Writer and novelist; publishes book notes and essays at nateliason.com and wrote the novel Husk and Crypto Confidential.
loved
This book stretched my mind more than almost any other book I’ve read. It’s tough at parts, it’s long, but you’ll come out of it thinking about brains, minds, intelligence, and AI in an entirely new way.
His book-notes index at nateliason.com/notes, where every book carries a star rating and his own one-line verdict; the index is undated (each book's own page prints only the date he finished reading it).
Tokyo-based American writer; author of Ametora (2015), Status and Culture (2022) and Blank Space (2025).
mixed
Two really long books ate up a lot of my reading this year: Gaddis’ The Recognitions and Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. I would not casually recommend either, but as my friend Nick said, “I’m glad they exist.”
Year-end look-back post on 2023 culture, ending with brief recommendations
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Hardware, services4 years
Software5 years
Podcasts, courses, other8 years
Books25 years
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.