Books

A list of books I’ve been reading. I tend to update it a few times a year. For my current stacks, see my Goodreads (opens in a new tab).

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

2023

• 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 Change Marx, 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