Bookshelf
Last updated: January 2020
This was inspired by Patrick Collison’s bookshelf and Nassim Taleb’s description of Umberto Eco’s library at the beginning of The Black Swan.
I don’t want this page to give an inflated impression so I need to admit this up front: I’ve only read a quarter these books. Maybe. That is probably generous.
This page contains most of the books on my physical bookshelf, my kindle, and my Amazon wishlist. I’ve moved a couple times as an adult and done a few purges, so many of the books I bought earlier in life aren’t listed. I haven’t included textbooks, children’s books, travel books, cookbooks, or anything I found too embarassing.
I’m organizing my books broadly by subject because I hope it helps you navigate. It’s also roughly how I aspire to organize my actual bookshelf, which is usually in a disordered approximation of these lists. Some of the books could live in multiple categories. This is entirely my own categorization, i.e. non-standard.
All sections are organized alphabetically by author’s first name.
Business and Investing
Title |
Author |
Predictable Revenue |
Aaron Ross |
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind |
Al Ries |
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life |
Alice Schroeder |
High Output Management |
Andy Grove |
Only the Paranoid Survive |
Andy Grove |
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers |
Ben Horowitz |
The Intelligent Investor |
Benjamin Graham |
Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist |
Brad Feld |
The Everything Store |
Brad Stone |
A Random Walk Down Wall Street |
Burton Malkiel |
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die |
Chip Heath and Dan Heath |
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail |
Clayton Christensen |
The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth |
Clayton Christensen |
Competing Against Luck |
Clayton Christensen |
The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures |
Dan Roam |
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement |
Eliyahu M. Goldratt |
The Lean Startup |
Eric Ries |
Magic Box Paradigm: A Framework for Startup Acquisitions |
Ezra Roizen |
Crossing the Chasm |
Geoffrey Moore |
The Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles, and the Efficient Market Fallacy |
George Cooper |
The Art of the Start |
Guy Kawasaki |
Simple Habits for Complex Times |
Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnston |
Good to Great |
Jim Collins |
Built to Last |
Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras |
The Essays of Warren Buffett |
Lawrence A. Cunningham |
Kaizen: The Key To Japan’s Competitive Success |
Masaaki Imai |
Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance |
Michael Porter |
Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors |
Michael Porter |
The First 90 Days |
Michael Watkins |
Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High |
Patterson Greeny McMillan Switzler |
Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite |
Paul Arden |
It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be |
Paul Arden |
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done |
Peter F. Drucker |
The Practice of Management |
Peter F. Drucker |
Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger |
Peter Kaufman |
One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market |
Peter Lynch |
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization |
Peter M. Senge |
Zero to One |
Peter Thiel |
Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings |
Philip A. Fisher |
Principles: Life and Work |
Ray Dalio |
Big Debt Crises |
Ray Dalio |
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters |
Richard Rumelt |
Irrational Exuberance |
Robert Shiller |
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In |
Roger Fisher and William Ury |
Marketing Imagination |
Theodore Levitt |
In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies |
Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman |
Blue Ocean Strategy |
W. Chan Kim |
On Becoming a Leader |
Warren Bennis |
Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor |
Warren Bennis and Daniel Goleman and James O’Toole |
Economics
Title |
Author |
Does Education Matter?: Myths About Education and Economic Growth |
Alison Wolf |
Give People Money |
Annie Lowrey |
Economic Fables |
Ariel Rubinstein |
Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism |
Arthur M. Diamond |
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages |
Carlota Perez |
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty |
Daron Acemoglu |
The Road to Serfdom |
F. A. Hayek |
Economics: The User’s Guide |
Ha-Joon Chang |
Progress and Poverty |
Henry George |
The Economy of Cities |
Jane Jacobs |
Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy |
Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake |
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy |
Joseph A. Schumpeter |
The Ultimate Resource 2 |
Julian L. Simon |
Essentials of Game Theory |
Kevin Leyton-Brown |
The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy |
Mariana Mazzucato |
The Mason Gaffney Reader: Essays on Solving the Unsolvable |
Mason Gaffney |
Capitalism and Freedom |
Milton Friedman |
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics |
Richard Thaler |
Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction |
Robert C. Allen |
How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness |
Russ Roberts |
Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives |
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir |
Enlightenment Now |
Steven Pinker |
The Incredible Bread Machine |
Susan Love Brown |
The Undercover Economist |
Tim Harford |
Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals |
Tyler Cowen |
The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves |
W. Brian Arthur |
Science and Engineering
Title |
Author |
Entropy: The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth |
Arieh Ben-Naim |
Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies |
Cesar Hidalgo |
The Mathematical Theory of Communication |
Claude E. Shannon |
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea |
Daniel C. Dennett |
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World |
David Deutsch |
The Diversity of Life: With a New Preface |
Edward O. Wilson |
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History |
Elizabeth Kolbert |
What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches |
Erwin Schrödinger |
Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters |
Freemason Dyson |
Chaos: Making a New Science |
James Gleick |
The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood |
James Gleick |
An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise |
John R. Pierce |
An Introduction to Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics |
Keith Stowe |
Biodiversity: An Introduction |
Kevin J. Gaston and John I. Spicer |
The Evolution of Culture |
Leslie A White |
The Quark and the Jaguar |
Murray Gell-Mann |
The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life |
Nick Lane |
Four Laws That Drive the Universe |
Peter Atkins |
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning |
Peter Brown |
The Selfish Gene |
Richard Dawkins |
The Blind Watchmaker |
Richard Dawkins |
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! |
Richard Feynman |
On Social Structure and Science |
Robert K. K. Merton |
The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself |
Sean Carroll |
Math and Computer Science
Title |
Author |
Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning |
A. D. Aleksandrov |
The C Programming Language |
Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie |
The Little Schemer |
Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen and Gerald J. Sussman |
Speed Mathematics Simplified |
Edward Stoddard |
Elements |
Euclid |
Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension |
Matt Parker |
What Is Mathematics? An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods |
Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins |
Some Abstract Algebra: A Primer and Interactive Workbook |
Richard Grassl |
Book of Proof |
Richard Hammack |
Understanding Analysis |
Stephen Abbott |
Philosophy
Title |
Author |
The Bhagavad Gita |
Anonymous |
In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon |
Bhikkhu Bodhi |
Basic Writings of Nietzsche |
Friedrich Nietzsche |
The Portable Nietzsche |
Friedrich Nietzsche |
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals |
John Gray |
Sophie’s World |
Jostein Gaarder |
The Prophet |
Kahlil Gibran |
Popper Selections |
Karl Popper |
All Life is Problem Solving |
Karl Popper |
Philosophical Investigations |
Ludwig Wittgenstein |
Meditations |
Marcus Aurelius |
What I Believe: 13 Eminent People of Our Time Argue for Their Philosophy of Life |
Mark Booth |
The Foucault Reader |
Michel Foucault |
The Book of Five Rings |
Miyamoto Musashi |
Plato: Complete Works |
Plato |
Mind-body Problem |
Rebecca Goldstein |
The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness |
Reinhold Niebuhr |
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values |
Robert M. Pirsig |
On the Happy Life |
Seneca |
On the Shortness of Life |
Seneca |
Letters from a Stoic |
Seneca |
Leviathan |
Thomas Hobbes |
Creative Work
Title |
Author |
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life |
Anne Lamott |
The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers |
Christopher Vogler |
The Design of Everyday Things |
Don Norman |
Visual Explanations |
Edward Tufte |
Envisioning Information |
Edward Tufte |
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering |
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. |
Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences |
Janis Bell |
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) |
Joseph Campbell |
The Artist’s Way: 25th Anniversary Edition |
Julia Cameron |
Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity |
Ray Bradbury |
Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting |
Robert McKee |
344 Questions: The Creative Person’s Do-It-Yourself Guide to Insight, Survival, and Artistic Fulfillment |
Stefan G. Bucher |
On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft |
Stephen King |
Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability |
Steve Krug |
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life |
Twyla Tharp |
Play-Making A Manual of Craftsmanship |
William Archer |
On Writing Well |
William Zinsser |
General Non-Fiction
Title |
Author |
The World Without Us |
Alan Weisman |
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance |
Angela Duckworth |
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End |
Atul Gawande |
Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science |
Atul Gawande |
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right |
Atul Gawande |
The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking |
Barbara Minto |
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin |
Benjamin Franklin |
Daring Greatly |
Brené Brown |
So Good They Can’t Ignore You |
Cal Newport |
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success |
Carol S. Dweck |
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. |
Clayborne Carson |
How to Win Friends & Influence People |
Dale Carnegie |
Predictably Irrational |
Dan Ariely |
The Talent Code |
Daniel Coyle |
Thinking, Fast and Slow |
Daniel Kahneman |
The Spell of the Sensuous |
David Abram |
Getting Things Done |
David Allen |
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World |
David Epstein |
Thinking in Systems: A Primer |
Donella H. Meadows |
Creativity, Inc. |
Ed Catmull |
Diffusion of Innovations |
Everett M. Rogers |
Talent Is Overrated |
Geoff Colvin |
The Wisdom of the Ego |
George Vaillant |
Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study |
George Vaillant |
Adaptation to Life |
George Vaillant |
An Introduction to General Systems Thinking |
Gerald M. Weinberg |
Factfulness |
Hans Rosling |
The Death and Life of Great American Cities |
Jane Jacobs |
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies |
Jared Diamond |
Trees in Paradise: A California History |
Jared Farmer |
Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly |
John Kay |
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief |
Jordan B. Peterson |
Moonwalking with Einstein |
Joshua Foer |
Gandhi, An Autobiography |
M.K Gandhi |
Outliers: The Story of Success |
Malcolm Gladwell |
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work |
Mason Currey |
Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World |
Michele Gelfand |
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience |
Mihaly Csikszentmihaly |
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder |
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
The Black Swan |
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
Fooled by Randomness |
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
The Now Habit |
Neil Fiore |
Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela |
Nelson Mandela |
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World |
Niall Ferguson |
Understanding Beliefs |
Nils J. Nilsson |
Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? |
Philip E. Tetlock |
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction |
Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner |
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion |
Robert Cialdini |
Mastery |
Robert Greene |
Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries |
Safi Bahcall |
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change |
Stephen Covey |
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything |
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J Dubner |
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires |
Tim Wu |
Man’s Search for Meaning |
Viktor E. Frankl |
Steve Jobs |
Walter Isaacson |
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind |
Yuval Noah Harari |
Narrative
Title |
Author |
The Stranger |
Albert Camus |
Brave New World |
Aldous Huxley |
Alice Munro’s Best: Selected Stories |
Alice Munro |
Henry and June |
Anais Nin |
Close Range: Wyoming Stories |
Annie Proulx |
A Clockwork Orange |
Anthony Burgess |
The Little Prince |
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry |
2001: A Space Odyssey |
Arthur C. Clarke |
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection |
Arthur Conan Doyle |
Atlas Shrugged |
Ayn Rand |
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn |
Betty Smith |
Infinite Jest |
David Foster Wallace |
Snow Falling on Cedars |
David Guterson |
White Noise |
Don DeLillo |
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy |
Douglas Adams |
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
Edwin A. Abbott |
Musashi |
Eiji Yoshikawa |
Swag |
Elmore Leonard |
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway |
Ernest Hemingway |
The Old Man and the Sea |
Ernest Hemingway |
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories |
Flannery O’Connor |
Crime and Punishment |
Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
Faust |
Goethe |
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle |
Haruki Murakami |
Norwegian Wood |
Haruki Murakami |
Tropic of Cancer |
Henry Miller |
Siddhartha |
Hermann Hesse |
The Story of King Arthur and His Knights |
Howard Pyle |
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas |
Hunter S. Thompson |
Nine Stories |
J. D. Salinger |
The Catcher in the Rye |
J. D. Salinger |
Slouching Towards Bethlehem |
Joan Didion |
The Year of Magical Thinking |
Joan Didion |
The Forever War |
Joe Haldeman |
Bad Blood |
John Carreyrou |
A Confederacy of Dunces |
John Kennedy Toole |
Rabbit, Run |
John Updike |
The Corrections |
Jonathan Franzen |
Catch-22 |
Joseph Heller |
Jules Verne Collection, 33 Works |
Jules Verne |
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest |
Ken Kesey |
Timequake |
Kurt Vonnegut |
Welcome to the Monkey House |
Kurt Vonnegut |
Cat’s Cradle |
Kurt Vonnegut |
Slaughterhouse-Five |
Kurt Vonnegut |
100 Years of The Best American Short Stories |
Lorrie Moore |
The Handmaid’s Tale |
Margaret Atwood |
The Complete Works of Mark Twain |
Mark Twain |
The Eden Express |
Mark Vonnegut |
House of Leaves |
Mark Z. Danielewski |
The Pillowman |
Martin McDonagh |
Liar’s Poker |
Michael Lewis |
Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt |
Michael Lewis |
The Undoing Project |
Michael Lewis |
The Master and Margarita |
Mikhail Bulgakov |
The Unbearable Lightness of Being |
Milan Kundera |
Snow Crash |
Neal Stephenson |
Hatching Twitter |
Nick Bilton |
The Naked and the Dead |
Norman Mailer |
The Name of the Wind |
Patrick Rothfuss |
The Alchemist |
Paulo Coelho |
Shoe Dog |
Phil Knight |
Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick |
Philip K. Dick |
Goodbye, Columbus |
Philip Roth |
Portnoy’s Complaint |
Philip Roth |
The Illustrated Man |
Ray Bradbury |
Fahrenheit 451 |
Ray Bradbury |
Herzog |
Saul Bellow |
The Adventures Of Augie March |
Saul Bellow |
The Orchid Thief |
Susan Orlean |
The Crying of Lot 49 |
Thomas Pynchon |
Gravity’s Rainbow |
Thomas Pynchon |
The Right Stuff |
Tom Wolfe |
The Bonfire of the Vanities |
Tom Wolfe |
In Cold Blood |
Truman Capote |
Breakfast at Tiffany’s |
Truman Capote |
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia |
Ursula K. Le Guin |
The Left Hand of Darkness |
Ursula K. Le Guin |
A House for Mr. Biswas |
V. S. Naipaul |
Lolita |
Vladimir Nabokov |
Collected Stories |
William Faulkner |
As I Lay Dying |
William Faulkner |
Poetry
Title |
Author |
Howl |
Allen Ginsberg |
Bob Dylan: Lyrics, 1962-1985 |
Bob Dylan |
The Singing |
C. K. Williams |
Repair |
C. K. Williams |
Love is a Dog From Hell |
Charles Bukowski |
The Last Night of the Earth Poems |
Charles Bukowski |
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses |
Charles Bukowski |
Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs |
Leonard Cohen |
Poems, 1965-1975 |
Seamus Heaney |
Ariel |
Sylvia Plath |
The Collected Poems |
Wallace Stevens |
Selected Poems |
William Carlos Williams |