A running list of books, articles, and papers I’m reading and a shortlist of what I’d recommend.
Currently Reading
Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs – Camilla Townsend
Excited to dig into this one. Though I’m always wary of revisionist works, this is an easy exception to make. I think it’s incredible that we have the opportunity to hear New World history from an indigenous perspective, because that is so exceedingly rare.
Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and Stan - Richard McElreath
Chipping away at this. I’ve dipped my toes into a few Bayesian tutorial books and this is the one that has stuck, and for good reason. McElreath has a way of making a statistics textbook actually interesting. Great, illustrative examples and communication of the theory behind Bayesian inference.
Shortlist Recommendations
Things I think you should read.
Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow - Aurélien Géron
An excellent primer on machine learning. It was my first introduction to many supervised and unsupervised ML algorithms. The second half may be somewhat out of date given TensorFlow’s status as a falling star in the open source community, who have exhibited more love for frameworks such as PyTorch and JAX. Though Keras is thriving as a central interface for all three.
John Adams - David McCullough
While I’ve yet to compare it to McCullough’s other works, this may be one of the best written history books I’ve ever read. There is so much ground to cover in a biography of an American giant such as John Adams, but this book does so by tying it all up in an amazingly narrative fashion.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
If you’ve never read this, don’t panic.
