Inspired by Patrick Collison’s bookshelf, I’m sharing some books I enjoyed. I would have kept them on my bookshelf if I hadn’t read them as audiobooks or ebooks.
At the time of reading, certain books seemed unusually good (marked with *) and others seemed particularly great (marked with **).
A caveat. I have changed quite a bit since reading some of them, so my current impression might be different. Needless to say, I obviously do not agree with every single thing said or implied in these books.
1. Non-Fiction: Business, Tech, and PM
- Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
- Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups
- Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup *
- Becoming Steve Jobs
- Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
- Continuous Discovery Habits
- Culture Code
- Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future *
- Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products
- Getting Things Done
- Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
- Hard Thing About Hard Things
- Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow **
- Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love
- Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
- Lost and Founder
- Never Split the Difference *
- Shoe Dog **
- The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Boundaries of Global Business
- The Inevitable
- The Mom Test *
- Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Growth
- What Technology Wants
- Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
2. Non-Fiction: Other
- Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
- Becoming
- Behave
- Blank Slate
- Capitalism in America: A History
- Chasing Excellence
- Doing Good Better *
- Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, and Humanism *
- Factfulness
- Free Will
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
- How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds
- How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
- How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics
- Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don’t Have To *
- Permanent Record
- Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind **
- Solve for Happy
- Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
- Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
- Talking to Strangers
- The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe
- The Book of Joy
- The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail
- The Gene: An Intimate History
- The Happiness Hypothesis
- The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide
- The Spy and the Traitor *
- Thinking, Fast and Slow *
- This Is Your Brain on Music
- Waking Up *
- Why Buddhism is True **
- Your Brain at Work *
3. Fiction
- 1984
- Brave New World
- Death’s End
- Exhalation: Stories *
- Project Hail Mary **
- Republic
- Siddhartha
- Stories of Your Life and Others
- Sum by D. Eagleman
- The Martian *
- The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
Short stories and novelettes:
- Story of Your Life by T. Chiang *
- The Egg by A. Weir
- The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by T. Chiang
- The Waves by K. Liu *
- Understand by T. Chiang *