On Books

How to be strategic about your reading list

“Scientists divide. We discriminate. We must break the world into its constituent parts — genes, atoms, bytes — before making it whole again. […] to create the sum of the parts, we must begin by dividing the parts of the sum.”

— ‘The Gene’ by Siddhartha Mukherjee

As we enter the new year, some of us will set new goals for the year, and some will go about like the day before. In either case, the Universe will march towards the ultimate heat-death bulldozing over our plans without any intent or regret. All we will have control over is our next decision.

The output of our micro-decisions will depend on the information we ingest, how we process it, and how inspired we feel to follow through.

Quality ( Decision ) = f ( Data, Algorithm, Inspiration)

Books are a source of fuel for all three dimensions. Below is a proposal to be strategic about what we read to maximize decision quality. The [untested] theory is to categorize the bookshelf on the dimensions mentioned above and balance reading across these categories.

Data

This category comprises facts and known patterns gathered by observing nature and society. To cover knowledge across the spectrum from the micro to the macro and physical to abstract, this could be sub-categorized as:

1. Cellular (think Biology)
2. Civilization (think Anthropology, Economics, History, Politics, Technology)
3. Cognitive (think Behavioral and Neurosciences)
4. Cosmos (think Physics)

Here are some examples from my shelf:

Algorithm

This category comprises rules and methods developed to work with data. Their abstractions could be mathematical, computational, pictorial, or simple heuristics — but the intended outcome is to make decisions better. This can be sub-categorized as:

1. Management (think Leadership, Execution, Policy Design)
2. Mathematics (think Calculus, Probability, Stats)
3. Modeling (think Causal Diagrams, Computational Programs)

Here are some examples from my shelf:

Inspiration

While data and algorithms can provide fuel for decision-making, stories can be the spark. Stories broaden the reader’s imagination and deepen their empathy by taking them to a world different from their own and letting them explore that world through others’ lives.

In addition, stories also introduce some randomness to the tiring orderliness of algorithms, opening a diverse set of solution pathways.

Stories can come in these formats:

1. Biography
2. Philosophy
3. Poetry
4. Fiction

The ideal strategy would be to concurrently read a book from each category in a given time frame. For a generalist, it is also worth designing habits to balance the coverage across categories over time.

Finally, like any strategy, it helps to have monitoring systems.

Systems

Goodreads lets you export your bookshelf (link on ‘How to Export’), which can be used to plot simple distributions that can show insightful behaviors.

For example:

1. The chart below shows an imbalance in my reading across categories.

Fig 1: Reading coverage across the 3 categories; ‘Data’ is further exploded to 4 sub-categories. Size of bubble = number of books on the shelf.

Fig 2: Reading coverage across finer categories within ‘Data’.

2. Plotting my book rating against others’ also helped me understand what I organically enjoy and the quality of books on the shelf.

Fig 3: Ratings [Me x Others]. The black line represents y = x; I was, on average, more generous with my rating, with categories that fall above the line. GR Rating ranges from 1–5. ‘Global Rating’ tend to be ~4, so the X-axis is zoomed in to highlight the difference.

I hope this makes you think about why/what/how you read.

Happy new year!