I’m not convinced of the utility of lists like this, or the multitude of other Awesome JavaScript Yeahhhh!!! lists.
As one of the issues in the GitHub repository suggest, it seems all that is needed for a book to be considered “mind expanding” here is for it to have a Goodreads and/or Amazon rating higher than 4.
But what does that prove? There are people who rate Netflix’s Red Notice 10/10. Relative to those people, I think I’ve seen more intelligent forms of life swimming in the milk in my breakfast cereal.
I read half of The Compound Effect — one of the books in this list. It was trash. I’ve also read Sapiens from this list, and I certainly would characterise it as mind expanding.
Even from these two titles alone, I’d say the quality in the selection is far too variable. I think reviews are near enough useless unless you’re intimately familiar with the reviewer, and trying to curate the works in a collection like this by writing unit tests is probably futile.
As one of the issues in the GitHub repository suggest, it seems all that is needed for a book to be considered “mind expanding” here is for it to have a Goodreads and/or Amazon rating higher than 4.
But what does that prove? There are people who rate Netflix’s Red Notice 10/10. Relative to those people, I think I’ve seen more intelligent forms of life swimming in the milk in my breakfast cereal.
I read half of The Compound Effect — one of the books in this list. It was trash. I’ve also read Sapiens from this list, and I certainly would characterise it as mind expanding.
Even from these two titles alone, I’d say the quality in the selection is far too variable. I think reviews are near enough useless unless you’re intimately familiar with the reviewer, and trying to curate the works in a collection like this by writing unit tests is probably futile.