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

history
History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides
Thucydides reconstructs the Peloponnesian War through speeches and events, arguing that power politics, not justice, determines interstate conduct.
fiction
Jean Santeuil
Marcel Proust
Proust's unfinished early novel following a sensitive aristocratic youth through love, art, and aesthetic awakening in Belle Époque France.
religion
Not Always So
Shunryu Suzuki
Zen teaching talks on practice, mind, and paradox, emphasizing that understanding Zen requires direct experience rather than intellectual comprehension.
fiction
Scenes of Clerical Life
George Eliot
Three portraits of English rural clergy reveal the gap between Christian ideals and institutional compromise, human weakness.
philosophy
The Plague
Albert Camus
Plague forces community confrontation with suffering and mortality; individual virtue persists despite cosmic indifference and collective catastrophe.
biography
Song in a Weary Throat
Pauli Murray
Murray's posthumous autobiography — Jim Crow, Howard Law School, civil rights activism, Episcopal ordination as first Black female priest, and gender nonconformity decades before the vocabulary existed.
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