goodreads on S Anand

I count AI summarized books as "Read"

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 02:54:41 +0000

I have this nagging feeling (maybe you do too?) that it’s cheating and I’m not really learning if it’s so easy. The same voice makes me feel guilty when using coding agents to code or ChatGPT in meetings.

I’m telling that voice to relax.

I upload books to Claude and ask it to “Comprehensively and engagingly summarize and fact-check, writing in Malcolm Gladwell’s style, the book …”. I can read it in an hour instead of twelve. Four bullet points instead of forty. With (this surprised me) roughly the same number of insights I actually do something with.

I read books for pleasure, learning, and implementing.

That last bit is key, but the bottleneck isn’t the book. It’s me: how much I can absorb, retain, and act on. From what I can tell, between reading 300 pages vs 10, there’s not much difference.

The pleasure is intact

I worried I’d lose the emotional jolt – those mind-blown moments that make reading feel worth it. For science and self-help books, I haven’t.

For example, take this summary excerpt of How Minds Change

The irony is almost too perfect. To change someone’s mind, you have to stop trying to change their mind. You have to start by trying to understand it.
And when you do that—really do that—something unexpected happens. Sometimes their mind changes. And sometimes, if you’re honest with yourself, yours does too.

That blew my mind for a good 10 minutes.

Or, from Ants:

Think of a leafcutter ant colony as a high-tech Fungus Farm. There are four main players in this system: two are partners, one is a bodyguard, and one is a villain.

I loved the villain part!

There’s a learning bonus: fact-checking

When I ask Claude to fact-check the book while summarizing, I learn beyond the book. For example, I learnt that, among these longevity books:

Lifespan is largely rubbish.
The Telomere Effect has a decent core but builds fancy castles on shaky foundations.
Outlive is more careful with its claims, though less ambitious.

I learned this during the reading, not months later when some podcast corrected me.

You can also just… ask questions.

While reading Ants, “OK, aren’t most species superorganisms then? If yes, what’s the big deal?”
While reading The Cancer Code, “Why are free radicals produced? Give me examples. Are they always oxygen molecules that lack electrons? ELI15.”

The book doesn’t do that. The summary can. (I’m loving the ELI15 responses, BTW.)

I can read inaccessible books

I can now read Kamba Ramayanam in Tamil (a script I read quite slowly). Or Gitanjali, The Iliad, Dream of the Red Chamber, or more.

It’s not just language. I can read boring or intimidating books. On Growth and Form. The Road to Reality. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Brilliant but unapproachable.

Heck, I managed to read Ants after 30 years!

Sometimes the very first line of a summary hooks me so hard I can’t stop reading. That’s a strange thing to admit about a summary. But there it is.

I haven’t figured it out fully

I would read Brandon Sanderson or Jeffrey Archer this way yet. The point is the experience itself: the slow unfolding, the surprise, the voice in your ear. They write in a style I like. Why summarize that?

Biographies are trickier. The Choice’s summary made me cry. So, I do want to read The Choice in original - and the summary helped me prioritize it.

Histories? I’m not sure. Manga? No way.

I’m logging these on Goodreads as “read”. I don’t know if that’s kosher. The voice in my head has opinions. But I’m learning things I wouldn’t have learned otherwise, from books I wouldn’t have finished or started, with the same pleasure and actionability.

Maybe that’s cheating. But maybe the rules of our game have changed, and I haven’t learned them yet.

Update: 31 Dec 2025. Here are the books I read this year via AI summaries, along with links to the Claude summaries.

Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jethá Claude
The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke Claude
Noise by Daniel Kahnemann Claude
How to Change by Katy Milkman Claude
Lifespan by David Sinclair and The Telomere EFfect by Elizabeth Blackburn and Outlive by Peter Attia. Claude
How Minds Change by David McRaney Claude
The Obesity Code by Jason Fung Claude
The Diabetes Code by Jason Fung Claude
The Cancer Code by Jason Fung Claude
The Ants by Bert Hölldobler, Edward O. Wilson Claude
Price of the Modi Years by Aakar Patel Claude
Behave by Robert Sapolsky Claude
The Choice by Edith Eva Eger Claude
How Not To Die by Michael Greger Claude
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker Claude
The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson Claude
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes Claude
Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive by Philipp Dettmer Claude Gemini
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee Claude
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould Claude
The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins Claude
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk Claude
The Culture Map by Erin Meyer Claude
Outcomes over Output by Josh Seiden Claude
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee Claude
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee Claude
Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli Claude
The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt Claude
Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan Claude
Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel Claude
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell Claude
Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine by Robert H. Lustig Claude
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker Claude
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker Claude
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker Claude
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker Claude
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan Claude
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures Claude
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran Claude
Small Wins Every Day: 100 Powerful Ways to Transform Your Life and Health by Luke Coutinho Claude
The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human by V.S. Ramachandran Claude

Update: 11 Apr 2026. I started adding this follow-up prompt:

Based on what you know of me, what are the things I should learn from these books? What might I do differently? Why? How?

Based on past conversations, AI knows me. For example, here were Claude’s thoughts:

Anand wants personalized life lessons from these books, filtered through what I know about him. Let me think about what I know:

Chief Innovation Officer at Straive, AI strategy, enterprise consulting

Faculty at IIT Madras, teaching Tools in Data Science to large cohort

Based in Singapore, Indian origins

Blogs daily at s-anand.net about AI experiments

Interests: data visualization, behavioral science, cross-domain pattern recognition, design

IIM Bangalore alumnus

Regular speaker at conferences

Core intellectual commitments: judgment and taste as scarce resource; verifiable/auditable AI outputs; Jevons Paradox applied to knowledge work; production costs collapsing shifts bottleneck to curation

Thinks in systems, economic, and forecasting frameworks with superforecaster-style probabilistic reasoning

Identifies as “LLM Psychologist”

Teaching an AI workshop for senior IAS officers at LBSNAA

That leads to high quality ideas. For example, it told me:

… you’re surrounded by people optimizing for the marathon — the visible, bounded deliverable. But Pheidippides’ actual run — the slow, unglamorous, unsexy one that actually won the war — was the one nobody watched.

What’s the Spartathlon version of your work? Probably: the long, patient work of changing how a client organization thinks, not just what tools it uses.

… make sure you’re spending some deliberate effort on it, even when there’s no one watching and no milestone presentation scheduled.

That led me to review transcripts for AI adoption impact. Answer: workshops help AI adoption most. I’m keeping an AI experiments list handy for impromptu workshops.

That’s real impact. In less time than I’d have taken to read a book.

Sure, I didn’t get what the books had to offer. I didn’t struggle. But I did get personalized value.

Picking books to read

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 03:20:39 +0000

I add book recommendations to my GoodReads – To-read list. Then I sort by rating and pick the first one I like to read.

In 2023, I’m reshaping my environment. Picking books I usually won’t pick. (Read The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted if you want to be similarly inspired.)

So here are 4 approaches I’m adding to my process.

Algorithmic. Sort Kaggle books based on popularity, rating, and age. Pick the top 10 (or 50)
Serendipitous. Go to bookstores and libraries. Pick the most popular books
Award-winning. Pick from the Pulitzer, Booker, Nobel, Hugo, and other award winners
Challenges. Pick from Popsugar, Book Riot, Goodreads, The 52 Book Club, and other challenges

FYI, here are algorithmic results (for books with 100+ ratings and a 4+ average on Goodreads):

Top rated books

Most popular books

Oldest books

Books in 2020

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 03:56:14 +0000

My Goodreads 2020 Reading Challenge target is 50 books. I’m at 45/50, with little hope of getting to 50. (I managed 25/24 in 2019.)

The 10 non-fiction books I read (most useful first) are below.

The Lean Startup by Eric Reis.
The principle of Build - Measure - Learn is useful everywhere in life too, not just in startups.
Never Split The Difference by Chriss Voss.
Shares principle-driven strategies to convince people.
The 4 Disciplines of Execution by McChesney, Covey & Huling.
Teaches how to build execution rigor in an organization. A bit long at the end, but the first section is excellent.
Sprint by Jake Knapp.
A detailed step-by-step guide to running product development sprints that you can follow blindly.
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams.
Dilbert’s author shares his strategies for life. Very readable, intelligent, and slightly provocative, but always interesting.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni.
Written as a story (like The Goal). Talks about the 5 problems in teams and how to overcome them.
The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle.
Explains the elements of strong cultures - belongingness, shared vulnerability, and shared purpose.
Data-Driven Storytelling by Nathalie Henry Riche et al.
Shares the latest points of view on telling data stories. My team and I read these chapters as a group.
Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek.
Inspiring when I read it, but I don’t remember what it said.
Deep Work by Cal Newport.
Shares tactics to focus. Practical and useful.

I also started, by haven’t finished these four:

Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown
The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
Stories at Work by Indranil Chakraborty

I read these 25 works of fiction – mostly by Brandon Sanderson (my current favorite author) and Brent Weeks.

Lightbringer (Books 1-5) by Brent Weeks.
In a world where color is woven as magic, the most powerful man is caught in politics. This series had enough twists and turns to keep me hooked till the end.
Skyward (Books 1-2) by Brandon Sanderson.
An outcast girl on an outcast planet becomes a fighter pilot with an alien spaceship. I love the way this is developing.
The Wheel of Time (Books 1-6) by Robert Jordan.
I picked it up again mainly because Brandon Sanderson wrote the last 3 books. It was great up to book 4 but has started dragging.
Alcatraz Versus The Evil Librarians (Books 1-4) by Brandon Sanderson.
The author lies to you. Literally. And tells you that he will, in almost every other paragraph. Great book for kids to laugh over.
Night Angel (Books 1-3) by Brent Weeks.
An assassin in a story that spans centuries of the history of magic.
Legion (Books 1-3) by Brandon Sanderson.
A detective who has multiple split-personalities in him – that help him solve cases.
Snapshot by Brandon Sanderson.
What if you could create a snapshot of the world, enter it, interact with it, and solve crimes?
The Art of Letting Go: Poetry for the Seekers by Sanhita Baruah.
It’s my first poetry book. (I hate poetry.) I took this up to see if I could survive it, and get a fresh perspective. I survived.

… and these 10 comic books/series.

At the moment, I’m at 45 books, with little hope of completing 5 more this month unless I pick up comics. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do 😉

Comments

Kalpana Behara 5 Dec 2020 6:10 pm: I am so glad you are still writing. I stumbled upon your site some 15 odd years ago and read your Illayaraja articles. They were very technical for me to understand but I remember completely being mesmerized by the technicalities. I come back every few years to read those articles and listen to the songs you reference. I did that again today and realized you continue to blog! This is one of my favorite blogs on Internet. Thanks for sharing.
Deepan Chithambaranadhan 6 Jun 2021 1:32 pm: Please also read the Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman ;if you havenot read. Very happy to See your updated website it was down for a few weeks some time ago. I recommend to my mentees your website for insights on interviews and your popular analysis on birth dates and 12th standard grades. I wish you could write more on Object oriented programming and Clean code.
Samrat Sen 28 Dec 2020 6:58 am: I have read some of these - The Lean Startup, Stories At Work and quite a few of the Batman comics (Superman - The Red Son is now on Prime). Hadn’t heard of Brandon Sanderson but looks promising. Currently reading Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. Inspiring!
Books in 2023 - S Anand 4 Jan 2024 4:46 pm (pingback): […] read 52 books in 2023 (about the same as in 2022, 2021 and 2020.) Here’s what I read (best books […]
S Anand 8 Dec 2020 3:52 pm: Thanks, Kalpana! I’ve been away for many years now, but am back regularly 😊
Books in 2024 - S Anand 31 Dec 2024 6:31 pm (pingback): […] read 51 new books in 2024 (about the same as in 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020.) But slightly […]