# Things I keep coming back to

> Books, podcasts and art Ralph Sena keeps coming back to, and why each one stuck.

Source: https://ralphsena.com/taste

## Books

### The Hard Thing About Hard Things

*Ben Horowitz · 2014*

Horowitz on running a company when everything is going wrong. Less about strategy than about the decisions nobody prepares you for: the layoff, demoting a friend, carrying on when quitting is the obvious move. The rare business book that admits most of the job is holding your nerve.

### Un piège sans fin

*Olympe Bhêly-Quénum · 1960*

Ahouna, son of a farmer and herder in northern Dahomey, lives a life tuned to music and to the land until his marriage to Anatou comes apart and she accuses him of infidelity. Bhêly-Quénum published it in 1960, and it stands as one of the founding novels of Beninese literature: a trap closing slowly on a man who did nothing to deserve it.

### Black Sunday

*Thomas Harris · 1975*

Harris wrote this before Hannibal Lecter. A Black September operative and a broken American veteran plan to attack the Super Bowl from a blimp, while an Israeli officer tries to find them first. What makes it work is that the people planning the atrocity are drawn as carefully as the ones chasing them.

### The Greeks

*H. D. F. Kitto · 1951*

A short introduction to classical Greece that has outlived nearly everything written alongside it. Kitto is interested in how the Greeks thought and why the polis produced what it did, and he writes with the confidence of someone who never mistook brevity for shallowness.

### La vengeance de Ralph

*Delly*

A Delly romance, from the brother and sister who wrote dozens of them under one name. A well-born but penniless young woman, badly used by her stepmother, is married by Ralph as an act of revenge. The title he inherits makes her a lady, and the marriage he entered coldly turns into something he did not plan.

## Podcasts

### Philosophy is Sexy

*Marie Robert*

Marie Robert takes one philosophical idea per episode and walks it straight into ordinary life: love, doubt, work, the things you actually turn over at night. Short, in French, and never academic for its own sake.

### Acquired

*Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal*

Three and four hour episodes telling the entire history of one company: how it started, the decisions that turned out to matter, and why it won or lost. The research is absurd, and it is the closest thing to a business education you can get while cycling.

### Lenny's Podcast

*Lenny Rachitsky*

Interviews with the people who actually build and grow products, pushed until they give up something specific. Useful rather than inspirational, which is rarer than it should be.

### Deep Questions

*Cal Newport*

Newport answers listener questions about attention, deep work, and arranging a working life around what matters instead of what is loudest. A steady argument against busyness as a measure of anything.