Bookshelf

Book recommendations are all situational, but I have highlighted some personal favorites below. There is no specific order.

Hall of Fame 🐐🥇: most influential and generally recommended

• John Steinbeck, East of Eden. An American tale of good and evil, and the choice we have.

Re-arranged furniture in my head 🪑 🛋 💡

• Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile
• Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
• Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
• Norm MacDonald, Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir
• Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
• Venkat Rao, The Gervais Principle
• Steve Martin, Born Standing Up
• The Upanishads
• Jeff Speck, Walkable City
• Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public
• Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned
• Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
• C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The Stacks 📚📚📚

• John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America
• Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
• Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
• Robert Fritz, The Path of Least Resistance
• Peter Thiel, Zero to One
• Cornel West, Race Matters
• Chris Arnade, Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America
• Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
• Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership
• Phil Knight, Shoe Dog
• Francis Bacon, Essays
• Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
• Felix Dennis, How to Get Rich
• Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things
• Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, Diary of a Very Bad Year
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow
• J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
• Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, God, Country, Notre Dame
• Andy Grove, High Output Management
• Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential
• Mark Robichaux, Cable Cowboy
• Brad Stulberg, Steve Magness, Peak Performance
• James Scott, Against the Grain
• Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
• Keith Johnstone, Impro
• Richard Rhodes, Energy
• Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos. Physical chemist who did foundational work understanding entropy. Chaos creates the necessary conditions for a more orderly steady state to arise. The physical principles are extensible to organizational and social implications... super interesting
• Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem. Creative Chinese science fiction
• Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• David Gibson, Living Life Backward. A study of Ecclesiastes, strikingly similar to the stoics
• Robert Caro, The Path to Power
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
• Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
• Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
• Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy
• Will Durant, The Pleasures of Philosophy
• Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization (11 vol. series)
  • Vol. 1, Our Oriental Heritage
  • Vol. 2, The Life of Greece
  • Vol. 3, Caesar and Christ
  • Vol. 4, The Age of Faith
  • Vol. 5, The Renaissance
  • Vol. 6, The Reformation
  • Vol. 7, The Age of Reason Begins
  • Vol. 8, The Age of Louis XIV
  • Vol. 9, The Age of Voltaire
  • Vol. 10, Rousseau and Revolution
  • Vol. 11, The Age of Napoleon
• Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money
• Barack Obama, A Promised Land
• Michel de Montaigne, Essays
• Stephane Kirkland, Paris Reborn
• Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
• Robert Oppenheimer, Science and the Common Understanding
• Ryszard Kapuściński, The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat
• Satya Nadella, Hit Refresh
• Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
• J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy
• Ben Westhoff, Original Gangstas
• Elad Gil, High Growth Handbook
• Cornel West, Brother West
• Kelly McGonigal, The Upside of Stress
• Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do
• Don Keough, The Ten Commandments for Business Failure
• Peter Bevelin, Seeking Wisdom from Darwin to Munger
• Eric Schmidt, How Google Works
• Shea Serrano, The Rap Year Book
• Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing
• William J. Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life
• Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers
• Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Steve Vogel, The Pentagon
• Moisés Naím, The End of Power
• Charles Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet
• Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
• Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends
• Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle
• Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude
• Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, The Knowledge Creating Company
• Chuck Yeager, Yeager
• Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution
• Katharine Graham, Personal History
• Randall Munroe, Thing Explainer
• David Brooks, The Road to Character
• Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods
• William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
• Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life
• Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think
• Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game
• Jeffrey Richelson, Spying on the Bomb
• Robert Cialdini, Influence
• Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Peter Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
• Sam Quinones, Dreamland
• John Kaag, Hiking with Nietzsche
• Walter Isaacson, Einstein
• Peter D. Kaufman, Poor Charlie's Almanack
• David McCullough, 1776
• Richard Branson, Losing My Virginity
• David McCullough, The Wright Brothers
• Edmund Morris, Dutch
• Ron Chernow, Titan
• David McCullough, Truman
• Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments
• Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby (eds.), A History of Private Life (5 vol.)
• Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling
• Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization
• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Per Bak, How Nature Works
• Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
• Dan Pink, Drive
• Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
• Bill Walsh, The Score Takes Care of Itself
• Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
• Sam Hughes, Ra
• William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
• Lee Smolin, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution
• Gregory Zuckerman, The Man Who Solved the Market
• Bob Iger, The Ride of a Lifetime
• Jessica Livingston, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
• Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within
• Peter Hollins, The Science of Self Discipline
• Paul Scharre, Army of None
• Joe Studwell, How Asia Works
• Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
• Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis
• Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here
• Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto
• Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
• George Gilder, Life After Google
• Chuck Klosterman, But What if We're Wrong?
• Danny Meyer, Setting the Table
• Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets
• James Clear, Atomic Habits
• Michael Marmot, The Status Syndrome
• Adam Penenberg, Viral Loop
• Kelly Weinersmith, Soonish: The Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything
• Tom Hodgkinson, How to be Idle
• Bailey Richardson, Kai Elmer Sotto, Kevin Huynh, Get Together
• Bill Burnett, Dave Evans, Designing Your Life
• Jeremy Bailenson, Experience on Demand
• Stephen Wolfram, Idea Makers
• Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
• Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage
• Morton Meyers, Happy Accidents
• Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class
• Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air
• Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
• Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
• Jonathan Rose, The Well-Tempered City
• Ray Dalio, Principles
• Venkat Rao, Crash Early Crash Often
• Roland Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther
• 99U, Manage Your Day-to-Day
• Stephen Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Blaise Pascal, Pascal's Pensées
• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
• Jim Collins, Built to Last
• Jim Collins, Good to Great
• Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You
• Bill McDermott, Winners Dream
• Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First
• Bill Bryson, The Body
• Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 1
• Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit
• Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!
• David Novak, Taking People With You
• Robert Caro, The Power Broker
• Jon Meacham, American Lion
• Sun Tzu, The Art of War
• Hal Whitehead, Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins
• Robert Ferguson, Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North
• Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
• Henry David Thoreau, Walden
• Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
• Thomas Paine, Common Sense
• Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, The Journals of Lewis and Clark
• Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex
• Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt
• Randall Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park
• Kai Bird, Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
• Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson, Venture Deals
• Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
• Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan
• Peter Diamandis, Steven Kotler, Abundance
• Ray Kroc, Grinding it Out
• David Allen, Getting Things Done
• Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell
• Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
• Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
• John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
• Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
• Homer, The Iliad
• David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
• Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Dave Eggers, What is the What
• Dave Eggers, The Circle
• Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
• Pierce Brown, Red Rising Series
• Vince Flynn, Order to Kill
• Vince Flynn, Kill Shot
• Vince Flynn, The Third Option
• Vince Flynn, Transfer of Power
• Peter Tanous, The Secret of Fatima
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
• Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth
• Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi
• Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
• Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
• Andy Weir, The Martian
• Frank Herbert, Dune
• David Bentley Hart, All Things Are Full of Gods
• Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
• Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed
• Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems
• Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
• Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler
• Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics
• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Activation of Energy
• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man
• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
• Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
• Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
• René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
• Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible
• Søren Kierkegaard, The Essential Kierkegaard
• Josiah Thompson, Kierkegaard
• Ian Buruma, Spinoza: Freedom's Messiah
• Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
• Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1
• H.J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative
• The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
• Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
• J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines
• C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
• E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed
• Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (Ursula K. Le Guin rendition)
• Terryl and Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps
• Peter Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels?
• Jan Shipps, Mormonism
• J. Krishnamurti, Total Freedom
• John Dewey, Art as Experience
• George Santayana, The Last Puritan
• James M. Gustafson and James T. Laney (eds.), On Being Responsible
• Federico Faggin, Irreducible
• M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
• Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition
• Richard Feynman, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces
• Richard Feynman, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track
• Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur
• Henry James, The Lesson of the Master
• François Villon, The Poems of François Villon
• Lucian, Satirical Sketches
• George Eliot, Middlemarch
• Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
• Richard Powers, The Overstory
• Colin Wilson, The Outsider
• Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I
• Fay Weldon, The Rules of Life
• Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts
• Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi
• Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
• J.A. Baker, The Peregrine
• Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
• John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845
• Sylvia Doughty Fries, The Urban Idea in Colonial America
• Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic
• James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom
• Brooklyn Botanic Garden, The Natural Water Garden
• Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. 1 — Fort Sumter to Perryville
• Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. 2 — Fredericksburg to Meridian
• Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (1885 first edition, 2 vol.)
• George McClellan, McClellan's Own Story
• Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery
• James Axtell, The Invasion Within
• National Park Service, Signers of the Declaration
• F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
• Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites
• Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
• Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order
• Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City
• Norman Gash, Aristocracy and People: Britain, 1815–1865
• Bill Aulet, Disciplined Entrepreneurship
• Robert Fritz, Corporate Tides
• John McMahon, The Qualified Sales Leader
• Adam Osborne, Hypergrowth: The Rise and Fall of Osborne Computer Corporation
• E.R. Yescombe, Principles of Project Finance
• Frederick B. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House
• Thomas Stanley and William Danko, The Millionaire Next Door
• Isaac Asimov, Asimov's Guide to the Bible: The Old Testament
• John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations
• Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis
• Vannevar Bush, Pieces of the Action
• Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training
• Rodale, Rodale's Book of Shortcuts
• The Wines & Vineyards of France
• Rollie Martinson, Elder Rising
• Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature