In the second half of 2018 I came back to reading on my Kindle, and ended up working through 31 books across the year. That makes it my most-read year since graduation. I jotted down some short reviews below as a record. Each book includes a purchase link — if you buy through them, I get a small affiliate commission.
IT / Internet
Badass: Making Users Awesome (《用户思维 +：好产品让用户为自己尖叫》)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
The author talks about product design with an open mindset — and it’s not strictly about products. The core idea is to build great products by making users excellent. I think it’s a fantastic book.
The summary boils down to three points:
- Help users get better: A. help them practice correctly; B. help them acquire the right tacit knowledge.
- Help users sustain the desire to succeed: A. clearly identify obstacles in their path; B. design growth paths and rewards.
- Reduce cognitive-resource leaks for users.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《流量池》 (Traffic Pool)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Written by Yang Fei, the marketing lead behind 2018’s much-talked-about Luckin Coffee. The tactics and frameworks in the book are great, with some genuine insights. But most of the case studies feel too superficial — going one or two layers deeper would have made them much better.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《内容算法：把内容变成价值的效率系统》 (Content Algorithms)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
The first half uses Toutiao as a backdrop to introduce the basics of recommendation systems and algorithms — works fine as an intro, and overlapped with similar things I was running into at work. The second half — operations and case analysis — is weaker, and analyzing only successes pales next to digging into a few failures.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《你凭什么做好互联网：从技术思维到商业逻辑》 (What Makes You Good at the Internet)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
A collection of @Caoz’s articles. The book lacks a strong unified framework, and the tone often feels paternalistic, but there’s plenty of substance. The value is up to you to judge — taking everything an author says at face value is never that interesting.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《全球电商进化史》 (The Evolution of Global E-commerce)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
An overview of the emerging e-commerce markets and key players in China, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, etc. Useful for understanding e-commerce from a macro angle. My one regret: the China section doesn’t dig into newer commerce models like Youzan, Yunji, or Pinduoduo.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《老二非死不可：关于投资、商业、互联网的碎片化思考》 (Number Two Must Die)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
An older book — Fang Sanwen, founder of Xueqiu, published it in 2013. I think it’s a great primer for stock-market newcomers. An insider’s take on investment, business, and the Internet, with viewpoints worth recommending. Reading it alongside the user discussion threads on Xueqiu makes the author’s deeper thinking even clearer. Even years later, the content is surprisingly forward-looking and insightful.
Purchase: Kindle e-book | (paperback is now going for 200+ RMB resale)
《孵化 Twitter：从蛮荒到 IPO 的狂野旅程》 (Hatching Twitter)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
The “interpersonal intrigue” history of Twitter’s founders. Reading this from today’s vantage point, my picture feels incomplete — the book came out in 2014. And as a business biography, there’s plenty about Twitter itself worth covering that gets glossed over here, which was painful for me. That said, it’s a great narrative read — I enjoyed it. Recommended.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《极致产品》 (The Ultimate Product)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
A bottom-line product philosophy. There aren’t really that many ideas in here, and you’ve heard them a hundred times, but you might still not get them. The “seven steamed buns” story in the book is one I bring up with colleagues a lot — re-reading it still hits.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《周鸿祎自述：我的互联网方法论》 (Zhou Hongyi: My Internet Methodology)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Required reading on our CEO’s list for the product team. As always, Zhou Hongyi’s book is easy to digest, but it overlaps a lot with The Ultimate Product above. This one reads more like it’s written for traditional-industry folks transitioning to the Internet. Heavy emphasis on user experience and starting from the user — explained in very accessible terms. Also covers three Internet business models in detail. Worth a read if you’re interested.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
Personal Development
Principles (《原则》)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Ray Dalio’s book — heavily hyped this year. A great book. “Real growth is continuous evolution by learning from pain” — I couldn’t agree more with the core idea. But it’s also more important to understand the reasons and logic behind the principles than the principles themselves. Whether someone else’s principles apply to your life — and whether you actually live by them — is for you to decide.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《这样读书就够了》 (Reading This Way Is Enough)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Recommended by an operations colleague — who then promptly resigned. I love reading practical, applied books, and I usually take notes by highlighting, quoting, summarizing, and tying things back to my own experience. I’ve always envied people who systematically deconstruct books with mind maps.
Luo Zhenyu of Dedao has dialed up my knowledge anxiety several times over — the more I read, the more anxious I get. Some chapters in this book have slowly given me a new perspective on that anxiety: not knowing something is fine — as long as it’s useful and “enough,” there’s nothing to fear.
The book introduces the “sticky-note reading method,” which has been hugely useful to me. First, it classifies reading at a high level, and I’ve reshaped how I read accordingly. For practical books, I’ve evolved my “summarize + personal example” method into “I + A1 + A2.” It also gave me a fresh perspective and methodology for building my own knowledge system. I’ll be doing some structured knowledge-system work based on this, anchored in my own positioning.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《100个基本》 (100 Fundamentals)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
I was looking for some methodological principles for reference, and this book fits exactly into what I’d call the “methodology” chapter of life. But methodologies don’t really transplant — copying someone else’s doesn’t do much for you. The principles you summarize for yourself are the ones that fit you. The final chapter on “how to draft your own 100 fundamentals” is a useful reference. Honestly, the book is less about the principles themselves and more about how moved I was by the author’s self-reflection and self-discipline.
Purchase: Amazon paperback
There’s also an iterated version, New 100 Fundamentals: Amazon paperback
《清醒思考的艺术：你最好让别人去犯的 52 种思维错误》 (The Art of Thinking Clearly)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Another practical-applied book. Lays out 52 classic thinking errors — every one of them lands like a wake-up call. The downside: the chapters are too short. There’s no deep elaboration on any single error, and if your interpretation isn’t sharp, the brilliance might pass you by.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《态度：吴军家书》 (Attitude: Letters from Wu Jun)
Rating: ★★★★☆
Wu Jun’s collected letters to his two daughters, who are in college and high school. Concrete advice on the specific issues young people face while growing up — learning, relationships, earning wealth, understanding the world. I love this kind of content — concrete situations with concrete analysis, giving you a reference for how someone else handles things. And communicating via long-form email is actually a great medium.
Purchase: Amazon paperback
Nonviolent Communication (《非暴力沟通》)
Rating: ★★★★★
The four steps of nonviolent communication: observe outcomes without judging — feel your own emotions without hiding them — express needs instead of accusing — make specific requests instead of vague opinions.
After several months of trying… well, I failed. I haven’t been able to successfully apply “nonviolent communication.”
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《这书能让你戒烟》 (This Book Will Help You Quit Smoking)
Rating: ★★★★☆
I don’t love the writing style — too much fluff. Lots of pages are spent essentially deprogramming the reader — or rather, deprogramming society’s deprogramming of smokers, with the author then re-programming smokers in the opposite direction. It doesn’t really engage with what smokers actually feel. But if you’re curious about smoking as a phenomenon, you can read it. Whether it actually helps you quit — I’m not sure.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
Deep Work (《深度工作：如何有效使用每一点脑力》)
Rating: ★★★☆☆
A poorly translated book — the content could fit on a single page but they padded it into a book. “What you learn from paper alone stays shallow; to truly learn martial arts, you have to take some hits.”
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
Picture Books
《我可以要你一口吗》 (Can I Have a Bite of You?)
Purchase: Amazon paperback
《你今天真好看》 (You Look Great Today)
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《芬兰人的噩梦：另类芬兰社交指南》 (Finnish Nightmares)
Rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
A picture book — I bought the e-book. Not much to say. Five minutes and I was done. It has a 7.4 on Douban, which surprised me a little.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
Other
《东京一年》 (A Year in Tokyo)
Rating: ★★★☆☆
I appreciate Jiang Fangzhou’s sincerity, and I love the line “the good things always come unexpectedly.” The first half is everyday life and human connections; the second half finally returns to Jiang Fangzhou’s signature mode — book summaries with opinions, gallery visits with anecdotes about famous people. Fits where I am now.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《海错图笔记》 (Notes on the Hai Cuo Tu)
Rating: ★★★☆☆
30 notes on the Hai Cuo Tu and 30 “seafood dining guides.” The layout isn’t great and the photo quality could be better. Might work as bedtime reading, but it’ll make you hungry. The book’s popularity owes a lot to the author’s Weibo influencer status.
Purchase: Amazon paperback
《且介亭杂文》 (Qiejieting Essays — Lu Xun)
Rating: ★★★★☆
Notes While Sick, More Notes While Sick, Layman’s Talk on Writing, Grab What’s Useful, Casual Browsing, Ah Jin — all great fun.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《大象无形》 (The Elephant Without Form)
Rating: ★★★☆☆
A mystery thriller mostly about solving the “Red Boy” case. Some readers find the prose icy and the pacing sharp, blending the eerie atmosphere of orthodox mysteries with the social commentary of social-school mysteries. To me, the writing is a bit too sharp — a little more polishing and more attention to characters’ inner lives would make it better.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《以幽默的方式过一生》 (Living a Humorous Life)
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Reads a bit like life-coaching syrup, but the substance under the seasoning is actually useful. The takes on workplace, love, failure, and friendship are fair and grounded.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《围城》 (Fortress Besieged — Qian Zhongshu)
Rating: ★★★★☆
A classic among classics — the irony and sorrow of life run deeper than any words or laughter.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《无所畏》 (Fearless — Feng Tang)
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Feng Tang’s new book. Young — indulge in joy to the fullest. Older — pursue clarity to the fullest.
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book
《高兴死了！！！》 (Furiously Happy)
Rating: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
In April I saw an 8-star recommendation on Douban and bought the e-book. Forced myself through half of it before I gave up. Lesson learned: when a new book comes out, wait a while, see what other readers say, sample the e-book — if you can read it, then buy. (Even with long-standing high-rated classics, they might not be right for you.)
Purchase: Amazon paperback | Kindle e-book