I read a bunch too. Here are some of the books I’ve read (and recently, with dates).
2025
- John Seabrook, The Song
Machine: Inside the Hit Factory (March 2024) - Michael Lewis, Liar’s
Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street (February 2025) - Alex Capri, Techno-Nationalism:
How It’s Reshaping Trade, Geopolitics and Society (February 2025) - Hanno Sauer, The Invention
of Good and Evil: A World History of Moralityy (January 2025)
2024
- Malcolm Gladwell, Talking
to Strangers:
What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know (December 2024) - Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Craig Mundie,
Genesis:
Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit (December 2024) - Blair Jackson, David Gans, This Is
All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead (November 2024) - Robert Greene, 48 Laws of
Power (November 2024) - Michael Shellenberger, San
Fransicko: Why
Progressives Ruin Cities (October 2024) - Liv Albert, Greek
Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes Handbook (September 2024) - Andrew Zimbalist, Circling the
Bases: Essays on the Challenges and Prospects of the Sports Industry (September 2024) - Ruy Teixeira, John B. Judis, Where
Have All the Democrats
Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes (September 2024) - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An
Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States: ReVisioning History (August 2024) - Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing
About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (August 2024) - John Hagel III, The
Journey Beyond Fear: Leverage the Three Pillars of Positivity to Build Your Success (July 2024) - James Lovelock, Novacene: The
Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (July 2024) - Ben Horowitz, The Hard
Things About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (June 2024) - Renee DiResta, Invisible
Rulers: The
People Who Turn Lies into Reality (June 2024) - Fred Turner, From
Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital
Utopianism (May 2024) - David Epstien, Range: Why
Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (May 2024) - Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge:
The Final Edition: Improving
Decisions About Money, Health, and the Environment (April 2024) - Yascha Mounk, The Identity
Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time (April 2024) - Hunter S. Thompson, Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas (April 2024) - Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry of the
Future (March 2024) - Neil MacGregor, History of the
World in 100 Objects (February 2024) - Ed Conway, Material
World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization (January 2024)
2023
- Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
(January 2024) - Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear, Border Wars: Inside
Trump’s Assault on Immigration (December 2023) - Jesse Jarnow, Heads: A
Biography
of Psychedelic America (December 2023) - Daniel Oberhaus, Extraterrestrial
Languages (December 2023) - Chris Miller, Chip War:
The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (December 2023) - Curtis Chin, Everything I
Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant: A Memoir (December 2023) - Tom Standage, Uncommon
Knowledge: The Economist Explains (November 2023) - Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of
Love: 49 Views of San Francisco (November 2023) - Eric Weiner, The
Geography of Genius: A Search for the World’s Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon
Valley (October 2023) - John Doe, More Fun in the New
World: The Unmaking and Legacy of L.A. Punk (October 2023) - Shery Turkle, Alone
Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (September 2023) - William Golding, Lord of the
Flies (September 2023) - Jonathan Taplin, The
End of
Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto
(September 2023) - Dan Charnas, The Big
Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (August 2023) - Malcolm Harris, Palo
Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (July 2023) - John Markoff, Whole Earth:
The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (June 2023) - David Brion Davis, Inhuman
Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (June 2023) - Paul Collier, Exodus: How
Migration is Changing Our World (May 2023) - Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test (March 2023) - Lincoln Mitchell, San
Francisco Year Zero: Political Upheaval, Punk Rock and a Third-Place Baseball Team (February 2023) - Patti Smith, Just Kids (February
2023) - Karen Bakker, The
Sounds of Life (January 2023)
2022
- Brian Christian, The
Alignment
Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values (October 2022) - Ayn Rand, Atlas
Shrugged (October 2022) – It took me three tries over 20+ years to finish this wretched book - Chris Ategeka, The
Unintended Consequences of Technology: Solutions, Breakthroughs, and the Restart We Need (May 2022) - Jimmy Soni, The
Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley (April 2022) - David Christian, Origin
Story: A Big History of Everything (March 2022) - Ernest Cline, Ready Player
One (February 2022) - Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
(January 2022)
2021
- Jonathan Tapli, The Magic Years:
Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life (December 2021) - Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, The Age of AI and our Human
Future (November 2021) - Bru Srinivasan, Americana:
A 400-Year History of American Capitalism (October 2021) - Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse
Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (September 2021) - David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable
Earth: Life After Warming (August 2021) - Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix
(August 2021) - J. D. Vance, Hillbilly
Elegy: A
Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (July 2021) - James Lovelock, Novacene: The
Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (June 2021) - Kevin Scott, Reprogramming
the American Dream: From Rural America to Silicon Valley – Making AI Serve Us All (June 2021) - Heather McGhee, The Sum of
Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (May 2021) - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile:
Things That Gain from Disorder (May 2021) - Phil Lesh, Searching for
the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (April 2021) - Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, Jazz: A History of America’s
Music (January 2021) - George Orwell, 1984 (January 2021)
- Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence:
Paths, Dangers, Strategies (January 2021)
2020
- Alan Krueger, Rockonomics
(December 2020) - Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
(December 2020) - Binyamin Appelbaum, The Economists’
Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (December 2020) - John Tusa, On Board:
The Insider’s Guide to Surviving Life in the Boardroom (December 2020) - Nathalia Holt, Rise of
the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars (November 2020) - Paul Brest and Hal Harvey, Money Well Spent: A
Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy (November 2020) - E. O. Wilson, Tales from the Ant World (October
2020) - Rebecca Henderson, Reimagining
Capitalism in a World on Fire (September 2020) - Seth Shostak, Confessions
of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (September 2020) - Aldous Huxley, Brave New
World (August 2020) - David Byrne, How Music Works
(August 2020) - Ed Ward, The History of
Rock & Roll, Volume 2: 1964–1977: The Beatles, the Stones, and the Rise of Classic Rock (August
2020) - Glen Weyl and Eric Posner, Radical
Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society (July 2020) - Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New
Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers (July 2020) - Condoleezza Rice and Amy Zegart, Political
Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity (June 2020) - Douglas Adams, The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (May 2020) - David Callahan, The
Givers: Money, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age (April 2020)
2019
- Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne, Tools and Weapons: The
Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age (December 2019) - E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops
(October 2019) - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine
(July 2019) - Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a
New Machine (June 2019) - Ken Auletta, World War 3.0 :
Microsoft and Its Enemies (May 2019) - Rob Reich, Just
Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (April 2019) - Anand Giridharadasm, Winners
Take All: The
Elite Charade of Changing the World (March 2019) - Kai-Fu Lee, AI
Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (March 2019) - Jaron Lanier, Dawn of
the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality (March 2019) - Richard Florida, The
New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the
Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It (March 2019) - Joel Selvin, Altamont: The
Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day (February 2019) - Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk
(February 2019) - Elizabeth Kolbert, The
Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (February 2019) - P.D. James, The Children of
Men (January 2019)
2018
- Douglas R. Hofstadter, I
Am a Strange Loop December 2018) - Kevin Mitnick, Ghost
in the
Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (November 2018) - Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford, The Phoenix Project:
A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win (August 2018) - Michael Lewis, The
Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World (August 2018) - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit
451
(July 2018) - Tim O’Reilly, WTF?: What’s the
Future and Why It’s Up to Us (July 2018) - Jeffrey Toobin, American Heiress:
The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst (June 2018) - Ed Ward, The History of Rock
& Roll, Volume 1: 1920-1963(June 2018) - Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow:
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (April 2018) - Yuval Noah Harari, Homo
Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (March 2018) - John Doe, Under the Big Black
Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk (March 2018) - Richard Florida, The
Rise of the Creative Class (March 2018)
Older
- Chris Anderson, The Long Tail
- Anonymous (Joe Klein), Primary Colors: A Novel
of Politics - Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational
- Ryan Avent, The
Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century - Nicholson Baker, Vox
- James Bamford, Body
of Secrets:
Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency - James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace:
A Report on NSA, America’s Most Secret Agency - Mahzarin R. Banaji, Blindspot: Hidden
Biases of Good People - John Battelle, The
Search: How
Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture - Sharon Begley, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain
- Lewis Black, Me of LIttle Faith
- Bill Bradley, Time Present, Time
Past: A Memoir - Erik Brynjolfsson, The
Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies - Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
- Carl Bernstein, A Woman In Charge
- Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians at the Gate: The
Fall of RJR Nabisco - Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter
- Stephen Carmichael and Susan Stoddard, Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro
- Nicholas Carr, The Big
Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google - Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
- Lewis Carroll, Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland - Graydon Carter, What We’ve Lost
- Ram Charan, Know-How
- Brian Christian, Algorithms
to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions - Brian Christian, Most
Human Human - Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or
Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance - Richard Clarke, Against
All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror - Richard Clarke and Robert Knake, Cyber War: The Next
Threat to National Security and What to Do About It - Thurston Clarke, The Last Campaign
- Jim Collins, Good to Great
- Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fall
- Wilkie Collins, The Woman
in White - Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
- Tyler Cowen, The
Great
Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually)
Feel Better - George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War
- Lanny Davis, Truth To
Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself: Notes from My White House Education - John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience
- John Dean, Worse than Watergate
- Ronald V. Dellums and H. Lee Halterman, Lying Down With the
Lions - Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
- Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
- Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Jonathan Woetzel, No Ordinary
Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trend - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The
Sign of the Four - Arthur Conan Doyle, Memoirs
of Sherlock
Holmes - Carol S. Dweck, Mindset:
The New
Psychology of Success - William Fleckenstein, Greenspan’s Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve
- James Fallows, The Obama
Presidency, Explained - John Fialka, War by Other
Means: Economic Espionage in America - Dave Foreman, Confessions of
an
Eco-Warrior - Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded
- Thomas Friedman, The
World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century - Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The
Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success
- Malcolm Gladwell, The
Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference - Sharna Goldseker, Generation
Impact: How Next Gen Donors Are Revolutionizing Giving - Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford, The
Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance - Laurence Gonzales, Deep
Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why - Brian Greene, The
Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory - The Brothers Grimm, Grimm’s Fairy Tales
- Michael Hammer and James A. Champy,
Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution - Robert Harris, Fatherland
- Sam Harris, The End of Faith
- Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick
- John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change
- Peter Hershberg, Dale Dougherty, and Marcia Kadanoff, Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing Our
Cities - Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of
Lightning:
Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age - Christopher Hitchins, God Is Not Great
- Christopher Hitchins, No One Left to Lie to
- Bryce G. Hoffman, American
Icon: Alan
Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company - Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams
- Kenneth Kamler, Surviving the
Extremes: A Doctor’s Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance - Guy Kawasaki, Reality Check
- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
- Kevin Kelly, Out Of
Control: The Rise Of Neo-biological Civilization - Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
- Mahan Khalsa, Let’s Get Real
- Jon Krakauer, Eiger Dreams:
Ventures Among Men and Mountains - Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
- Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air:
A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster - Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three
Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead - Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal
- Paul Krugman, The Great
Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century - Paul Krugman, Peddling
Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations - Paul Krugman, The
Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 - Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the
Future? - Jaron Lanier, You are not a Gadget
- Edward Lazarus, Closed
Chambers: The First Eyewitness Account of the Epic Struggles Inside the Supreme Court - Lawrence Lessig, Code:
And Other Laws Of Cyberspace - Lawrence Lessig, The
Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics
- Steven Levy, Crypto: How
the Code Rebels Beat the Government–Saving Privacy in the Digital Age - Michael Lewis, The Big Short
- Michael Lewis, Flash Boys
- Charelele Li and Josh Bernoff, Groundswell
- Martin Lindstorm, Brandwashed:
Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy - Roger Lowenstein, When
Genius Failed:
The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management - Edward Lucas, The
Snowden Operation: Inside the West’s Greatest Intelligence Disaster - Frank Luntz, Words That Work
- Marcus Luttrell, Lone Survivor
- Charles Mann, 1493
- John Markoff, What
the
Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer - Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen
- Robert McNamara, In
Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam - Robyn Meredith, The Elephant and the Dragon
- Gabriel Metcalf, Democratic
by Design: How Carsharing, Co-ops, and Community Land Trusts Are Reinventing America - Jack Miles, God: A Biography
- Kevin Mitnick, The Art of Deception
- Kevin Mitnick, Ghost in the Wires
- Enrico Moretti, The
Geography of Jobs - Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now
- Annalee Newitz, Autonomous
- Joseph Nye, The
Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone - George Orwell, Animal Farm
- Kerry Patterson, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything
- Kevin Phillips, American
Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century - Kevin Phillips, The
Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath - Gregory Phister, In Search of Clusters: The Ongoing Battle in Lowly Parallel Computing
- Thomas Piketty, Capital
in the 21st Century - Kevin Phillips, Bad Money
- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
- Howard Rheingold, Virtual Communities
- James Risen, State of War
- Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The
Making of the Hydrogen Bomb - Randall Robinson, The Debt :
What America Owes to Blacks - Douglas Rushkoff, Coercion:
Why We Listen to What “They” Say - Tsutomo Shimomura and John Markoff, Takedown: The
Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick by the Man Who Did It - Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus
- Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes:
The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity - Joe Simpson, Touching the Void
- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
- Robert Louis Stevenson, The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
- James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of the Crowds
- Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine
- Ron Suskind, The Price
of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neil - David Talbot, Season of
the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan
- Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Wikinomics
- Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
- Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just for Fun: The
Story of an Accidental Revolutionary - Tim Weiner, Legacy Of Ashes
- H. G. Wells, The Time
Machine - H. G. Wells, The War of the
Worlds - Jack Weatherford, The History
of Money - Simon Winchester, Pacific:
Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the
Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers - Simon Winthrop, How to
Be a Mentalist: Master the Secrets Behind the Hit TV Show - Bob Woodward, The Agenda:
Inside the Clinton White House - Bob Woodward, Maestro:
Greenspans Fed and The American Boom - Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack
- Bob Woodward, State of Denial:
Bush at War, Part III - Bob Woodward, The War
Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 - Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith, iWoz: Computer
Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It - Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower
- Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The
Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern
World - Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World
- Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States