Alban's Blog

Books

These books I'm reading, or have read recently. If you want to chat about books or recommend something you think I'd enjoy, tweet @albanbrooke

Reading

Recently finished

2025 05-07: Dungeon Crawler Carl (series) by Matt Dinniman

  1. Dungeon Crawler Carl
  2. Carl's Doomsday Scenario
  3. The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook
  4. The Gate of the Feral Gods
  5. The Butcher's Masquerade
  6. The Eye of the Bedlam Bride
  7. This Inevitable Ruin

2025 05 12: Transition by Iain M. Banks

2025 03 13: Caliban's War by James S. A. Corey

2025 02 05: Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

2024

2024 12 12: Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford

2024 12 10: Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

2024 11 xx: The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

2024 xx xx: Echopraxia by Peter Watts

2024 08 xx: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything by Nate Silver

2024 08 14: Excession by Iain M. Banks

2024 07 xx: Dracula by Bram Stoker

2024 05 28: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan

2024 05 25: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

2024 05 01: Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

2024 04 24: State of the Art by Iain M. Banks

2024 04 16: Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick

4/5: Exceptional introduction to working with AI tool, specifically LLMs like ChatGPT. Combines practical advice, like how to improve prompts, with philosophical questions about the purpose of work.

2024 04 13: Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

One of the best books in The Culture series.

2024 04 03: Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks

5/5: Absolutely ambitious novel with a complicated structure. It would prob be considered literary fiction if it wasn't science fiction. I'd love to write an in-depth review with a graphic depicting the structure of the novel.

2024 03 20: Down the Great Unknown by Edward Dolnick

2/5: I read this account of Powell’s expedition down the Colorado River while on vacation in Sedona and the Grand Canyon. It was pretty rough, I only finished because it was an audiobook and we had a lot of driving around Arizona.

2024 03 10: Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

2024 02 17: Blindsight by Peter Watts

2024 02 07: How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

2024 01 31: The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

2023

2023 07 05: Matter by Iain M. Banks

2023 05 22: The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks

2023 02 21: Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks

2023 02 01: The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman

2023 01 17: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

2023 01 08: The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge

2022

2022 12 04: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

2022 11 23: Small Gods by Terry Pratchett

2022 10 01: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

2022 10 01: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

2022 10 01: A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

2022 06 12: Dawn by Octavia E. Butler

2022 05 22: The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

2022 02 09: Tribe by Sebastian Junger

2022 01 28: Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson

2021

2021 11 16: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

2021 06 20: Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks

2021 06 09: Atmosphæra Incognita by Neal Stephenson

2021 03 10: The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

2021 03 10: Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

2021 02 13: Ten Drugs by Thomas Hager

2021 02 07: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

2021 02 01: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

2020

2020 09 08: The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi

2020 09 02: The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu

2020 08 15: Exhalation by Ted Chiang

2020 06 21: The Ascent of Rum Doodle by W.E. Bowman

2020 06 20: Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

2020 06 12: Positioning by Al Ries

2020 06 01: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

2020 04 20: On Having No Head by Douglas E. Harding

2020 01 26: Seven Years a Sailor by Bob Settles

2020 01 12: Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

2020 01 07: Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

2020 01 01: The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

2019

2019 12 19: The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism by Matthew Van Natta

2016

2016 11 27: The Enchiridion by Epictetus

2016 09 07: Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

2016 08 17: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

2015

2015 08 05: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell