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// READING LIST — ENTRY POINTS IN ORDER
Curated entry points — in the order I'd recommend them. Not exhaustive, not impartial. These are the books that did the most work shaping how I read the world. Start at 01 and move through; or jump to whichever badge calls.
01
Simulacra and Simulation
Start here. The framework through which everything else on this site is filtered. Read slowly.
ENTRY POINT
02
Discipline and Punish
The panopticon as a diagram of power. You will never look at institutions the same way.
FOUNDATIONAL
03
The Society of the Spectacle
Read this, then immediately read Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. The second book is where the real Debord lives.
ESSENTIAL
04
Anti-Oedipus
Difficult. Rewarding. A machine for thinking about desire, capital, and social production that still has no equal.
ADVANCED
05
Of Grammatology
The text that destabilizes text. Read the Spivak introduction first — it's indispensable.
ADVANCED
06
On the Genealogy of Morality
The clearest Nietzsche. A masterclass in how values are constructed, not discovered.
PARALLEL TRACK
07
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Why reason became its own opposite. The Frankfurt School at its most urgent.
FRANKFURT SCHOOL
08
The Shallows
The one accessible book that applies the entire theoretical framework above to the internet. A useful bridge.
APPLIED
09
Gödel, Escher, Bach
The book that makes strange loops feel inevitable and beautiful simultaneously. Read it slowly. It rewards the patience. The fugues are not decorative.
ESSENTIAL
10
Capitalist Realism
Short, devastating, and precise. The diagnosis of why imagining alternatives feels impossible — and what that foreclosure tells us about the system producing it.
CONTEMPORARY
11
Being No One
Dense but necessary. The argument that the self is a transparent self-model — the brain's simulation of a subject so seamless it mistakes the model for the thing.
ADVANCED
12
The Conscious Mind
Where the hard problem gets its canonical formulation. Read alongside Metzinger — one dissolves the self, the other refuses to dissolve the experience.
ADVANCED
13
Reasons and Persons
What ethical navigation looks like when personal identity is thin or illusory. Parfit's conclusion — that we are less separate than we think — is quietly radical.
FOUNDATIONAL