Books

A list of books I’ve been reading. I tend to update it a few times a year.

• ⭐ Favorites - added at end of year
• 🎧 Audiobooks
• 🔁 Rereads

2025

• Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2. Thinking about LLMs in 1995(!).
• Sarah Wynne-Williams - Careless People
• Thich Nhat Hahn - At Home in the World
• [DNF] Sahil Bloom - Five Types of Wealth. Could've been a good blog post, sans standard productivity hacks.
• Paul Murray - The Bee Sting. A very depressing slog, but masterful storytelling.
• Solvej Balle - On the Calculation of Volume (Book 2). Surprised how well this pushed the premise deeper.
• Solvej Balle - On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1). Magic Mountain in an afternoon?

2024

• Playground - Richard Powers. Felt a little too overstory templated, but still grokking the ending.
• 🎧 Private Citizens - Tony Tulathimutte. A little dated now that 2008 Bay Area culture is ubiquitous. Not as good as rejection.
• ⭐️ Oliver Burkeman - Meditations for Mortals. Medicine for control freaks.
• ⭐️ Rejection - Tony Tulathimutte. Repulsive, escalating trainwrecks I couldn't look away from, with some audible gasps and laughs.
• The Chronicles of DOOM - S.H. Fernando
• You Have Not Yet Head Your Favorite Song - Glenn MacDonald
• The Last Dream - Pedro Almodóvar. A messy collection with two standout stories: "The Visit", "The Life and Death of Miguel".
• The Overstory - Richard Powers
• 🤔 All Fours - Miranda July. Wished she just went on the road trip...
• Build - Tony Fadell
• Strange Pilgrims - Gabriel García Márquez
• Tennis: Five Essays - David Foster Wallace. Mindblowing ending to the IJ-lite juniors memoir; Michael Joyce piece was a far richer Challengers.
• Table for Two: Fictions - Amor Towles
• Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture - Kyle Chayka
• Training for the Uphill Athlete: A Manual for Mountain Runners and Ski Mountaineers - Steve House, Scott Johnston, Kilian Jornet
• Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death - Yoel Hoffman
• Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton
• The Making of Karateka - Jordan Mechner
• Raising Raffi: The First Five Years - Keith Gessen. A refreshing and funny view amid many baby books.

2023

I didn't get through many books this year, other than a few tomes. I picked up and dropped more books than ever, and skimmed lots of parenting and baby books. So it goes.

• The Guest - Emma Cline
• Every Man for Himself and God Against All - Werner Herzog
• Trust - Hernan Diaz
• The Crystal World - JG Ballard
• Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology - Chris Miller
• Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall - Zeke Faux
• ⭐️🎧 The Path to Power - Robert Caro
• 2666 - Roberto Bolaño
• Rise of the Data Cloud - Frank Slootman
• ⭐️ Into Thin Air - John Krakauer
• And Finally - Henry Marsh
• Sandworm - Andy Greenberg
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linus and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary - Eric S. Raymond.
• Overcoming Gravity: A Systematic Approach to Gymnastics and Bodyweight Strength - Steven Low
• Moonwalking with Einstein - Joshua Foer

2022

• Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant ChangeMarx, W. David - W. David Marx
• Continuous Discovery Habits - Teresa Torres
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
• Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future
• Stay True: A Memoir - Hu Hsu
• The Trail Runner’s Companion - Sarah Lavender Smith
• Heat 2 - Michael Mann
• Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software - Nadia Eghbal
• ⭐ This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race - Nicole Perlroth
• The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
• Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused - Melissa Maerz
• ⭐ Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players - Stefan Fatsis
• 💔 What About the Rest of Your Life - Sung Kim
• Exercised: How We Did Not Evolve to Exercise and What to Do About It - David E. Lieberman
• A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
• The Feral Detective - Johnathan Lethem
• ⭐ Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals - Oliver Burkeman
• Searching for the Sound - Phil Lesh
• The Duel - Anton Chekhov
• Sweat: A History of Exercise - Bill Hayes
• The Idiot - Elif Batuman
• Endurance - Alfred Lansing
• Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
• Seven Games: A Human History - Oliver Roeder
• Islands of Abandonment - Cal Flyn
• A Year with Swollen Appendages - Brian Eno
• Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism - Amanda Montell

2021

• ⭐🎧 Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty - Patrick Radden Keefe
• The History of Bones - John Lurie
• Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects - Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
• Leave Society - Tao Lin
• ⭐ Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking - Bill Buford
• 🎧 The Goal - Eliyahu M. Goldratt
• Blood, Sweat, and Pixels - Jason Schreier
• The Infinite Machine - Camila Russo
• Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World - Jane McGonigal
• Ask Iwata - Satoru Iwata
• Yearbook - Seth Rogen
• The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality - Blake Harris
• The Art of Thinking Clearly - Rolf Dobelli
• Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture - David Kushner
• Beloved - Toni Morrison
• The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance - Ron Chernow
• Higher Love: Climbing and Skiing the Seven Summits - Kit DesLauriers
• Underland: A Deep Time Journey - Robert Macfarlane

2020

• Sweat! The Illustrated History and Description of the Finnish Sauna, Russian Bania, Islamic Hammam, Japanese Mushi-Buro, Mexican Temescal, and American Indian & Eskimo Sweatlodge - Mikkel Aaland
• The PayPal Wars - Eric Jackson
• Payments Systems in the U.S. - Carol Coye Benson, Scott Loftesness, Russ Jones
• Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World - Oliver Bullough
• Wenger: My Life and Lessons in Red & White - Arsène Wenger
• Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno und die Wende - Felix Denk, Sven von Thülen
• Are Your Lights On? - Gerald Weinberg
• 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Hamilton W. Helmer
• Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games - Sid Meier
• Duveen: The Story of the Most Spectacular Art Dealer of All Time - S.N. Behrman
• Getting High in the Himalayas - James Ramsey
• ⭐ A Random Walk Down Wall Street - Burton G. Malkiel
• The Yoga of Eating: Transcending Diets and Dogma to Nourish the Natural Self - Charles Eisenstein
• 🎧 How to Be an Antiracist — Ibram X. Kendi
• Becoming Ageless - Strauss Zelnick
• Consider This - Chuck Palahniuk
• The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness - Robert S. de Ropp
• Paying with Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing - David S. Evans, Richard L. Schmalensee
• Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor - Layla F Saad
• Life, on the Line: A Chef's Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat - Grant Achatz, Nick Kokonas
• The Making of Prince of Persia - Jordan Mechner
• 🎧 You May Also Like - Tom Vanderbilt
• 🎧 Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America - Christopher Leonard
• Fragrant Harbour - John Lanchester
• Gamelife - Michael Clune
• Agency - William Gibson
• Imaginary Museums - Nicolette Polek
• The Quiet American - Graham Greene
• ⭐ Uncanny Valley - Anna Wiener
• The Extraordinary Adventures of Arséne Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar - Maurice Leblanc
• ⭐ Acid for the Children: A Memoir - Flea
• Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America - Christoper Wylie

2019

• The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham
• 🎧 Loserthink - Scott Adams
• Capital - John Lanchester
• ⭐ The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York - Robert Caro
• Autumn - Ali Smith
• The Wall - John Lanchester
• Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models: Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann
• Cherry - Nico Walker
• Normal People - Sally Rooney
• Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• ⭐ The Debt to Pleasure - Jonathan Lancaster
• Machines Like Me - Ian McEwan
• Finite and Infinite Games - James Carse
• Hippie - Paulo Coelho
• Can’t Hurt Me - David Goggins
• The Wisdom of Insecurity - Alan Watts
• 🎧 Digital Minimalism - Cal Newport
• ⭐ Less: A Novel - Andrew Sean Greer
• Small Fry - Lisa Brennan-Jobs
• 🎧 On the Move: A Life - Oliver Sacks
• Factfulness - Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola Rosling
• ⭐🎧 Arbitrary Stupid Goal - Tamara Shopsin
• Creative Selection - Ken Kocienda

2018

• 🎧 Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen
• Lessons for the 21st Century - Yuval Harari
• ⭐️🎧 Thinking in Bets - Annie Duke
• Raw: My Journey into the Wu-Tang - U-God
• Beyond Jogging: The Innerspaces of Running - Mike Spino
• ⭐️ Killing Commendatore - Haruki Murakami
• Draft No. 4 - John McPhee
• It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work - Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
• Thinking in Systems - Donella H Meadows
• Fashion Climbing: A Memoir with Photographs - Bill Cunningham
• The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit - Michael Finkel
• The Courage to be Disliked - Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga
• High Growth Handbook - Elad Gil
• Bruce Lee: A Life - Matthew Polly
• Springfield Confidential - Mike Reiss
• ⭐️ Mother American Night - John Perry Barlow
• ⭐️🎧 How to Change Your Mind - Michael Pollan
• Prediction Machines - Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb
• ⭐️ Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change - Tao Lin
• 🎧 Let My People Go Surfing - Yvon Chouinard
• Total Running - Jim Lilliefors
• The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life - Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson
• Gut - Giulia Enders, Jill Enders, and David Shaw
• ⭐️ By The Smoke and The Smell - Thad Vogel
• The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu
• Pot on the Fire: John Thorne
• 🎧 Vacationland - Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches- John Hodgman
• ⭐️ Endurance - Scott Kelly
• From Here to Eternity - Caitlin Doughty
• Polishing the Mirror - Ram Dass
• Sneakers - Howie Kahn
• Silence: In the Age of Noise - Erling Kagge

2017

• A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan
• 🎧Porcelain: A Memoir - Moby
• A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life - Waldman, Ayelet
• The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World - Scott Galloway
• 🎧 Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III - Greenfield, Robert
• Life is Not an Accident - Jay Williams
• Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
• ⭐️ Do No Harm - Henry Marsh
• The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman
• Day of the Locust - Nathaniel West
• Why Buddhism is True - Robert Wright
• ⭐️ Open - Andre Agassi
• Deep thinking - Gary Kasparov
• ⭐️ Insomniac City - Bill Hayes
• Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice - Matthew Syed
• ⭐️ Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
• Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - Philip K. Dick
• Catching the Big Fish - David Lynch
• Moonglow - Michael Chabon
• Black Edge - Sheelah Kolhatkar
• ⭐️ Happy City - Charles Montgomery
• The Attention Merchants - Tim Wu
• Algorithms to Live by - Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
• Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari
• ⭐️ Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari

2016

• ⭐️ How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big - Scott Adams
• Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang
• 🎧⭐️ How Music Got Free - Stephen Witt
• Misbehaving - Richard Thaler
• Chaos Monkeys - Antonio Garcia Marquez
• Disrupted - Dan Lyons
• ⭐️ Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• ⭐️ Heads - Jesse Jarnow
• A Gambler’s Anatomy - Jonathan Lethem
• Bill Walton - Back from the Dead
• Sprint - Jake Knapp
• From Impossible to Inevitable - Aaron Ross
• 🎧 Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life - William Finnegan
• Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art - Virginia Hefferman
• ⭐️🎧 Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem

2015

• ⭐️ 100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
• ⭐️ 🎧 Born Standing Up - Steve Martin
• Making Things Happen - Scott Birkun
• The Shallows - Nicolas Carr
• The Best Interface is No Interface - Golden Krishna
• Humans Need Not Apply - Jerry Kaplan
• Wind/Pinball - Haruki Murakami
• Digital Gold - Nathaniel Popper
• Solaris - Stanislaw Lem
• The Futurological Congress - Stanislaw Lem
• A Bone to Pick - Mark Bittman
• ⭐️ The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
• Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy - William Janeway
• 🎧 Elon Musk - Ashlee Vance
• Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank
• ⭐️ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• The Second Machine Age
• How We Got to Now - Steven Johnson
• Einstein - Walter Isaacson
• The Innovators - Walter Isaacson
• Dataclysm - Christian Rudder
• Playing to Win - David Sirlin
• Console Wars - Blake Harris

2014

• ⭐️ Fiasco - Stanislaw Lem
• High Rise - JG Ballard
• Cracking the PM Interview
• Where You Go, There You Are - Jon Kabat Zinn
• Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki - Haruki Murakami
• If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller - Italo Calvino
• Dissident Gardens - Jonathan Lethem
• Zero to One - Peter Thiel
• Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut
• Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
• Flash Boys - Michael Lewis
• The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
• Hooked - Nir Eyal
• Taipei - Tao Lin
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz
• Present Shock
• Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh
• Age of Context - Robert Scoble
• This is How You Lose Her - Junot Diaz
• Sam Walton: Made in America
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami
• Hot to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie

2013

• David and Goliath - Malcolm Gladwell
• Rework - Jason Fried
• The Innovator’s Dilemma - Clayton Christenson
• Eleven Rings - Phil Jackson
• ⭐️ Who Owns the Future? - Jaron Lanier
• 🤦‍♂️ 4 Hour Work Week
• Back to Blood - Tom Wolfe
• ⭐️ Mindset - Carol Dweck
• Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
• The Everything Store - Brad Stone
• The Circle - David Eggers
• Hatching Twitter - Nick Bilton
• ⭐️ How Music Works - David Byrne