Merry Christmas to my friends here on Substack. To wrap up the year, I wanted to share a list of the books I have read and reflect a little on the state of After the Hour of Decision.
I have not been writing as much recently, but I am not quitting Substack. To put it simply, life circumstances have become more demanding and complex in both career (thanks to the Tortuga Media Society) and family life (thanks to my wife). Because I have had less time to write, I made an effort to focus on the things that I really want to write, write things that make me take pride in them, regardless of how much reach they get.
The interesting thing is that when I focus on what I get personal gratification from writing, it tends to do well on Substack. This is not always the case, but I would rather keep it this way than write something just because I think someone else wants to hear it. I write on Substack for nobody but myself, and I do it because I enjoy it. It is a happy, incidental byproduct that so many people read them, and that some even pay me for it. But I would still be writing even if people were not.
I was most proud of this essay this year:
It got profoundly positive feedback from here on Substack and from personal friends. I do not know if I will ever top it, but I will try.
Most of my writing happens in my head. It only gets actually written once it becomes too difficult to keep track of it in my head anymore. Words are a prison for ideas, and they calcify as soon as they are written down. I spent most of 2025 thinking about that essay. There are more that I am thinking about now.
Going into 2026, I plan to continue writing. I already have some good ideas and things in the works that I certainly expected to be finished by now. But life gets busy, and I need more time to think about them anyway.
This book list is ordered by genre, not reading order. Does not include any random or fragmented book chapters I read.
Plato - The Republic
Bernardo Kastrup - Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics
Ernst Junger - The Worker
Nick Land - Fanged Noumena
Jeremy Johnson - Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness
Christopher Caldwell - Age of Entitlement
Edward Dutton - Woke Eugenics
Curtis Yarvin - An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives
Curtis Yarvin - How Dawkins Got Pwned
Jay Wengrow - A Common Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms
Chip Huyen - Designing Machine Learning Systems
Chip Huyen - AI Engineering
Bruce & Bruce - Practical Statistics for Data Scientists
Deepak Kunungo - Probabilistic Machine Learning for Finance and Investing
DFW - Infinite Jest
Cixin Liu - Three Body trilogy
Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun (Shadow & Claw, Sword & Citadel)
Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings (first time reading)
Andy Weird - Project Hail Mary
Neil Stephenson - Snow Crash
Jean Raspail - The Camp of the Saints
Max Chafkin - The Contrarian (a completely libtarded biography of Peter Thiel)
G. Gordon Liddy - Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy
Jefferey Pomerantz - Metadata
Andrew Lo - Adaptive Markets
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