Bookshelf

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

Currently Reading

• I haven't been able to keep this up, may come back to it later

Recently Finished

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 some furniture in my head 🪑 🛋 💡

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile
• Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
• Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
• Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
• Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
• Norm MacDonald, Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir
• Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
• Venkat Rao, The Gervais Principle
• Cornel West, Race Matters
• Steve Martin, Born Standing Up
• Phil Knight, Shoe Dog
• Francis Bacon, Essays
• The Upanishads
• Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
• Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership
• Jeff Speck, Walkable City
• Chris Arnade, Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America
• Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public

Other favorites

• John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America
• Robert Fritz, The Path of Least Resistance
• Peter Thiel, Zero to One
• 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

The Stacks 📚📚📚

• Richard Rhodes, Energy. I'd skip this honestly. Interesting to think about previous energy transitions in the context of the work ahead though… we've already gone from wood to coal to oil over the last few hundred years and each transition has been needed and uncertain. The only way out is through optimism to find new ways to do things
• 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
• Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
• Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
• Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy
• Will and Ariel Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
• 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 Kapu, 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 and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization (11 vol. series)
• Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle
• Octavia 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
• C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
• Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think
• Robert 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 Almanac
• 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
• 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
• Jessican 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 Myer, 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
• Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
• 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
• Herman 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 Louis 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

Literature/Fiction:

• 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