Bookshelf
A list of books I’ve enjoyed over the years, in the order I finished reading them. This list helps me keep track of some ideas which have influenced me, and helps me mark the passage of time. My favourites are indicated with *. Recommendations are always welcome.
Some other reading lists I admire:
2022
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien
The Big Short, Michael Lewis
Tiger Woods, Armen Keteyian and Jeff Benedict
2021
Letters to a Young Scientist, Edward O. Wilson
Doing the Impossible, Arthur L. Slotkin
The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner
Freedom’s Forge, Arthur Herman
The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell
The Education of an Idealist, Samantha Power
Flash Boys Not So Fast, Peter Kováč
Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Count Down, Steve Olson
A Problem from Hell, Samantha Power
Whatever It Takes, Paul Tough
Privilege, Shamus Khan
The Privileged Poor, Anthony Abraham Jack
Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis
A Promised Land, Barack Obama
Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama
Brave Men, Ernie Pyle
2020
Dune, Frank Herbert
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Years That Matter Most, Paul Tough
The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli
With the Old Breed, Eugene Sledge
Skunk Works, Ben Rich and Leo Janos
Exhalation*, Ted Chiang
Becoming, Michelle Obama
Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow
The Social Transformation of American Medicine, Paul Starr
The New New Thing, Michael Lewis
Flash Boys, Michael Lewis
Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell
Hackers and Painters, Paul Graham
Shoe Dog, Phil Knight
Working, Robert Caro
The Passage of Power, Robert Caro
The Book of Why, Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie
The Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant
The Second Mountain, David Brooks
2019
Master of the Senate, Robert Caro
Means of Ascent, Robert Caro
Personal History, Katharine Graham
Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain
Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky
I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Ramit Sethi
The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig
The Path to Power, Robert Caro
Models of My Life, Herbert Simon
Mastery, Robert Greene
Difficult Conversations, Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen
The Power Broker, Robert Caro
The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene
Range, David Epstein
Principles, Ray Dalio
The Three Body Problem, Liu Cixin
In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn
Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
The Ph.D. Grind, Philip Guo
The Hungry Brain, Stephan Guyenet
In the Plex, Steven Levy
The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT, Pepper White
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Gene, Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Person and the Situation, Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett
We Need to Talk, Celeste Headlee
Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World*, Iddo Landau
2018
…yes, I really didn’t read many books this year…
2017
Einstein, Walter Isaacson
The Laws of Medicine, Siddhartha Mukherjee
A Mind at Play, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman
The Way of Baseball, Shawn Green
The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis
Letters from a Stoic, Seneca the Younger
Seeking Wisdom, Peter Bevelin
A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
The Big Picture, Sean Carroll
Stories of Your Life and Others*, Ted Chiang
Darwin: Portrait of a Genius, Paul Johnson
How We Die, Sherwin Nuland
Storm in a Teacup, Helen Czerski
The Outsider (L’Étranger), Albert Camus
The Pig That Wants to be Eaten, Julian Baggini
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Chris Hadfield
Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
Flowers For Algernon, Daniel Keyes
Birth of a Theorem (Théorème Vivant), Cédric Villani
A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright
Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Charlie Munger
Deep Work*, Cal Newport
Complications, Atul Gawande
Here’s Looking at Euclid, Alex Bellos
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance
Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
The Dictator’s Handbook, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith
2016
The Grapes of Math, Alex Bellos
Chaos Monkeys, Antonio García Martínez
Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Burning the Days, James Salter
Managing Oneself, Peter Drucker
Rules for a Knight, Ethan Hawke
Our Town, Thornton Wilder
The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton
On The Shortness of Life*, Seneca the Younger
When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and Alex Haley
The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton
Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg
Brave New World*, Aldous Huxley
Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
1984, George Orwell
Man’s Search for Meaning*, Viktor Frankl
On The Move: A Life, Oliver Sacks
Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Poke The Box, Seth Godin
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon), Jean-Dominique Bauby
The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
How Will You Measure Your Life?, Clayton Christensen
Quiet*, Susan Cain
Stop Stealing Dreams, Seth Godin
2015
Dreaming in Code, Scott Rosenberg
Zero To One*, Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Elon Musk*, Ashlee Vance
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Mohsin Hamid
Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson
The Dip, Seth Godin
What The Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell
Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell
Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
2014 and earlier
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino
The Opposite of Loneliness, Marina Keegan
The Pacific, Hugh Ambrose
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis