what i've read in 2026 so far
07 Mar 2026For various reasons1, i found myself away from ‘work work’ for the past couple of weeks, and also mostly away from a laptop2, and because of that, first of all i feel rusty and out of touch with the research areas (and some aspects of agentic coding). we’ll see how to come out and fix that: i can double click on this feeling and say that a] it’s probably mostly ‘fake’ in the sense that stuff is indeed moving fast, but two weeks away isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things, and is more a result of being on the bleeding edge than anything else, and b] that this feeling is pretty much motivating and useful, so yay, let’s try to utilize it. And second of all, my mental energy flowed elsewhere i suppose. A nice thing about being away is that i had the mental space to think about grander things! So i’m writing about some great books.
I tried to focus on reading this past period, and this is by no means an exhaustive list of everything3. Anyway, i always wanted to better collect the content i go through, and thought this might be a good place to start.
Two big books dominated my last couple of months with some lighter stuff in between.
The Brothers Karamazov: i could never truly write about Dostoyevsky4. Too much has been written already. I can try though. Kurt Vonnegut allegedly referred to the Brothers and said “there is one other book that can teach you everything you need to know about life.” That feels right.
The part i remember laughing hard about was the description of medicine from the conversation between Ivan and the devil, at that period where it was ‘too specialized’ (one doctor for the right nostril and another for the left one). But this novel is also really deeply moving. The way the characters swing between moods, the way they converse, it all feels very real. And not only the brothers themselves, also Lise’s weird attraction to suffering and pain, which i can only think of as a form of searching for authenticity. The devil’s visit to Ivan (predicting satellites!, interesting). And of course, the narrator, who is on one hand very ‘familiar’ and talks about ‘our town’, but also knows the innermost thoughts of the characters, and yet is not completely reliable, and is very self-conscious about it. This kind of unreliable semi-omniscient narrator was really captivating. Of course, the trial, and the ‘two abysses’ of the Karamazov nature.
It would be hard for me to claim that i understand Dostoyevsky, but i definitely wish i could have a conversation with him5.
The Grapes of Wrath: i think i’m in a phase of classics; it feels like the ultimate antidote to much of the online discourse and the world at large at the moment. I went for Steinbeck because i enjoyed Of Mice and Men a lot. Somehow this feels heavier in content than the Brothers, in retrospect (i’d finished it before starting the Brothers). I guess i read it right after / during watching Pluribus and some of the scenery got tangled up for me, they do travel from the panhandle to California through NM. I think i’ve read it as a ‘familial’ and periodic novel, about the relations between the family members and how they hold (a reminder to myself that i should have written about it in real time). I will quote one thing here, from an exchange between Al and his mother:
Al: “Ain’t you thinkin’ what’s it gonna be like when we get there? Ain’t you scared it won’t be nice like we thought?”
Ma: “No,” she said quickly. “No, I ain’t. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. It’s too much — livin’ too many lives. Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one. If I go ahead on all of ‘em, it’s too much.”
Something about not pre-living many different lives when only one will end up arriving.
Essays and other stuff i found online
Code Mode and MCP: i enjoy the Cloudflare folks’ blog and try to read some of their technical stuff from time to time. This one is about how they fit the entire Cloudflare API into <1000 tokens.
Showboat and Rodney (Simon Willison): i’m not even sure this was the best simonw piece from recent times, but it touches on the important topic of making coding agents ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ about their work.
Rereads:
Taste (Paul Graham): oldie but goodie, read it on the way to the airport.
Good Writing (Paul Graham): “ideas are tree-shaped and essays are linear.”
How I Practice at What I Do (Tyler Cowen): one of those essays where i can usually find something new and unexplored each time.
Learning by Writing (Holden Karnofsky): i recollected pieces of this one quite often, now that i try to write a bit more.
Interesting research / review papers (just one):
The Hallmarks of Cancer: this is almost nostalgic to me. This paper has three versions, and when i was in medical school we learned an earlier one. It’s interesting to see what has remained relevant and what changed in the past decade. It also made me miss medicine in the traditional sense, and good-old-fashioned biology research.
-
Some great, some not so much. ↩
-
The feeling of being out of touch even for a fortnight hits the FOMO really hard. I’ve accumulated a lot of stuff i want to try and do in that time! ↩
-
I also kind of wanted it to be exhaustive, maybe in the future this will be a running document, or at least a list i keep updated. At the moment this was mostly composed after the fact, due to the circumstances. ↩
-
It’s just too big and too cramped a space. Much more intelligent people have written about him. ↩
-
Like Salinger said about how it’s a great book if you finish it and you wish the author was a friend of yours and you could pick up the phone and talk to him. ↩