Books on Kaizen Musings - Writings by Taylan Pince, Engineering and Product Leader

Blindsight

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0200

I can’t say I enjoyed this one, and I’ve been trying to work out why, because the premise is genuinely interesting.

A crew is sent out to make contact with something that has turned up at the edge of the solar system, and the book builds towards an argument that consciousness might be a liability rather than an advantage. You could have something enormously intelligent with nobody at all at home inside it. That is a strong idea, and it’s the reason the book has the reputation it has.

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0200

I picked this up at my local bookstore completely by chance. I didn’t know Doctorow had a new book out, and I like his non-fiction generally, so I bought it on the spot. It turned out to be a signed copy, which was a nice bonus.

The title is worth explaining. A centaur, in the usual telling, is a person made more capable by a machine. A reverse centaur is the arrangement flipped around. The machine does the work, and the person is bolted onto it to handle the parts it can’t, at the machine’s pace and on the machine’s terms.

Daemon

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0200

Daemon came out in 2006. Daniel Suarez originally self-published it under the name Leinad Zeraus, which is his own name spelled backwards, and Goodreads still files it that way. That is how I found out, and it is a good indication of how long this book has been quietly circulating.

The premise is that a famous computer game designer dies, and the software he left behind reads his obituary online and starts acting on it. From there it spreads outward into the economy and eventually into how society organises itself. It is a thriller first, and a good one, but Suarez is clearly more interested in the second-order effects than in the chase scenes.

Contrapposto

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0200

I enjoy most of what Dave Eggers writes, so I was always going to read this one. It still surprised me. It feels more mature and more grounded than his other books, and I say that as someone who liked the other books.

It follows two people who love art, their stories winding around each other from their teenage years all the way into old age. Along the way it makes some genuinely interesting observations about the art world, about what it actually means to be a “successful” artist, and about how people who are real artists look at things differently from the rest of us.

Infinite Detail

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0200

This one sat on my reading list for years and I finally got to it.

The internet goes away. Not degraded, not censored, gone, and the book moves back and forth between the years before that happens and the years after, mostly around an anarchist enclave in Bristol. I enjoyed it, with reservations.

The first reservation is that it’s more post-apocalyptic than I usually go for. The second is that the premise is far-fetched, and I don’t really believe it could happen the way it happens here.

The Infinity Machine

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0200

I’ve already used this book as a counter-example in my note on The MANIAC, so it’s only fair to give it its own entry.

The first part is genuinely good. Mallaby is very strong on Demis Hassabis’s early years, the gaming background, the chess, and later the Go and the board games. Hassabis is a genuinely interesting person and obviously extremely intelligent, and the account of how he assembled his interests into a research programme is worth reading.

The Soul of a New Machine

Fri, 29 May 2026 09:00:00 +0200

Tracy Kidder spent 1978 and 1979 with a team at Data General in Westborough, Massachusetts, watching them build a 32-bit minicomputer in a basement. The machine was code-named Eagle, and it existed because Digital had shipped the VAX and Data General had nothing to answer it with. The book came out in 1981 and won the Pulitzer.

That’s the setup, but it doesn’t really explain why the book is as good as it is.

The Anthropocene Reviewed

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0200

I came to this book backwards. Years before reading it I listened to every episode of the podcast it came out of, and that was during COVID, when we were still living in Toronto. I’d go out for night walks in the middle of a frigid Canadian winter with John Green in my ears. His voice is sorrowful and calming at the same time, which turned out to be roughly what I needed that year.

The Faith of Beasts

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0200

This is the second book in The Captive’s War, following The Mercy of Gods.

It is James S.A. Corey. I loved every single Expanse book, and I love this series too, so I am not exactly a neutral party here.

What they do well, they keep doing. The alien civilisations are actually alien, which sounds like a low bar until you notice how rarely anyone clears it. Most science fiction gives you humans with a different number of limbs. This gives you something whose reasoning you have to work at. Alongside that there is a full imagining of how a society and an economy would actually hold together under these conditions, and none of it comes at the cost of the pace. It is a thrill ride the whole way through.

Brooklyn

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0200

I expected more from this one, and I want to be careful about how I say that, because the writing is excellent throughout.

I love Tóibín. The Magician is one of my favourite books. Brooklyn is the story of Eilis Lacey, a young Irish woman who emigrates to New York in the 1950s, and her inner life is imagined and rendered about as well as I have seen it done. The story just flows.

When We Cease to Understand the World

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0200

I read this about five weeks after The MANIAC, which is unusual for me. I normally space authors out. In this case I wanted to know whether the first book was a one-off or whether Labatut actually works this way, and it turns out he does.

It covers different ground, though. The MANIAC is about building a machine. This one is about the point where understanding runs out.

What it is

It’s a set of linked pieces about Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Alexander Grothendieck, and then Heisenberg and Schrödinger. The proportion of invention goes up as the book goes on, which I didn’t notice until afterwards and thought was a nice trick.

The MANIAC

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0200

I have been interested in the history of technology for a long time, and more specifically in what new technology does to the society that produces it. That is what led me to Labatut. He writes about scientists and engineers, but he does it the way an anthropologist would, which is not how these stories normally get told.

This was the first of his books I read, and I liked it enough that I picked up another one five weeks later.