My name is Bai Li. I am a PhD student at the University of Toronto. I do research in artificial intelligence and natural language processing. I read a lot of books, mostly nonfiction (science, economics, history, etc), so that I can better understand the world that we live in. Over the past few years, I’ve read about one book per week; this site is a collection of my book notes.
This site is monetized with the Amazon Affiliates Program: I earn a small amount every time you make a purchase using these links. However, I give honest reviews and scores to my books. The scoring system is designed as follows:
- <7: Didn’t enjoy it. Doesn’t mean the book is objectively bad (most of these books are highly rated on Amazon), it’s just a matter of personal taste.
- 7-8: Decent book and I learned something from it, but probably has some flaws that prevented me from rating it higher. My average book gets a score of around 7.5/10.
- 8-9: Very well written book that I would definitely recommend to anyone interested in the topic. Top 30% of books.
- 9-10: Book that transformed my worldview in a significant way. I give scores above 9 very sparingly, top 5% of books.
Here is a list of my top-rated books of all time.
Please subscribe to my mailing list (on the sidebar) to receive weekly book reviews, or check out my math and coding blog!