Books
Books

Books

The books I read in order to write.

At The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, CA.
At The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, CA.
With the books I read in 2020.
With the books I read in 2020.
Meeting my favorite author: Dr. Fritjof Capra.
Meeting my favorite author: Dr. Fritjof Capra.
My favorite memory as a kid was when my dad would take me to the Hayward Public Library to checkout some books. I still remember the layout and I find that when I’m lost in a reverie, I think about being in that library curled up with a stack of books. This is my happy place. That enthusiasm never escaped me — till this day I rack up credit card points in exchange for a massive 3,000 volume personal library. This is why I work, to bring these comforts to my life so I can time travel in my head to worlds of past or fiction. While I do consume these books, in 2020 I realized I need to also be a creator. I started writing my first book, Manifest. Since then, I’ve found that I’m equally as happy writing as I am reading — and recently I’ve been charting a career path that allows me to combine the two. Heaven really does exist and it’s when I’m reading & writing. If you’re a fellow bibliophile, don’t hesitate to reach out. A shared love of reading is a deeply understood bond between people.

Books I’m Writing

Click here
Click here to purchase.

I’m a published author who writes across a wide range of topics.

Published Books

  • Manifest → This book explores the vast terrain of mathematics, starting with the history of mathematics, extending to complex problems in theoretical physics, and surveying the most important unsolved problems & conjectures. Click here to purchase.

In Progress Books

  • The Grimoire of Wealth → A set of business case studies from the Gilded Age highlighting the chaos of the times & surfacing valuable business lessons.

Upcoming Books

  • The Art of Leisure → An argument not in rejection of hustle culture, but in a resurgence in leisurely time to do deep thinking. Stemming from the Greek work skoleia, readers will learn about how downtime allows one “to become”.
  • The Power We Inherit → An exploration into the various archetypes stemming from the relationship between fathers and sons throughout history.

Books I’m Reading

Annual Reading Goals

🎯
Reading Goals

Goal
Current
Target
Progress
Number
16
25

●●●●●●○○○○ 64%

19
25

●●●●●●●○○○ 76%

8
25

●●●○○○○○○○ 32%

10
50

●●○○○○○○○○ 20%

50
50

●●●●●●●●●● 100%

85
100

●●●●●●●●○○ 85%

150
100

●●●●●●●●●● 100%

Current Progress

Title
Author
Pages Read
Progress
Genre
Read Dates
Alexandre Dumas

○○○○○○○○○○ %

Fiction
J Krishnamurti
34

●●○○○○○○○○ 27%

Religion
Jun 8, 2026
P. D. Ouspensky
23

○○○○○○○○○○ 6%

Self-DevelopmentSpiritual / Religious
Jun 7, 2026
David McCullough
132

●●○○○○○○○○ 20%

Biography & Autobiography
May 31, 2026
Stephen King
134

●○○○○○○○○○ 16%

May 29, 2026

What I Read This Year

Title
Author
Rating
Genre
Read Dates
Page Count
Ron Chernow
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Biography & Autobiography
Jan 6, 2026 → Jan 23, 2026
774
Marcus Aurelius
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Philosophy
Jan 12, 2026 → Jan 14, 2026
258
Hampton Sides
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
History
Jan 18, 2026 → Jan 24, 2026
705
David McCullough
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Biography & Autobiography
Jan 21, 2026 → Jan 27, 2026
448
Ron Chernow
Biography & Autobiography
Jan 22, 2026
852
Bessel van der Kolk M.D.
Psychology
Jan 26, 2026
465
John Williams
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Fiction
Feb 1, 2026 → Feb 3, 2026
337
Stephen Greenblatt
History
Feb 3, 2026
389
Ryan Holiday
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Business & Economics
Feb 9, 2026 → Feb 12, 2026
417
Edmund Morris
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Biography & Autobiography
Feb 10, 2026 → Feb 20, 2026
794
Edmund Morris
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Biography & Autobiography
Feb 13, 2026 → Feb 28, 2026
786
David Foster Wallace
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Humor
Feb 15, 2026 → Feb 21, 2026
549
Hannah Arendt
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Philosophy
Feb 16, 2026 → Apr 2, 2026
383
Peter Adamson
History
Feb 16, 2026
455
Kazuo Ishiguro
Fiction
Feb 18, 2026
280
Edmund Morris
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Biography & Autobiography
Feb 22, 2026 → Feb 27, 2026
961
Rüdiger Safranski
Biography & Autobiography
Mar 3, 2026
405
Alan Watts
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Religion
Mar 5, 2026 → Mar 7, 2026
226
Gordon S. Wood
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
History
Mar 9, 2026 → Mar 12, 2026
344
Michel de Montaigne
Literary Collections
Mar 9, 2026
1398
Josef Pieper
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Philosophy
Mar 16, 2026 → Mar 26, 2026
144
Michael Shaara
Fiction
Mar 16, 2026
402
Albert J. Baime
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Biography & Autobiography
Mar 19, 2026 → Mar 22, 2026
461
Robert A. Caro
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Biography & Autobiography
Mar 23, 2026 → Apr 4, 2026
962
Erik Larson
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
History
Mar 25, 2026 → Mar 28, 2026
465
Robert A. Caro
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Biography & Autobiography
Mar 29, 2026 → Apr 20, 2026
594
Joseph Campbell
Psychology
Apr 20, 2026
436
Adrian Goldsworthy
Biography & Autobiography
Apr 28, 2026
616
Robert A. Caro
Biography & Autobiography
May 1, 2026 1:19 AM (UTC)
241
Andrew Carnegie
Biography & Autobiography
May 1, 2026 1:20 AM (UTC)
353
Ron Chernow
Biography & Autobiography
May 1, 2026 1:20 AM (UTC)
1217
Robert A. Caro
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Biography & Autobiography
May 1, 2026 → May 31, 2026
1049
Ron Chernow
Biography & Autobiography
May 1, 2026
961
Robert A. Caro
Biography & Autobiography
May 1, 2026
1345
David W. Blight
Biography & Autobiography
May 2, 2026
912
Peter Burke
History
May 2, 2026
353
Paul Strathern
History
May 6, 2026
482
Hugo Münsterberg
PsychologyBusiness & EconomicsPhilosophySocial Science
May 8, 2026
344
Lee Kuan Yew
Political Science
May 8, 2026
630
Jon Meacham
Biography & Autobiography
May 9, 2026
753
Joan Didion
Biography & Autobiography
May 14, 2026
241
Thomas Carlyle
Heroes
May 16, 2026
167
Amanda Montell
Psychology
May 17, 2026
298
Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosophy
May 27, 2026
271
Jean Baudrillard
Art
May 28, 2026
159
Ada Palmer
History
May 28, 2026
650
Stephen King
May 29, 2026
842
David McCullough
Biography & Autobiography
May 31, 2026
651
Carol S. Pearson
Psychology
Jun 4, 2026
205
Ralph Waldo Emerson
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Biography & Autobiography
Jun 4, 2026 → Jun 5, 2026
19
P. D. Ouspensky
Self-DevelopmentSpiritual / Religious
Jun 7, 2026
389
J Krishnamurti
Religion
Jun 8, 2026
124

Bookshelf

‣
Reading
‣
Up Next
‣
Backlog
The Greatest Story Ever Told--So FarThe Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far
The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far
Lawrence M. Krauss

○○○○○○○○○○ %

Bruce Lee The Art of Expressing the Human BodyBruce Lee The Art of Expressing the Human Body
Bruce Lee The Art of Expressing the Human Body
Bruce Lee

○○○○○○○○○○ %

Bruce Lee The Art of Expressing the Human BodyBruce Lee The Art of Expressing the Human Body
Bruce Lee The Art of Expressing the Human Body
Bruce Lee

○○○○○○○○○○ %

The Three-Body ProblemThe Three-Body Problem
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu

○○○○○○○○○○ %

‣
Read
The Future of the BodyThe Future of the Body
The Future of the Body
Michael Murphy

○○○○○○○○○○ %

Body Mind Mastery
Body Mind Mastery
Dan Millman

○○○○○○○○○○ %

‣
Paused
The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan YewThe Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew
The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew
Lee Kuan Yew

○○○○○○○○○○ 4%

The Body Keeps the ScoreThe Body Keeps the Score
The Body Keeps the Score
Bessel van der Kolk M.D.

●●●●●●○○○○ 60%

Highlights, Quotes, & Notes

‣
Goethe: Life as a Work of Art
💡
“No longer discouraged by the great men, he was instead guided by his own high standards, which he had so far failed to meet. The key words he noted down for a planned autobiography in 1767 were Self-development through the transformation of experience into an image. These few words adumbrated his poetics of the time. It was not enough to be in conformity with everyday reality, nor to simply express one's inner life. Experience is fleeting, and artistic creation preserves a lasting trace, an image: experience given a form. The young Goethe was already well versed in the manipulation of forms, but he had since learned that one must fill them with their own life. He called it working according to nature, which also meant leaving himself free so that something could grow and flour-ish. He knew he possessed characteristics... necessary for a poet. He just needed to be left alone, not distracted by prémature criticism. Only then would he be able to show his true nature. Let them leave me be. If I possess genius, I shall become a poet even if no one corrects me. If I possess none, no critiques will help.”
Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
Highlight
CriticismStandardsGenius
💡
“But this is ultimately a defensive attempt to carve out a sacred space, separate from ordinary life, in order to protect transcendence from the leveling effects of society. The momentary bliss he feels is restricted, for his gaze remains fixed on the limits of space and time. It resembles what happens in prayer. In the "Notes and Essays toward a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan," he writes that in most cases, prayer does not pervade life. Usually an effulgent sense of momentary bliss is followed by disenchantment, and the unsatisfied... person, returned to himself, falls back into the most unending boredom, the boredom of mundane life.”
Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
Highlight
FocusGenius
‣
Leisure
💡
“The medievals distinguished between the intellect as ratio and the intellect as intellectus. Ratio is the power of discursive thought, of searching and re-searching, abstracting, refining, and concluding [cf. Latin dis-currere, ”to run to and fro”], whereas intellectus refers to the ability of ”simply looking” (simplex intuitus), to which the truth presents itself as a landscape presents itself to the eye. The spiritual knowing power of the human mind, as the ancients understood it, is really two things in one: ratio and intellectus, all knowing involves both. The path of discursive reasoning is accompanied and penetrated by the intellectus’ untiring vision, which is not active but passive, or better, receptive - a receptively operating power of the intellect.”
Josef Pieper
Highlight
LeisureIntellectRatio
‣
Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds
💡
“These four schools — the Cynics, the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Epicureans — are the main philosophical traditions of what we call the Hellenistic period. This is often defined as the time beginning with the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BC, and ending wherever the historian you’re talking to decides it should end, one popular choice being the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC.”
CleopatraAlexander the Great
Highlight
PhilosophyStoicsCynicsSkepticsEpicureansHellenistic Period
💡
“The schools built allegiance over generations in part by devoting themselves to the authority of their founders. In the case of the Stoics this meant giving an authoritative position to Zeno of Citium. For the Skeptics, the founding father was Pyrrho; Sextus Empiricus calls himself not a “Skeptic” but a “Pyrrhonist.” The Cynics looked back to Diogenes of Sinope, while in the case of the Epicureans it was, of course, Epicurus.”
EpicurusPyrrhoSextus EmpiricusDiogenes of SinopeZeno of Citium
Highlight
SkepticsStoicsEpicureansHellenistic Period
‣
Revolutionary Characters
💡
“To be a gentleman was to think and act like a gentleman, nothing more, an immensely radical belief with implications that few foresaw. It meant being reasonable, tolerant, honest, virtuous, and “candid,” an important eighteenth-century characteristic that connoted being unbiased and just as well as frank and sincere.”
Gordon Wood
Highlight
Gentleman
💡
“In the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world gentlemen believed that only independent individuals, free of interested ties and paid by no masters, could practice such virtue. It was thought that those who had occupations and had to work strenuously for a living lacked the leisure for virtuous public leadership. In the ideal polity, Aristotle had written thousands of years earlier, "the citizens must not live a mechanical or commercial life. Such a life is not noble, and it militates against virtue." For Aristotle not even agricultural workers could be citizens. For men "must have leisure to develop their virtue and for the activities of a citizen."Over several millennia this ancient ideal had lost much of its potency, but some of it lingered even into the eighteenth century. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776) thought that ordinary people in a modern complicated commercial society were too engaged in their occupations and the making of money to be able to make impartial judgments about the varied interests and occupations of their society. Only "those few, who being attached to no particular occupation themselves," said Smith, "have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people.”
AristotleAdam Smith
Highlight
Leisure
💡
“Whatever their fathers were, however, gentlemen could not themselves be husbandmen, mechanics, or laborers – that is, men who worked for a living with their hands.”
Gordon Wood
Highlight
Gentleman
‣
Self-Reliance
💡
“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Highlight
IntellectGeniusOriginality
💡
“To be great is to be misunderstood.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Highlight
Greatness
💡
“A character is like an Acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; — read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Highlight
Character
💡
“If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. if the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards and the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to be his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank and revere him, – and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Highlight
TrustRiskRespectOriginalityGreatness
‣
Simulacra and Simulation
💡
“But it is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction. Because it is difference that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real.”
Jean Baudrillard
Highlight
RealitySimulation
‣
The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior
✍️
Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgias represented the tripartite expression of the Renaissance
Leonardo Da VinciCesare BorgiasNiccolo Machiavelli
Note
Renaissance
💡
“Machiavelli was certainly chastened and impressed by this performance. Borgia's murderous legend had preceded him: this man, who “made Florentines tremble and Rome weep,” was liable to do anything. Yet Machiavelli also had sufficient diplomatic experience to recognize that Borgia's declaration was not quite all that it seemed. He sensed that Borgia was bluffing. Yet why?”
Cesare BorgiasNiccolo Machiavelli
Highlight
StrategyRenaissance
💡
“Borgia has become a byword for monstrous deeds – his very name summoning up images of betrayal, murder, and depravity. Here was a man who acted on impulse, who judged people intuitively with a cunning, almost animal acumen. He was a savage, but he was also a man of the Renaissance – a highly educated savage, a brilliant mind utterly attuned to its basest instincts.”
Cesare Borgias
Highlight
PowerSavage
‣
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
💡
“The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind – whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. They're not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives.”
Highlight
HeroUnconscious
💡
“The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved.”
Highlight
HeroVirtue
💡
“The so-called rights of passage, which occupies such a prominent place in the life of a primitive society (ceremonials of birth, naming, puberty, marriage, burial, etc.), are distinguished by formal, and usually very severe, exercises of severance, whereby the mind is radically cut away from the attitudes, attachments, and life patterns of the stage being left behind. Then follows an interval of more or less extended retirement, during which are enacted rituals designed to introduce the life adventurer to the forms and proper feelings of his new estate so that when, at last, the time has ripened for the return to the normal world, the initiate will be as good as reborn.”
Highlight
✍️
When the hero is in the belly of the whale, they’re undergoing the necessary ego death.
Note
HeroActualizationEgo Death
‣
The Human Condition
💡
“Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.”
Hannah Arendt
Highlight
LaborLeisure
💡
“Within this society, which is egalitarian because this is labor's way of making men live together, there is no class left, no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew. Even presidents, kings, and prime ministers think of their offices in terms of a job necessary for the life of society, and among the intellectuals, only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living.”
Hannah Arendt
Highlight
LaborLeisure
‣
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate
✍️
Johnson as a “professional son”
Note
ManipulationPower
🗣️
“I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me. I know where to look for it, and how to use it.”
Lyndon B. Johnson
Quote
Power

Favorites (rated ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)