Reading
Books that shape how I think
I keep this list because books shape how I think. Some are purely for joy; others influenced how I approach research, life, or communication.
Currently Reading
1984
George Orwell
Histoire de Jérusalem
The History of Jerusalem: An Illustrated Story of 4,000 Years
Vincent Lemire & Christophe Gaultier
Learning Theory from First Principles
Francis Bach
Top Shelf
My strongest recommendations—books that fundamentally changed how I see the world.
Ce que le jour doit à la nuit
What the Day Owes the Night
Yasmina Khadra
Sometimes the tragedy is not hatred, but impossible loyalties.
“Life is a train that doesn’t stop at any station. You either jump on while it’s moving or watch it go by from the platform, and there is no greater tragedy than a ghost station.”
Vivre : la psychologie du bonheur
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Csikszentmihalyi reframes happiness as an attention strategy: “flow” emerges when challenge and skill are balanced, goals are clear, feedback is immediate, and self-conscious rumination disappears.
“Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.”
La vie devant soi
The Life Before Us
Émile Ajar (Romain Gary)
Dignity and love are often defended in small choices (how we speak, stay, and show up), not in grand moral speeches.
“Psychiatric patients are people who are constantly being told they don’t have what they have and don’t see what they see, and in the end it drives them crazy.”
L’Équation africaine
The African Equation
Yasmina Khadra
“Understanding” isn’t empathy as a sentiment, it’s the collapse and rebuilding of your framework. Despair is largely a matter of perception, while the true value of existence lies in life itself.
“When life loses its meaning, it keeps its substance intact.”
Recently Read
Rage for Life: Complete Poetical Works
Joy/Happiness is something you must fight to preserve, an insistence on life that resists cynicism and historical erasure.
poetry slavery Caribbean identity love & revolt
The Aeneid
Rome’s founding epic, Virgil’s Aeneid, aims to write an everlasting masterpiece at the level of Homere’s Iliad and Odyssey.
epic mythology Rome founding myth pietas
A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues
A modern virtue-ethics journey, from politeness to love, treating virtues as lived practices shaped by weakness, habit, and social life rather than moral perfectionism. Philosophy is worthwhile only insofar as it helps us live our virtues rather than merely think about them.
ethics moral psychology philosophy
Time is the non-renewable resource; most suffering comes from spending it on imagined futures and self-made anxieties.
Stoicism ethics time life & death philosophy
The Four Agreements
A compact “code of conduct” that targets the cognitive roots of conflict. The fastest way to reduce unnecessary pain is to question the story my mind is adding to raw facts.
philosophy ethics meaning-making mindset personal discipline
Treatise on Despair and Beatitude
Hope can be a distraction, lucidity is sometimes the most compassionate form of courage.
philosophy spirituality optimal experience life & death
The most stable freedom is control over my judgments, everything else is negotiation with the world.
Stoicism self-discipline philosophy
Surveillance, truth, and power. The dystopia that never stops being relevant.
totalitarianism surveillance language dystopia
What the Day Owes the Night
Sometimes the tragedy is not hatred, but impossible loyalties.
“Life is a train that doesn’t stop at any station. You either jump on while it’s moving or watch it go by from the platform, and there is no greater tragedy than a ghost station.”
identity colonial Algeria love sociology
The Life Before Us
Dignity and love are often defended in small choices (how we speak, stay, and show up), not in grand moral speeches.
“Psychiatric patients are people who are constantly being told they don’t have what they have and don’t see what they see, and in the end it drives them crazy.”
moral love pauperism poetry
The African Equation
“Understanding” isn’t empathy as a sentiment, it’s the collapse and rebuilding of your framework. Despair is largely a matter of perception, while the true value of existence lies in life itself.
“When life loses its meaning, it keeps its substance intact.”
humanitarianism Africa/Europe ethics philosophy
The Sun Queen
A historical novel set during the final years of Akhenaten’s religious revolution and its aftermath, where legitimacy, faith, and succession collide as Akhesa (Ankhesenpaaten) and Tutankhamun navigate court intrigue, rival priesthoods, and the ambitions of the general Horemheb
ancient Egypt power Akhenaten historical fiction Pharaoh
The Swallows of Kabul
Oppression doesn’t only punish bodies; it contaminates moral agency by shrinking the space of safe choices.
oppression love & revolt Taliban-era Afghanistan moral
One of the most effective ways to resist powerful systems is disciplined self-mastery: refusing to let your character and desires be shaped by their incentives.
Shibumi espionage philosophy power systems discipline optimal experience
Masterpiece of French literature. An epic about moral transformation set against institutions that confuse legality with justice, exposing how poverty and punishment can be engineered as structural fate.
moral pauperism sociology philosophy Paris revolution
The History of Jerusalem: An Illustrated Story of 4,000 Years
A beautifully illustrated journey through 4,000 years of one of the world’s most contested cities.
history religion empires
A rigorous yet accessible introduction to the mathematical foundations of machine learning.
machine learning optimization statistics
A probability text that motivates the theory through concrete domains (finance, physics, signal processing, etc.), using applications as the “why” behind formal stochastic objects.
Probability Markov processes Discrete & Continuous diffusions
One of the bibles of deep learning. A broad, structured map of deep learning—mathematical foundations, architectures, and practical methodology—written as a unifying reference.
Machine Learning Deep Learning representation learning neural nets
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Csikszentmihalyi reframes happiness as an attention strategy: “flow” emerges when challenge and skill are balanced, goals are clear, feedback is immediate, and self-conscious rumination disappears.
“Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.”
optimal experience mindset well-being
The Dream Life of a Butterfly
A graphic retelling around Henri Charrière (“Papillon”), who escaped from the Guyana bagne.
biography freedom imprisonment comics France
If you came for books…
You might also enjoy exploring my work:
- Publications — Research papers on deep learning and related topics
- Blog — Longer-form writing on ideas that interest me
- Projects — Things I’m building and exploring