book / recommends
There Is No Antimemetics Division
“I'll talk about one nonfiction and one fiction book. The fiction book was I just finished reading it. I really recommend it. There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm. I think it's like an online author, but I saw it being shared on X. It's like a science fiction-y kind of book and I basically devoured it in like two days. It's super, super well written, super fascinating. It's about a government agency that's fighting things that make you forget it. And so it's just a very smart creative book and fresh, honestly, in terms of source material that I really like. So I'd recommend that one. The book is also unintentionally hilarious. So it's meant to be this sci-fi, almost like horror style book, but it made me laugh a couple times. So that's the fiction book. Non-fiction, so I'm going to cheat and I'm going to recommend two of them. So in the last year, I've been reading a lot more about China and the US-China relations. And I think there are two books that came out in the last year that have been really, really eye-opening for me in that regard. First one is the Dan Wang book, Breakneck. That one was really, really good. I really liked his analogy of the lawyerly, US is the lawyerly society, China is the engineering society, and there are pros and cons to each. I read it and I was like, hmm, yeah, it does seem like we're run by lawyers in the US. So then that's one. And the other one is the Patrick McGee book on Apple in China. It was super, super interesting. I'm a huge Apple fanboy. If you could see my desk right now, it's all Apple stuff. But just one, it was just super fascinating learning about Apple's relationship to China. And then two, it just had a lot of inside information about Apple as a company that I found fascinating. So it was also quite a page-turner and also a very, very timely book as well.”