A Living Knowledge Graph

Read Widely. Think Clearly.

A personally curated library of 5,441 books spanning every civilization, discipline, and tradition. Every Tier 1 entry has been read and vouched for.

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5,441Books
787Tier 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

science
Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down
J.E. Gordon
The book that made structural engineering accessible to anyone curious — why materials fail, how bones and bridges and ships resist stress, the deep unity between biological and human-made structures. Gordon is a materials scientist with the gift of making equations feel like common sense. Petroski's To Engineer Is Human is the story of failure; Gordon's Structures is the story of why things hold. The two together are the complete structural imagination library.
fiction
Burr
Gore Vidal
Aaron Burr in old age, dictating his memoirs. Vidal demolishes the founding myth with wit, affection, and devastating historical accuracy. The best novel ever written about the American founding.
fiction
Romola
George Eliot
A woman navigates Renaissance Florence's religious and political upheaval, seeking personal autonomy within constraining social structures.
architecture
Shelter
Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn's massive visual survey of vernacular shelter worldwide — how people have built homes without architects across cultures and centuries: yurts, igloos, adobe, timber frame, stone. Published after Kahn worked on the Domebook series with Brand. The book that made a generation of back-to-the-landers realize that human beings had been solving the shelter problem brilliantly for millennia before the building industry arrived. Essential document of the counterculture's engagement with architecture.
technology
Programming in Prolog
William F. Clocksin and Christopher S. Mellish
The standard introduction to Prolog — the language where you describe facts and rules, and the system figures out the answers. Logic programming is the most radical departure from the von Neumann model: you say what is true, not what to do. Prolog was briefly the language of the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer project (which failed) and of early expert systems (which mostly failed). But the ideas — unification, backtracking, constraint satisfaction — permeate modern AI. Still the clearest introduction to declarative thinking.
philosophy
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche
A visionary philosophical novel depicts an overman transcending conventional morality through creative self-overcoming and affirming life's suffering.
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