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 |