Bookshelf

Here is a list of all the books I've read or listened to since 2011.

***: Top 5%
**: Top 10%
*: Top 15%

2024

Dune by Frank Herbert

** When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut

Super Pumped by Mike Isaac

How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil

Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell

Leviathan Falls by James S. A. Corey

Tiamat's Wrath by James S. A. Corey

Persepolis Rising by James S. A. Corey

Babylon's Ashes by James S. A. Corey

Nemesis Games by James S. A. Corey

Cibola Burn by James S. A. Corey

Abaddon's Gate by James S. A. Corey

Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charlie Munger

2023

The Conservative Futurist by

My Struggle, Book 3 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

My Struggle, Book 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Caliban's War by James S. A. Corey

Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

Will to Battle by Ada Palmer

The Outsiders by William Thorndike Jr

In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

*** Things That Are by Amy Leach

** The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

The Drug Hunters by

Why Knowledge Matters by E. D. Hirsch Jr.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns

The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr

* The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Novelist as Vocation by Haruki Murakami

The Book of Why by Judea Pearl

The Song of the Cell by

Transformer by Nick Lane

The Higgs Boson and Beyond by Sean Carroll

Particle Physics for Non-Physicists by Steven Pollock

*** The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

Parfit by David Edmonds

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone

Quarantine by Greg Egan

The Science of Can and Can't by Chiara Marletto

The Courage to Grow by Laura Sandefer

*** Hold On To Your Kids by Gabor Maté, Gordon Neufeld

* The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch

Babel by RF Kuang

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

*** Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned by Kenneth Stanley, Joel Lehman

2022

A Shot to Save the World by Gregory Zuckerman

Paper Belt on Fire by Michael Gibson

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga

Why Materialism Is Baloney by Bernardo Kastrup

Editing Humanity by Kevin Davies

The Machiavellians by James Burnham

The Revelations by Erik Hoel

The Parent Trap by Nate Hilger

I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

Despair by Vladimir Nabokov

The Conscious Mind by David Chalmers

Galileo's Error by Philip Goff

* Talent by Tyler Cowen; Daniel Gross

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

How to Raise Successful People by Esther Wojcicki

The Second Kind of Impossible by Paul Steinhardt

*** The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

The Founders by Jimmy Soni

* Beautiful World Where Are You? by Sally Rooney

Project Hail Mary by Andy Wier

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

Tenth of December by George Saunders

*** The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante

The Machine Stops by E. M. Forester

The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier

The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen

2021

Where's My Flying Car? by J Storrs Hall

Minds Almost Meeting by Robin Hanson; Agnes Callard

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Influence Without Authority by

The Big Score by

** The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

The Sovereign Individual by

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen by

Charter Schools and Their Enemies by Thomas Sowell

** The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop

* Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto

Beyond the Hole in the Wall by Sugata Mitra

*** Seeing Like a State by James Scott

Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamed

Pastoralia by George Saunders

*** The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

Oh Crap! Potty Training by Jamie Glowacki

Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell

NurtureShock by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman

Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff

The Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

The Emotional Life of the Toddler by Alicia Lieberman

** A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson

Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

* Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

* The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin

** How Children Learn by John Holt

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Ageing: A Very Short Introduction by Nancy A. Pachana

2020

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

The Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori

Adam Smith: A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Berry

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters

Advertising: A Very Short Introduction by Winston Fletcher

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

Adolescence: A Very Short Introduction by Peter Smith

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer

The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga

Accounting: A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Nobes

Abolition: A Very Short Introduction by Richard Newman

Imperium by Robert Harris

How to Teach Your Baby to Read by Glenn Doman, Janet Doman

*** My Struggle, Book 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

** Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

* H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

** Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang

Boyd by Robert Coram

The First Salute by Barbara Tuchman

* Grant by Ron Chernow

Paul Simon by Robert Hilburn

Working by Robert Caro

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

Rising Sun by Michael Crichton

* Educated by Tara Westover

UBIK by Phillip K Dick

2019

The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt

Ward by John C McCrae

Human Acts by Han Kang

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 2 by Philip K Dick

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

Ringworld by Larry Niven

The Porpoise by Mark Haddon

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin

*** Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids by Bryan Caplan

The Montessori Toddler by Simone Davies

Teach Your Children Well by Madeline Levine

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

** Normal People by Sally Rooney

Trinity by Louisa Hall

Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina

Montessori from the Start by Paula Polk Lillard

How Children Succeed by Paul Tough

The Gift of Failure by Jessica Lahey

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre

iGen by Jean Twenge

Becoming Human by Michael Tomasello

Achtung Baby by Sara Zaske

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 1 by Philip K Dick

Exhalation by Ted Chaing

The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles Mann

** Taming the Sun by Varun Sivaram

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

*** East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

** Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky

** The English and Their History by Robert Tombs

** Churchill by Andrew Roberts

Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

** The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

* Christianity: The First 3000 Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

** Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

2018

* In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Knoxville: This Obscure Prismatic City by Jack Neeley

Submission by Michel Houellebeq

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

The Firm by John Grisham

Hawaii by James Michener

** The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

Letters of James Agee to Father Flye by James Agee

* Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

The World According to Garp by John Irving

* A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

Ficciones by Jorge Borges

Cathedral by Raymond Carver

The Coal Tattoo by Silas House

* Johnny Cash by Robert Hilburn

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh

* Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Janesville by Amy Goldstein

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

The Emissary by Yoko Tawada

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Bluebird Bluebird by Attica Locke

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

* Beauty Enough by Rosemary Palms

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

** Small Country by Gael Faye

* Tai-Pan by James Clavell

* Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance

Cape Fear by John D MacDonald

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Radical Markets by Glen Weyl, Eric Posner

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster

When Montezuma Met Cortes by Matthew Restall

1493 by Charles Mann

Mexico: A Biography of Power by Enrique Krauze

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

Improvement by Joan Silber

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

*** The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

Zama by Antonio di Benedetto

Can It Happen Here? by Cass Sunstein

* Patrimony by Philip Roth

Things that Can and Cannot be Said by John Cusack, Arundhati Roy

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

** The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

Daniel Boone by John Faragher

The All or Nothing Marriage by Eli Finkel

Our Towns by James Fallows, Deborah Fallows

* Stoner by John Williams

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

** Principles by Ray Dalio

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Polk by Walter Borneman

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

* Roots by Alex Haley

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

** A Death in the Family by James Agee

1491 by Charles Mann

Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward

*** Underground by Haruki Murakami

I Hear Your Voice by Young-Ha Kim

Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8 by Naoki Higashida

Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

*** The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami

*** Shogun by James Clavell

The Great Wave by Christopher Benfey

Embracing Defeat by John Dower

Artemis by Andy Weir

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

Supreme Commander by Seymour Morris Jr.

*** An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

** After the Quake by Haruki Murakami

Please Look After Mom by Kyungsook Shin

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

Ties by Domenico Starnone

** Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller

The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson, Kevin Simler

Martin Luther by Lyndal Roper

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

** Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

*** Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse

2017

The Ideas Industry by Daniel Drezner

Eyes on the Street by Robert Kanigel

Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford

Kingdom of the Wicked by Helen Dale

The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin

The Age of Em by Robin Hanson

Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Jefferson and the Rights of Man by Dumas Malone

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Valiant Ambition by Nathaniel Philbrick

Jefferson the Virginian by Dumas Malone

Texas by James Michener

Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson

A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Lone Star Nation by H. W. Brands

Secret Formula by Frederick Allen

Redeemer by Randall Balmer

*** Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor

Kissinger by Walter Isaacson

The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

* Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin

The Nix by Nathan Hill

Einstein by Walter Isaacson

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson

To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey

** Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chaing

Incarnations by Sunil Khilnani

Zodiac by Neal Stephenson

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari

Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell

Lust for Life by Irving Stone

The Elephant Keepers' Children by Peter Hoeg

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

My Struggle, Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

** Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thomson

* Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrammage by Haruki Murakami

The Unwinding by George Packer

Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks

*** The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

The Trial by Franz Kafka

*** Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

** The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu

Reputations by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

*** The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life by Philippe Girard

Seoul Man by Frank Aherns

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

** The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Midnight Rising by Tony Horwitz

** Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman

Intiution Pumps and Other Tools For Thinking by Daniel Dennett

Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft

2016

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

* I Am the Messenger by Markus Zusak

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

* My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

** A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon Jones

* The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

The Vivisector by Patrick White

** The Fall of Heaven by Andrew Scott Cooper

The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

** The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Fire Gospel by Michel Faber

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Albion's Seed by David Hacker Fisher

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris by Ian Kershaw

The Great Upheaval by Jay Winik

Embassytown by China Mieville

Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris

* Worm by John C McCrae

Who Gets What and Why by Alvin Roth

The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson

Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Passage of Power by Robert Caro

American Caesar by William Manchester

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

The City & the City by China Mieville

*** The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate by Robert Caro

The Shadow Throne by Django Wexler

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent by Robert Caro

Under the Skin by Michel Faber

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

2015

Three Worlds Collide by Eliezer Yudkowsky

* The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power by Robert Caro

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Mao II by Don DeLillo

The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu

The Power Broker by Robert Caro

Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick

*** Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine

Lincoln by David Herbert Donald

** The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times by H. W. Brands

** Truman by David McCullough

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ira Vogel

* Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Caesar: Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldworthy

*** A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

Medieval Iceland by Jesse Byock

Saturn's Children by Charles Stross

* Napoleon, A Life by Andrew Roberts

The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson

2014

The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge

The Martian by Andy Weir

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

Fordlandia by Greg Grandin

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

** The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee

The Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

* The Secret History by Donna Tartt

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Looking for Alaska by John Green

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

The Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick Dewitt

* The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

City of Thieves by David Benioff

The Thousand Names by Django Wexler

The Gunslinger by Stephen King

Emperor of Thorns by Mark Lawrence

King of Thorns by Mark Lawrence

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

* The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence

Mitosis by Brandon Sanderson

Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

2013

Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson

*** The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

*** Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thompson

The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson

The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson

The Family Trade by Charles Stross

The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson

Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

Catch Me If You Can by Frank Abagnale

* Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

Atonement by Ian McEwan

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

** The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

** The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle

The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger

2012

A Moment in the Sun by John Sayles

The Outcast by Sadie Jones

C by Tom McCarthy

** Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

* Men In Space by Tom McCarthy

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

*** Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

*** Straight Man by Richard Russo

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

Old Man's War by John Scalzi

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

* The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

** A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

2011

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

*** Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

#REF!

Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer