Scott Mauvais - Bookshelf

I read a bunch too. Here are some of the books I've read (and recently, with dates).

2025

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (December 2025)

This is widely regarded as the first work of science fiction, because Victor Frankenstein uses contemporary laboratory science and galvanism rather than magic to create life. Shelley explores ideas about technology, responsibility, and unintended consequences and sets the template for later science fiction stories about invented beings that turn back on their creators—from industrial-age machines to artificial intelligence.
Greg Berman, Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age (December 2025)

Berman argues that durable social and political reforms usually emerge from incremental steps rather than sweeping transformations. He makes a case for “radical realism,” urging pragmatic, sustained efforts that compound into meaningful improvement over time.
Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West (December 2025)

Walker reconstructs Russia's deep-cover “illegals” program, following spies who spend entire lives posing as ordinary Westerners while secretly serving Moscow's intelligence services. Starting with Lenin in pre-Bolshevik days and continuing up through Putin and covering from Nazi Germany to suburban America, he uses interviews and archives to show how this clandestine system shaped both Cold War history and today's geopolitical tensions.
Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection (December 2025)

Anderson uses a salvaged stage monitor as a doorway into the story of the Grateful Dead's colossal Wall of Sound, a three-story, 75-ton PA system that redefined what a rock concert could sound and feel like. He details innovations such as speaker line-arrays, phase-canceling dual microphones, musician-controlled mixes, massive Macintosh-powered amplification, and feedback-taming hacks that helped shape everything from arena sound systems to modern noise-canceling headphones and hearing aids.
Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future (November 2025)

Hagey charts Sam Altman's path from ambitious young founder and Y Combinator leader to central figure in the modern AI boom. The book examines his risk-embracing belief in technological salvation, the power structures around OpenAI, and the controversies surrounding his ouster and return.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (October 2025)

Fressoz disputes the myth of sequential "energy transitions" (wood to coal to oil) as a false narrative born from futurology arguing all primary energies have a symbiotic relationship and new energy sources accumulate on top of old ones via materials like steel, concrete, and wood props, fueling endless accumulation without substitution. Using examples from whaling to nuclear power, he shows how societies have continually gorged on ever-expanding energy supplies and decarbonization demands unprecedented "energy amputation".
Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare (September 2025)

Fishman argues that American dominance over key financial, technological, and logistics chokepoints—from the dollar and payment systems to advanced chips and shipping services—has enabled a new era of powerful, rapidly deployed economic warfare that often substitutes for conventional force. Tracing cases from Iraq and Iran to Russia, China, and the global oil market, he shows how sanctions and export controls can cripple adversaries yet also fragment globalization, fuel counter-moves by rivals, and risk eroding U.S. leverage if overused.
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (September 2025)

Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, linger by a roadside tree, trading jokes, memories, and doubts as they endlessly wait for the mysterious Godot, who never arrives. Their circular conversations and repeated non-events expose the absurdity, boredom, and fragile companionship at the heart of human existence.
Catherine Bracy, World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy (August 2025)

Bracy argues that the dominant venture-capital model, built around power-law returns and blitzscaling, pushes startups toward hyper-rapid, winner-take-all growth that distorts business models, fuels labor abuses, deepens racial and housing inequality, and often destroys more value than it creates. Drawing on interviews across the funding ecosystem and case studies from tech, housing, and AI, she shows how VC's incentives crowd out other forms of finance.
Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip (August 2025)

Witt tells how Nvidia started as a scrappy graphics-card maker and how Jensen Huang bet Nvidia's future on parallel-processing GPUs and the CUDA software stack, turning the firm into the indispensable hardware backbone of the modern AI boom. Centering on CEO Jensen Huang's high-risk bets, his relentless vision, and the breakthrough of AlexNet and deep learning, the book shows how this bet reshaped the global AI industry by pioneering the modern GPU and associated software.
Alex Ogg, Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Early Years (July 2025)

Ogg reconstructs how the Dead Kennedys emerged from late-1970s San Francisco, using caustic satire, DIY organizing, and art-damaged punk to attack racism, militarism, and consumer culture. Ogg combines oral history, archival material, and visual art to show how their caustic songs and imagery turned their debut into a lasting political landmark rather than just another punk record.
Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (July 2025)

From ancient droughts to the Little Ice Age and modern warming, Frankopan retells global history by putting climatic change at the center, showing how shifting temperatures, water systems, and volcanic eruptions, have always been intertwined with politics, economics, and war and has been responsible for the rise, expansion, and collapse of societies from ancient empires to the Cold War. Based on climate archives—from ice cores and tree rings to pollen, sediments, and written weather records—he argues that today's human-driven warming and planetary degradation are only the latest, most extreme phase in a long story of humans reshaping the Earth.
Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company (June 2025)

McGee shows how Apple's drive for unmatched efficiency led it to rebuild its manufacturing around China, training millions of workers and suppliers, investing tens of billions annually—more than twice the size of the US's Marshall Plan over just five years—and in the process fueled Beijing's manufacturing dominance. He argues that this tight coupling made Apple vulnerable to state pressure, nationalist politics and a fragile iPhone supply chain that no other country can replicate while undermining the United States geopolitical position.
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (May 2025)

Burroughs fragments the story of William Lee, an addict and sometime con man, as he drifts through a series of hallucinatory zones—American cities, Tangier, drug dens, grotesque bureaucratic regimes, and the nightmarish Interzone—while addicted to a shifting array of drugs and fantasies. The result is an intentionally disjointed, taboo-shattering text that uses shocking imagery to expose addiction, control systems, and the darker corners of the psyche.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (May 2025)

The book argues that the defining failures of 21st-century America come from chosen scarcities in housing, clean energy, infrastructure, and medical innovation, created by a political system that subsidizes demand while strangling supply with procedural veto points and local obstruction. They propose a forward-looking “politics of abundance” that speeds permitting, fixes institutions and rules, and aggressively funds new technologies so society can actually deliver material progress at scale again.
Robert Greene, The Laws of Human Nature (May 2025)

Greene distills human behavior into 18 laws—from irrationality and narcissism to role-playing, envy, shortsightedness, aggression, and compulsive groupthink—showing how our drives for status, attention, and belonging make us irrational, envious, and prone to toxic leaders unless we cultivate self-awareness. Through historical portraits like Pericles, Anton Chekhov, and Queen Elizabeth I, alongside practical strategies for mastering emotions, decoding masks, and channeling shadow impulses, the book offers a field guide to seeing through self-deceptions and others' manipulations to forge deeper empathy, authority, and strategic self-mastery.
Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being (April 2025)

Rubin redefines creativity not as rare genius but as an attentive way of living, open to subtle signals and willing to follow genuine excitement. Distilling decades producing icons from Johnny Cash to Jay-Z, he offers meditative tools to quiet ego and filters, ride inspiration's waves through experimentation and craft, guiding readers through phases of making—from playful experimentation to imperfect completion—urging them to trust their own taste above all.
Nick Greene, How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius: What Game Designers, Economists, Ballet Choreographers, and Theoretical Astrophysicists Reveal About the Greatest Game on Earth (April 2025)

Greene tells the history of basketball and deconstructs it by interviewing non-sports experts—magicians, cartographers, choreographers, and more—to illuminate hidden structures and skills within the game. Their outside perspectives teach fans to see spacing, deception, teamwork, and even free throws with new analytical and aesthetic clarity.Greene tells the history of basketball and deconstructs it by interviewing non-sports experts—magicians, cartographers, choreographers, and more—to illuminate hidden structures and skills within the game. Their outside perspectives teach fans to see spacing, deception, teamwork, and even free throws with new analytical and aesthetic clarity.
Simon Stålenhag, The Electric State (March 2025)

In a ruined alternate-1990s America littered with colossal war machines and VR-addicted husks, a runaway teen named Michelle drives west with her small robot companion. Their journey to find her brother gradually reveals a personal story of loss intertwined with a larger collapse driven by seductive neuronic technologies.
Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (March 2025)

Stiglitz argues that globalization's promise of prosperity for all has failed because it's been rigged by rich countries and corporate interests—through unfair trade rules, predatory capital flows, IMF austerity that worsens crises, and debt traps that drain poor nations—leaving billions in poverty despite theoretical gains. He proposes a reformed globalization with fairer trade reciprocity, massive debt relief, higher aid without strings, democratic global governance, environmental safeguards, and a new global reserve currency aimed at reshaping globalization so it genuinely benefits developing nations and the poor.
John Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory (March 2025)

Seabrook investigates how teams of producers and songwriters, especially those emerging from 1990s Sweden like Max Martin and Stargate industrialized Jamaica's "track-and-hook" method—pre-built beats emailed to topliners (e.g., Ester Dean) for freestyle melodies/lyrics—yielding repetitive, hook-saturated "Robo-Pop" anthems. Traveling through studios from Stockholm to Los Angeles and Seoul, he shows how data, technology, anonymous pros, and specialized workflows transformed both the music industry and listeners' habits.
Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street (February 2025)

I originally read this in the 1980s while I was in school where all my friends aspired to careers in investment banking and I was surprised how well the book holds up some 40 years later. Lewis recounts his years as a young bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s, using darkly comic stories to expose Wall Street's greed and bravado. Through the metaphor of the high-stakes game “liar's poker,” he shows how opaque financial innovation, outsized bonuses, and cynical salesmanship reshaped modern finance.
Alex Capri, Techno-Nationalism: How It's Reshaping Trade, Geopolitics and Society (February 2025)

Capri defines techno-nationalism as states have weaponized critical technologies like AI, semiconductors, biotech, quantum computing, and cleantech through subsidies, export controls, IP theft, and alliances. He shows how this techno-nationalism is fragmenting supply chains, intensifying U.S.–China rivalry, and pushing the world toward more bifurcated, security-driven globalization and how technology is now a core element of national security, economic power, and social stability.
Hanno Sauer, The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality (January 2025)

Sauer traces five million years of moral evolution through seven major epochs from its early roots in punitive instincts enabling cooperation in small egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands to cultural adaptations like "big gods," gossip, and laws stabilizing inequity during agriculture's rise through modern-day individualism, impartiality fostered via institutions. He presents morality as an adaptive “social technology” shaped by biological, cultural, and historical pressures and shows how advances like altruism, punishment, and universalism expanded cooperation while generating new forms of conflict and hypocrisy.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War (January 2025)

I hadn't read this since my college political philosophy class so I decided to give it a re-read. This classic treatise teaches that the highest form of warfare is winning without battle by knowing both yourself and your enemy, and shaping conditions before conflict. Sun Tzu emphasizes deception, speed, flexibility, and careful choice of terrain so that victory is achieved with minimal cost and maximum strategic advantage.

Bookshelf

2025

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (December 2025)

Greg Berman, Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age (December 2025)

Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West (December 2025)

Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection (December 2025)

Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future (November 2025)

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (October 2025)

Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare (September 2025)

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (September 2025)

Catherine Bracy, World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy (August 2025)

Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip (August 2025)

Alex Ogg, Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Early Years (July 2025)

Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (July 2025)

Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company (June 2025)

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (May 2025)

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (May 2025)

Robert Greene, The Laws of Human Nature (May 2025)

Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being (April 2025)

Nick Greene, How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius: What Game Designers, Economists, Ballet Choreographers, and Theoretical Astrophysicists Reveal About the Greatest Game on Earth (April 2025)

Simon Stålenhag, The Electric State (March 2025)

Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (March 2025)

John Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory (March 2025)

Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street (February 2025)

Alex Capri, Techno-Nationalism: How It's Reshaping Trade, Geopolitics and Society (February 2025)

Hanno Sauer, The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality (January 2025)

Sun Tzu, The Art of War (January 2025)

2024

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2020

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2018

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