01 — Science fiction
Snow Crash
The cyberpunk novel that coined "metaverse" — a breakneck mashup of linguistics, virus theory, and hacker mythology.
Worth It by Sid Singh
Worth It
Things that earned their place.
A personal index of books, tools, gear, objects, services, and experiences that justify their cost, space, time, and attention.
Books worth reading.
The top of the shelf — pulled straight from the library catalogue, sorted by rating. Fifteen that earned five stars and kept them.
02 — Science fiction
Solaris
A first-contact story built around the impossibility of truly understanding an alien mind — no easy answers offered.
03 — Gothic fable
Something Wicked This Way Comes
A small-town gothic tale of a sinister travelling carnival, and the price of wishing for more than your own life.
04 — Satire
The Space Merchants
A 1950s satire of an advertising-run future — eerily prescient about how far marketing can reach into a society.
05 — Classic
A Sportsman's Notebook
Lyrical sketches of Russian rural life under serfdom — quiet, humane observation rather than plot.
06 — Science fiction
Stand on Zanzibar
A sprawling, fragmented near-future epic on overpopulation, structured in Dos Passos-style cuts and collage.
07 — Science fiction
Stranger in a Strange Land
A human raised by Martians returns to Earth and reinvents religion, sex, and society on his own terms.
08 — Myth
Tales of Troy and Greece
An old-fashioned but durable retelling of the Trojan cycle and Greek myth for the general reader.
09 — Humour
Talk to the Snail
A wry outsider's field guide to French manners, bureaucracy, and the unwritten rules nobody explains.
10 — Philosophy
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A philosophical prose-poem circling the Übermensch, eternal recurrence, and the death of God.
11 — Classic
Tropic of Cancer
A confessional, sensory, formally loose portrait of a broke expatriate writer adrift in Paris.
12 — Essays
Travels in Hyperreality
Essays on America's museums, wax figures, and simulated authenticity — semiotics disguised as travel writing.
13 — Classic
Trout Fishing in America
A genre-defying, playful short-chapter novel that uses fishing as a lens on 1960s America.
14 — Historical fiction
Twelve Fingers
A comic historical novel trailing a real 19th-century Brazilian anarchist and assassin across continents.
15 — Classic
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
A philosophical novel on love, politics, and the strange weightlessness of a life lived only once.
The test.
Not every recommendation means the same thing. Each entry carries a signal, so the reader knows the basis of the endorsement.
Tested
Sid has personally used this and can speak from direct experience.
Kept
This stayed in Sid's life after repeated use. The strongest signal.
Researched
Not personally used yet, but it passes the research test.
Aspirational
Expensive, rare, future-facing, or hard to access, but worth tracking.
From the archive.
A running personal bookmark archive, 900+ entries deep since 2013. A dozen recent ones worth a second look.
Charts of the Week: Cycles, Different but the Same
A data-led look at AI adoption cycles, lean startup headcounts, and productivity's double edge in retail.
The Mattering Instinct
Why the drive to feel significant runs so deep, and what separates a life worth living from mere persistence.
Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly
An argument that a small cartel of superstars now dominates culture, and what that concentration costs everyone else.
AI Doesn't Reduce Work — It Intensifies It
A case that automation is raising the pace and expectations of knowledge work rather than lightening it.
To Matter More or Cost Less?
PwC and the ANA on how leading CMOs are using AI to chase growth and enterprise value, not just efficiency.
Design Archive of John Maeda
A working designer's own record of how design's status inside tech companies rose over two decades.
The Key to Grand Strategy
Grand strategy as the collision of five idea-streams — conviction, institutions, intellect, zeitgeist, and culture.
2025: The State of Consumer AI
Menlo Ventures' survey-backed read on how fast US consumers actually adopted AI tools last year.
The $160B Martech Industry Can't Answer a Simple Question
A pointed critique of a marketing-technology sector that struggles to prove it makes customers money.
Welcome to the Post-Naive Internet Era
On the internet's shift from open-hearted optimism to a more guarded, skeptical, algorithm-wary posture.
Change Is Overrated
A contrarian marketing take: the fundamentals stay fixed, no matter how much digital and AI claim to change.
Otto Gross (1877–1920): A Biographical Survey
A scholarly life of the psychoanalyst whose ideas on sexuality and authority unsettled Freud's own circle.
On rotation.
Five playlists, five different moods. Public, live, and updated whenever the mood shifts.
61 tracks
Rewiredtech
42 tracks
Alt Rock Revival
47 tracks
Classic House
30 tracks
Anthems
303 tracks
IntroJazz
Still to come.
The rest of the shelf is being assembled — gear, objects, places, and paid-for experiences.
Gear worth carrying
Electronics, travel gear, bags, audio, and work tools that survive real use.
Coming soon
Objects worth keeping
Everyday things that earn permanence because they are useful, beautiful, or unusually well judged.
Coming soon
Places & experiences
Hotels, cities, routes, courses, and services that repay the money or the journey.
Coming soon
Against the infinite shelf.
The internet has made everything available and very little easier to choose. Worth It is a small resistance to that glut.
This is not a shop, a mass catalogue, a deals page, or a random affiliate dump. It is a filtered index of things that appear to repay attention.
Some things will be inexpensive and practical. Some will be indulgent. Some will be intellectual. Some will simply be well made. The common test is whether they deserve a place.
More shelves are being assembled.
Gear, objects, places, and paid-for experiences are next. Books, bookmarks, and playlists are live.