This is my digital bookshelf, holding new books, books I'm about to read, and favorites from the past, in no particular order. Asterisks mark books that come with my highest possible recommendation.
Recent
Up Next
- The Elements of Poker
- BetterWithout.ai
- 1883 (TV show)
- The Fifth Risk
Foundations
Know these books and you will know my heart (or my mind, anyway).
- The Art of Learning*
- Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell translation) *
- Meaningness
- The Inner Game of Tennis
- Impro
- Convict Conditioning
- The Nature of Order
- Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow
- The Elephant in the Brain
Read to save decades of suffering!
- Born To Run*
- Treat Your Own (Back, Knee, Neck, Hip, Shoulder)
- The Mind Illuminated
Blogs
Fiction
Epics
- Shantaram*
- Papillon*
- Cryptonomicon
- Bone (the graphic novel)*
- East of Eden
- War and Peace
- Dune
- Hitchhiker's Guide*
Scifi
- Blindsight
- Seveneves
- Old Man's War
- Redshirts
- Snow Crash*
- Pastwatch
- I, Robot
- Diaspora*
- Delta-V
- Daemon/Freedom*
Fantasy
- The Kingkiller Chronicles*
- The Slow Regard of Silent Things
- The Mistborn Trilogy
Life
- Fault in Our Stars
- Joy Luck Club
Young Adult
- Bartimeus Trilogy
- Mortal Engines
- Alex Rider
- Artemis Fowl
- Anything by Gordon Korman (for young boys)
- Ender's Game
Nonfiction
Biography-ish
- West with the Night
- The World of Leonardo
- The Man who Solved the Market
- The Art of doing Science and Engineering
- Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!*
- The Right Stuff
- The Power Broker
- Endurance (Shackleton)
- Eating Bitterness
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb*
Journalism/Ideas
- Flash Boys
- The Undoing Project
- Freakonomics
- Antifragile
- Omnivore
- Game Changer (Alpha Zero)
Philosophy/Ideas
- Finite and Infinite Games
- Thus Spake Zarathustra
- Metaphors We Live By
- Slouching towards Bethlehem
- The Life and Death of Great American Cities
Science
- A Thousand Brains*
- Immune*
- A New Kind of Science
Textbooks
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics
- Gamelin, Advanced Calculus
- Introduction to Java Programming
- Six Ideas that Shaped Physics
- Landau, Mechanics (and others)
- Asimov's Chronology of the World
- Asimov's Physics
- Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns
Other Media
Shows
- Friday Night Lights
- The Wire
Podcasts
- This American Life
- Serial
Music
(tiny, unrepresentative sample!)
- Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas
- The Beatles
- Jose Gonzalez
- Red Hot Chili Peppers