Reading notes for 2023

• A Christmas Carol (Dickens) [I try to read this during the Christmas period every year]
• The Goal - A Business Graphic Novel (Goldratt) [This was mentioned in, I recall, the Economist. I thought it sounded interesting in principle and did provide some insights into business processes. However, I suspect that I was not the target audience]
• How to do things with Emotions (Flanagan) [This is a monograph in moral psychology by the philosopher Owen Flanagan. It focuses specifically on cross-cultural issues in anger and shame. Shame is particularly interesting for me given the role of shame in stigma related to substance use disorder. Flanagan provides an interesting account of the ambiguous role of shame in stigma processes]
• From Bud to Brain: A Psychiatrist’s View of Marijuana (Cermak)
• 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Burkeman)
• Bartleby the Scrivener (Melville) [More of a short story than a novel, I remember reading this when I was 15 or 16. Back then, I interpreted Bartelby’s story as subversive. Now I see it more as a man struggling with something like catatonic depression]
• Human Compatible (Russell)
• The Philosopher and the Wolf (Rowlands)
• Natural Language Annotation for Machine Learning (Pustejovsky & Stubbs) [This is more of a strictly technical, work-related book. It is probably one of the most approachable introductions to annotation available]
• Strategy of Preventive Medicine (Rose)
• Healing (Insel) [Tom Insel’s account of his time as the director of NIMH and subsequent career as a leader at Google and various startups. Interesting insights into his waining confidence in the privileging of neuroscience in mental health research]
• DSM: A History of Psychiatry’s Bible (Horwitz) [A wonderful and sobering book on the (not very) scientific basis for the development of the various iterations of the DSM]
• Stigma of Substance Use (Corrigan)
• Cambridge Handbook of Stigma and Mental Health (Vogel & Wade) [I didn’t get through all of this magisterial handbook on the complex relationship between mental health and stigma, but the chapters that I read were illuminating]
• The Cigarette: A Political History (Milov)
• The Places in Between (Stewart)
• Desperate Remedies (Scull)
• How to be Free (Epictetus)
• On Bullshit (Frankfurt) [The recent death of Harry Frankfurt prompted me to go back and revisit this invigorating read]
• Parfit’s Ethics (Chappell)
• Uncanny Valley (Wiener)
• Mental Patient: Psychiatric Ethics from a Patient’s Perspective (Gosselin)
• Rethinking Suicide (Bryan)
• Intermittent Fasting (Mattson)
• Deep Medicine (Topal) [Invigorating book length treatment on the potential of AI methods to improve clinical care]
• Zen Pathways An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism (Davis)
• Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Suzuki)
• Language of Mental Illness (Price)
• The Righteous Mind (Haidt)
• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Odell)