reality check.