Why Did Angela Jiang Read So Many Books?

Angela Jiang read something like 200 books in a year because work had left her bored and no longer intellectually challenged.

She missed the muscle-building of school, where a new topic is tough, not super fun, and still forces a real stretch. After a couple of years on the job, the work stayed interesting and challenging, but it lacked that intellectual bit. A very long Caltrain commute made the reading bender a good use of time, and she came out of it thinking a lot. The writing was not meant to build a Twitter following. She had no followers and was tweeting into the abyss, practicing how to compress an idea into as few words as possible. People started liking the posts, she kept going, and then work got too busy and she stopped.

The book she still names as a favorite is The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. For her it was a life-changing philosophical book and a completely different way to look at the world: a thing you did not know could happen, which then permanently changes the framework for how things work. The idea is simple, and Taleb hits how that property shows up across so much of the world.