Bookshelf

Last updated June 21, 2019

My bookshelf is a work in progress. I tend to read many books in parallel, but occasionally I'll pick up something that's so captivating I can't put it down until it's finished. Books in bold are so fantastic they shaped who I am today. If you want to read some, read those. As always, I'd love to hear from you if you have any recommendations.

The Dream Machine — M. Mitchell Waldrop

Born a Crime — Trevor Noah

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World — Cal Newport

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon — Robert Kurson

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft — Stephen King

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals — Tyler Cowen

Deep Learning — Ian Goodfellow

Shoe Dog — Phil Knight

Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson

Principles — Ray Dalio

How to Lie with Statistics — Darrell Huff

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! — Richard Feynman

Ready Player One — Ernest Cline

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies — Jared Diamond

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die — Chip Heath

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies — Nick Bostrom

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind — Yuval Noah Harari

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age — Leslie Berlin

A Mathematician's Apology — G.H. Hardy

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives — Leonard Mlodinow

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism — Arun Sundararajan

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism — Olivia Fox Cabane

The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company — Steve Blank

Hit Refresh — Satya Nadella

The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — Scott Galloway

Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel — Tom Wainwright

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution — Walter Isaacson

Finite and Infinite Games — James P. Carse

The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup — Noam Wasserman

The Kind Worth Killing — Peter  Swanson

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation — Jon Gertner

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values — Robert M. Pirsig

The Three Body Problem — Liu Cixin

The Dark Forest — Liu Cixin

Death's End — Liu Cixin

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions — Brian Christian

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money — Bryan Caplan

The Circle — Dave Eggers

Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal — Nick Bilton

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story — Michael Lewis

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams — Matthew Walker

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Daemon — Daniel Suarez

PoC||GTFO — Manul Laphroaig

Peer-To-Peer Computing: Applications, Architecture, Protocols, and Challenges — Yu-Kwong Ricky Kwok

Freedom — Daniel Suarez

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup — John Carreyrou

The Dream Machine — M. Mitchell Waldrop

The Making of the Atomic Bomb — Richard Rhodes

Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment — Gregory Berns

Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens — K.C. Cole

The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium — Martin Gurri

Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life — Stephen Webb

The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King — Rich Cohen

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones — James Clear

Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China — Philip P. Pan

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China — Evan Osnos

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World — David Deutsch

Creativity, Inc: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration — Ed Catmull

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler — Ryan North

Only the Paranoid Survive — Andrew S. Grove

Nexus — Ramez Naam

Tools of Titans — Timothy Ferriss

Show Stopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft — G. Pascal Zachary

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture — David Kushner

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. — Ron Chernow

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products — Nir Eyal

Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination — Neal Gabler

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made — Jason Schreier

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley — Antonio García Martínez

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future — Peter Thiel

Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft's Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution — Dean Takahashi

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life — William Finnegan

Video Encoding by the Numbers — Jan Lee Ozer

Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy — Mo Gawdat

How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone — Brian  McCullough

The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer — Neal Stephenson

Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl

Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture — Johan Huizinga

Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach — James F. Kurose

The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety — Alan W. Watts

Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation — Blake J. Harris

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell — Eric Schmidt

Blade Runner — Philip K. Dick

Twenty Minutes in Manhattan — Michael Sorkin

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy — William Braxton Irvine

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose — Tony Hsieh

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection — John T. Cacioppo

Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts — Guy Winch

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days — Jessica Livingston

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World — Cal Newport

Adult Children of Alcoholics — Janet Geringer Woititz

This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See — Seth Godin

All Marketers Are Liars — Seth Godin

Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age — Michael A. Hiltzik

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management — Will Larson

Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love — David Talbot

Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman

Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too — Jomny Sun

The C Programming Language — Brian W. Kernighan

Liar's Poker — Michael Lewis

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers — Geoffrey A. Moore

Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side — Trish Hall

Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age — Paul Graham

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road — Nick Bilton

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon — Brad Stone

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future — Ashlee Vance

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid — Douglas R. Hofstadter

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams

Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited — Aldous Huxley

The Book Thief — Markus Zusak

The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins

A Brief History of Time — Stephen Hawking

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking — Susan Cain

How to Win Friends and Influence People — Dale Carnegie

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim — David Sedaris

The Princess Bride — William Goldman

A Thousand Splendid Suns — Khaled Hosseini

The Hunger Games — Suzanne Collins

The Kite Runner — Khaled Hosseini

The Lean Startup — Eric Ries

Elements of Programming Interviews in Python: The Insiders' Guide — Adnan Aziz

Algorithms — Robert Sedgewick

Cracking the Coding Interview — Gayle Laakmann McDowell

When Breath Becomes Air — Paul Kalanithi

Starting Strength — Mark Rippetoe

The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail-But Some Don't — Nate Silver

The 48 Laws of Power — Robert Greene

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers — Ben Horowitz

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python — Al Sweigart

The Elements of Style — William Strunk

Meditations — Marcus Aurelius