Book Recommendations

These are the books I read in my free time during military service.

I thought of rating the books, but then remembered that there was an unavoidable problem with measuring opinion. So I constructed a utility graph, with engagement level on the y-axis and the enlightenment level on the x-axis. Because the best books are immensely superior to the good and the worst, and the worst books are vastly inferior to the good and the best, it would be most accurate to express my opinion by dividing the axes into thirds: the first third would be logarithmic in magnitude, the middle third linear, and the final third again logarithmic.

Though this chart includes a fair number of books, the scope of the topics is severely limited to my fields of interest: Economics, Sociology, Philosophy, Religion, Policymaking, Psychology and Fiction. One reason for this is that these are the topics that I am naturally interested in. But another reason is that the Amazon fed my interests and book browsing history into its algorithms, recommending books that I would most likely enjoy. This is analogous to a mole exploring deep into the ground, only to dig so deep that it gets trapped in its own hole that it made. I can only hope that I stumble upon new topics and avoid this tragedy.

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