📚 Books I read in March 2026
A fascinating book about the incredible machine that is the human brain, a bestseller that didn't amaze, and a gem in literature that I'll be reading a lot more of.
Reading is callisthenics for your brain.
Reading good books is a great way to broaden your knowledge and perspectives.
Reflecting on the books I read every month helps me cement the key learnings from each one of them.
What's better than recommending someone else a good book?
Recommending two, three, or five good books!
Here we are with the March edition of the books I read last month!
If you end up reading one of them, please let me know in the comments section.
Before we get into the meat of the books list, I need your input on something of vital importance.
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Thanks for casting your vote, and now, onto the books I read in March.
💫 Book Highlight: A Brief History of Intelligence by Max S. Bennett
A Brief History of Intelligence, by Max S. Bennet
432 pages, First Published: October 24, 2023
Even if a book has a subtitle that sounds suspiciously enthusiastic about something controversial, such as Why the Evolution of the Brain Holds the Key to the Future of AI as is the case for this book, if it’s blurbed by Daniel Kahneman, it’s a sign I take seriously that I need to read it1.
The book is a lot more about the evolution of the human brain and the evolution of our understanding of its inner workings than it is about AI. Furthermore, it’s really about the evolution of AI as a whole discipline, not narrowly focused on the past 7 years since the introduction of Transformers that led to large language models.
Something I particularly liked is that Bennet does a good job at mentioning the limitations of LLMs, talking about how they only cover one key aspect of human intelligence, language, while lacking any mechanism to implement what’s generally referred to as a model of the world. Something that appears to be key in explaining human intelligence.
I found the last paragraph in the whole book particularly intriguing in expressing this view
In the human brain, language is the window to our inner simulation2. Language is the interface to our mental worlf. And language is built on the foundation of our ability to model and reason about the minds od others—to infer what they mean and figure out exactly which words will produce the desired simulation in their minds. I think most would agree that the humanlike artificial intelligence we will one day create will not be LLMs; language models will be merely a window to something richer that lies beneath.
Bennet did a great job at clarifying what are facts that we know about today on how intelligence works and what are just hypotheses and theories, still unconfirmed and highly debated.
I found the part about catastrophic forgetting in AI models, where learning new concepts or abilities often leads them to forget other important ones. The animal brain, and the human brain above all else, has been able to continuously and linearly learn new skills while not forgetting old ones, at least not systematically.
This is just one of many unsolved challenges on the way to whatever will look like real intelligence in machines, and Bennet sums it up perfectly in this passage.
How do modern AI systems overcome this problem? Well, they don’t yet. Programmers merely avoid the problem by freezing their AI systems after they are trined. We don’t let AI systems learn things sequentially; they learn things all at once and then stop learning.
This is not to say AI systems won’t ever be able to do this, but as of today we have little to no idea about how that might happen. Yet, as the book shows with plenty of specific examples, many breakthroughs in ML and AI have come from trying to reproduce our understanding of how the human brain works. But sometimes even some of the best advancements are barely scratching the surface of how the brain really works:
Despite being inspired by the brain, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are, in fact, a poor approximation of how brains recognise visual patterns.
My main takeaway from this book is that though we do know a lot about how the human brain works, there are still plenty of things we don’t. Neuroscience is a key discipline, and research in this space, including in AI systems to mimic how the brain works, should continue, as it carries huge potential for humanity.
That also means we must stay humble and avoid the hubris of recent advancements fooling us into believing that true artificial intelligence is just around the corner.
Overall, this is an impressively dense yet accessible book on one of the most mysterious and fascinating aspects of what makes us humans: intelligence.
There are a few additional details besides the actual content that make it an amazing achievement for Bennet.
The first one is that this is his first book. And it is wonderfully well written, complete and engaging while being thorough, nerdy and fun. A work in which the passion of the author is palpable, yet it does not fall into sensationalism, overly enthusiastic predictions or promises. Bennet clearly believes that one day we'll achieve a human-like level of artificial intelligence, but he's very cautious at not resorting to salient predictions about how quickly we'll get there.
The second one is that Bennet is not a neuroscientist by education or trade3. He studied maths and economics, but he clearly has a passion for neuroscience and has been working in the AI field for his entire career. Not a complete stranger to the topic, but the level of depth he reached in his book is proof of an admirable ability to go deep on a topic driven by pure interest. A clear example of what Cal Newport defines as being so good you can’t be ignored, I guess.
I believe Max Bennet is quite busy with his life as an entrepreneur, but I’d be curious to read more from him if he ever wrote another book.
📚 Other Books I Read in March
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell
301 pages, First Published: Marc 1, 2000
This is the second book I've ever read from Gladwell. The first one was Blink, and it was ages ago. I got this second-hand copy from an online reseller I’d like to partner with4. The Tipping Point is both an interesting and easy read. I like how it sounds a bit “old” as it’s been published in 2000: all examples are from the pre-ubiquitous-internet and pre-smartphone eras. A time when the offline, physical world was the centre of attention and the dominant place of interaction for most people.
The core idea of the book is to try and illustrate the mechanism through which trends, diseases, or general phenomena that go through phases of massive expansion germinate, spread quickly, and then fade out.
Of all the examples, I found the one about the crime rate in New York City and the correlations with the degradation of the subway system intriguing. I even mentioned them in a previous article.
Or the interesting correlation and causality effects between teenager coolness and their tendency to smoke.
But that’s pretty much it. The Tipping Point, in my experience, is the kind of book that leaves you with a disappointing “so what?” unanswered question at the end.
It’s interesting, original, and arguably well written.
Yet, I struggle to understand why it encountered such enormous success when it came out.
I don’t regret reading it, but I’m not sure it’s a book I’d recommend.
Surely not as much as the next one.
La femme gelée by Annie Ernaux
La femme gelée, by Annie Ernaux
182 pages, First Published: February 12, 1981
Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, and after reading La femme gelée it became clear why.
It’s the first book I read from her, but clearly not the last one. I must credit and thank my wife for making me discover this amazing author.
La femme gelée might as well be the most subtle yet brutal feminist book ever written. The most profound and poignant piece of literature highlighting the reality of inequalities between men and women in the Western world.
It does all this without ever mentioning the word ‘feminism,’ or engaging with lengthy political dissertations. No. It does that in the simplest, yet most powerful, way: by telling a story. Her story. The story of a young woman who grew up in a family in which the roles in the couple were so distant from the dominating stereotypes as to be almost embarrassing. The story of how despite that odd cultural frame of reference, she ended up following the traditional path. How she had to sacrifice her dreams, desires and ambitions in service of her new family: her husband first, and then her two kids.
Annie Ernaux achieves all that in a relatively short book, with an absolutely unique style. Her writing doesn’t follow traditional and familiar structures. It’s a mix of a stream of consciousness and jazz. She can explore her thoughts for multiple pages in a row without an evident discontinuity, or she can jump from one thought to a dialogue to the description of an event in the space of just a few sentences or words.
Transitions are sometimes smooth, but they’re often abrupt.
There is a certain brutality in her style too. She doesn’t filter the reality she’s describing, be it her internal world or what’s happening outside of here. What makes it even more brutal is that she doesn’t even need to use excessive emphasis or troubling images: just the reality of her condition, the way she lives it. Day in and day out.
She’s not talking about violence. She’s not talking about oppression. She’s not talking about poverty, the struggle to make ends meet. She’s the wife of a perfectly normal middle-class young family. A husband with a good job. Two kids. A nice house. She’s almost the perfect archetype of a tradwife, an idea that a certain part of American conservatives have been promoting as something to aspire to.
But she calls it “the frozen woman”. As all her desires, wishes and ambitions have been frozen and replaced with this image that someone else has chosen for her. The image of the woman whose role is reduced to servicing her husband and kids.
A wonderful book. One that makes you think deeply and reconsider a lot of your biases and actions.
I already have a couple more books from Annie Ernaux piled on my bedside table, and I’m both eager and hesitant to read them. I’m eager, because this is just great literature. And hesitant, because they force you to confront certain aspects of the life you’re living under in a new light.
And what you discover isn’t always pleasant.
See you soon!
As a reminder for all my readers, on April 16th at 5PM CET, I’ll host a free open session of the Sudo Make Me a CTO Community. It will be like one of the regular sessions reserved for members of the community, except that it will be open to anyone for attendance.
Many of my readers have signed up already and submitted interesting topics to be covered during the session.
One that we'll focus on is something many leaders are struggling with: managing the often unreasonable expectations for productivity improvements through AI-assisted coding across many C-levels.
I'm looking forward to having that conversation with many of my readers.
If you’re interested, sign up here and you’ll receive an invite shortly after.
See you on the 16th!
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Kahneman’s blurb says, “I found this book amazing. I read it through quickly because it was so interesting, then turned around and read much of it again.”
So, people like Marc Andreessen bragging about not having any form of introspection might actually be an admission of not being humans after all. Watch the short video, it's hilarious.
If anyone here knows someone over at Awesome Books, please get in touch. They seem to align well with the spirit of this newsletter, and I’d love to send them more readers.