A Living Knowledge Graph

Read Widely. Think Clearly.

A personally curated library of 5,548 books spanning every civilization, discipline, and tradition. Every Tier 1 entry has been read and vouched for.

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5,548Books
809Tier 1 — Personally Read
13Domains
1,835+Author Graph Nodes

Not a bestseller list. Not an algorithm.

Annotary is a hand-curated knowledge graph built from fifty years of serious reading — seeded from Nobel Prize lists, university syllabi, and the personal libraries of great minds, then filtered through one curator's judgment.

Every book has a synopsis. Every author has an influence graph. Every domain has a reading path. The goal: a library you can think with, not just browse.

Curated by Brian T. Ball — systems engineer at IBM, VP at Tandem, CTO EMEA at Microsoft. Lifelong reader of 5,000+ books. Every Tier 1 entry is personally vouched.

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From the Library

A few books, chosen at random

religion
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Shunryu Suzuki
The most accessible introduction to Zen practice — talks given to American students on zazen, breathing, and the beginner's mind that contains all possibilities.
fiction
The Far Side of the World
Patrick O'Brian
The Pacific, following a rogue American frigate. The basis for the Peter Weir film. Among the finest in the series.
systems
Out of the Crisis
W. Edwards Deming
The fourteen points for management transformation — Deming's indictment of American management practice and the philosophy that rebuilt Japanese industry. The most consequential management book of the 20th century. Quality is not inspected in; it is designed in.
fiction
Neuromancer
William Gibson
A hacker navigates virtual space and artificial intelligence in a near-future corporate dystopia, inaugurating cyberpunk aesthetics.
science
The Principles of Psychology
William James
The founding text of American psychology — two volumes covering habit, stream of consciousness, the self, emotion, will, and attention. James invented the vocabulary we still use to think about the mind. The most readable and most intellectually alive of all the great psychology texts.
fiction
Silence of the Grave
Arnaldur Indriðason
The second Erlendur novel — a skeleton found in a Reykjavik garden, a domestic abuse story across decades, and Erlendur's own damaged family life interwoven. Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger. Indriðason is Mankell's closest peer in literary crime fiction: the same moral seriousness, the same use of genre to excavate social wounds, but rooted in Iceland's specific history and claustrophobia.
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