Will Zeng Public Library

“Some colleagues, a tiny bit envious of his intuitions, a few priests, more acquainted with the many evils of our time, some subalterns, clerks, and his superiors too, insisted he read strange books: from which he drew all those words that mean nothing, or almost nothing, but which serve better than others to dazzle the naïve, the ignorant…”
- That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, Carlo Emilio Gadda

Enjoy! Make suggestions! Sincerely,
Will Zeng

An appetizer: some other selected quotes.

Literature

• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
• That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda
• The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
• Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel
• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
• t zero by Italo Calvino
• The Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton
• Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
• Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
• Ficciones by Borges (and other collections), especially The Immortal
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
• Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein
• Life a User’s Manual by George Perec
• Sum by David Eagleman
• A Case of Conscience by James Blish
• Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel
• The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus
• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
• The Void Captain's Tale by Norman Spinrad
• Blindsight by Peter Watts
• Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
• Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson
• 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
• Labyrinths By Jorge Borges
• The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin
• This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
• Exhalation by Ted Chiang
• Second Skin by N. K. Jemisin
• The Overstory by Richard Powers

Philosophy & Literary Theory
- Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
- Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
- Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel
- Trickster Makes the World by Lewis Hyde
- Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson
- System and Structure by Anthony Wilden
- Gramophone, Film, Typewriter by Friedrich Kittler
- Theory of Prose by Viktor Shklovsky
- Graphs, Maps and Trees by Frano Moretti
- Of Grammatology by Derrida
- The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn
- The Poetic Structure of the World by Ferdinand Hallyn
- Theory of Prose by Viktor Shklovsky
- Where Mathematics Comes From by Lakoff and Nunez
- Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty by Kline
- The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauere

Technology and Ethics
- Oppenheimer’s Farewell Speech, Nov 2, 1945

Quantum Computing
- [Counterexamples in Quantum Information link]
- Quantum Information and Quantum Computation by Nielsen and Chuang
- [A Practical Quantum Instruction Set Architecture by Robert Smith, Michael Curtis, and William Zeng arXiv]

Quantum Information & Foundations

• The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory According to the Everett Interpretation by David Wallace

General Physics
- [Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone by John Baez and Mike Stay arXiv]

Mathematics
- [Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone by John Baez and Mike Stay arXiv]
- Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories by F. William Lawvere
- Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists by Benjamin Pierce
- Groups and Their Graphs by Israel Grossman and William Magnus
- Homotopy Type Theory by many
- Mathematics, morally by Eugenia Cheng
- Where Mathematics Comes from by Lakoff and Nunez

Programming & Computer Science
- [Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity by Scott Aaronson arXiv]

History / History of Science / History of Computing
- Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner
- The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin
- The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer by Charles Murray
- The Pixar Touch by David Price
- The Making of the Bomb by Richard Rhodes
- The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Terror and Beauty of Science by Richard Holmes
- Minds, Machines, and the Multiverse by Julian Brown

Films
- Lawrence of Arabia
- Ex Machina
- Paprika
- Tokyo Godfathers
- Synecdoche, New York
- 8 1/2
- Space Dandy, Cowboy Beebop and Samurai Champloo

Poetry
- The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion by Kei Miller
- The Waste Land by T. S. Elliot
- The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje
- Oulipo Compendium Edited by Harry Mathers and Alastair Brotchie

Economics
- [The Nature of the Firm by R. H. Coase link]
- Radical Markets by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl

Leadership
- Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading by Martin Linsky and Ronald Heifitz

Other
- Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh
- Peaks of Yemen I Summon by Steven Caton
- Growing a Revolution: Bringing our soil back to life by David Montgomery