I ended up fitting a lot of reading into 2022, and thought it’d be fun to start a retro series at the end of every year to track the memorable reads of the year. This probably isn’t everything - and that’s because I didn’t do a good enough job this year tracking papers and articles.

Man, I read so much Greg Egan this year.

History

2022 was the year of India and Central Asia for me. I consumed so much history in the latter half of the year that I’ve gotten a little sick of it.

• India After Gandhi - Ramachandra Guha
• India - John Keay
• Hero of Two Worlds - Mike Duncan
• Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World - Jack Weatherford
• Debt, The First 5000 Years - David Graeber
• From Third World To First - Lee Kwan Yu
• A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th Century - Barabara Tuchman

Papers/Academic Stuff

I skimmed a lot of papers this year and read even fewer. Here’s some that made a lasting impact - whether that be in the way I thought about something or my work.

• The Physics of Financial Networks
• Operating Systems in Three Easy Pieces - Arpaci-Dusseau
• The Physics of Orbital Warfare
• The Autodidactic Universe
• DeepFreeze: Towards Scalable Asynchronous Checkpointing of Deep Learning Models
• Scabbard: single-node fault-tolerant stream processing
• Every Model Learned by Gradient Descent Is Approximately a Kernel Machine
• Data-driven discovery of coordinates and governing equations
• Orbital Edge Computing: Nanosatellite Constellations as a New Class of Computer System

Articles

I skimmed a lot of articles this year, but also read a lot of them. Similarly, below are articles that I ended up saving to my read-it-later thingy that I think are worth a call-out. If we’ve been having conversations regularly, some of these will feel familiar.

• Permacomputing
• Chartbook #133 Under the hood of the power dynamics of inflation
• The Year of Fukuyama
• Nuclear Energy is Clean
• The South Asian Polycrisis
• Becoming a Systems Architect
• Nick Cammarata on Jhana
• Every: Foreign Exchanges Today in History. Proud to say I’ve read every single one of these (and the World Roundups) this year - linked the one from the week I’m writing this.
• How to design a house to last 1000 years. This one had a lasting impact - excited to annoy contractors for the future house by bringing this up.
• Building a Modern Home. Similar to ^ in effect on future contractors.
• Vets today are like doctors yesterday
• Why America Can’t Build Big Things Anymore
• Play to Earn and Bullshit Jobs
• Is the “End of History” back on track?

Fiction

I think out of anything that’s significantly shifted my thinking this year, it’d have to be everything on this list that’s Egan-related.

• Permutation City - Greg Egan
• Instantiation - Greg Egan
• Incandescence - Greg Egan
• Quarantine - Greg Egan
• Distress - Greg Egan
• Declare - Tim Powers
• Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer
• Authority - Jeff VanderMeer. Acceptance (the third book in this series) kind of slogged, so I stopped reading.
• Hollow - B.Catling
• Gene Wolfe - Soldier of the Mist. This paired super well with a visit to Greece :)
• There is No AntiMemetics Division - Qntm
• Ra - Qntm
• Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
• Stonefish - Scott R Jones
• Anathem - Neal Stephenson. At this point it’s become somewhat of a tradition to reread this every year or so. Expect it in 2023’s retro.
• Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

Misc

• Heaven in Disorder - Slavoj Zizek sniff
• Sun and Steel - Yukio Mishima
• Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas - Leigh Brasington
• Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows
• Cyclonopedia - Reza Negarestani Still working through this, too weird to just pick up