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Booklist

last updated: June 2024

Really, really good books:

Every once in a while, you stumble upon a book that is so well-written, so full of novel ideas, and so informative, that it literally expands the world you live in. I hope to keep finding more of these.

  • Titan: the Life of John D. Rockefeller
  • The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, and Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook
  • The Brothers Karamazov
  • The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
  • Alchemy: the Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
  • The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
  • The Mating Mind
  • The Lessons of History
  • Strong and Weak
  • Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders (compiled as a book, but can be read for free here)
  • The Master and His Emissary
  • Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
  • Chaos: Making a New Science

Good books:

Other books are great, and help you think about things differently, and teach you a lot, but maybe didn't find you at the right time in life, or just touched you in a smaller way.

  • The Art of Game Design
  • The Goal: a Process of Ongoing Improvement
  • Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises
  • Skin in the Game
  • Antifragile
  • Fooled by Randomness
  • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
  • Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World
  • How to Read a Book
  • A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
  • The Consuming Instinct
  • Memories, Dreams, Reflections
  • The Alchemy of Finance
  • 48 laws of Power
  • What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars
  • 12 Rules for Life
  • Live-wired
  • Improv Wisdom
  • The Triple Package

Fiction I'd recommend:

  • Exhalation: Stories (or most anything by Ted Chang)
  • Brothers Karamazov
  • Fire Upon the Deep
  • The Artemis Fowl series (childhood favorite)
  • Stories of Your Life and Others (again, Chang)
  • Grapes of Wrath
  • The Interpreter of Maladies
  • What's Mine is Mine (George MacDonald)
  • The Foundation series
  • The Paper Menagerie, and other short stories
  • The Three Body Problem series

And, other books I've read (or mostly read), but didn't feel too strongly about. Happy to share my opinion if you're planning to read some of these - just because they're down here doesn't mean they're not good books:

  • Plain Talk: Lessons from a Business Maverick
  • House of Morgan
  • Quantum
  • Very Important People
  • Start-up Nation: the Story of Israel's Economic Miracle
  • Benjamin Franklin: an American Life
  • Principles: Life and Work
  • What Hedge Funds Really Do
  • Liar's Poker
  • Zero to One
  • The Wright Brothers
  • The Charisma Myth
  • Finite and Infinite Games