Here are some books I enjoyed reading and would keep on my bookshelf if they weren’t almost all digital.
At the time I read them, certain books seemed unusually good (the * list) and others seemed particularly great (the ** list)
I’ve changed quite a bit since reading some of them, so my impression could be different today. Needless to say, I obviously don’t agree with every single thing said or implied in these books.
**
- Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, and Humanism
- Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
- Shoe Dog
- Why Buddhism is True
*
- Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
- Doing Good Better
- Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
- Exhalation: Stories
- Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don’t Have To
- Never Split the Difference
- Permanent Record
- Project Hail Mary
- The Martian
- The Mom Test
- The Spy and the Traitor
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
- Waking Up
- Your Brain at Work
More Non-Fiction (Business/Tech)
- Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
- Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups
- Becoming Steve Jobs
- Culture Code
- Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products
- Getting Things Done
- Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
- Hard Thing About Hard Things
- Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love
- Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
- Lost and Founder
- The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Boundaries of Global Business
- The Inevitable
- Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Growth
- What Technology Wants
- Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
More Non-Fiction (Other)
- Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
- Becoming
- Behave
- Blank Slate
- Capitalism in America: A History
- Chasing Excellence
- 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
- Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
- 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
- This Is Your Brain on Music
More Fiction
- 1984
- Brave New World
- Republic
- Siddhartha
- Stories of Your Life and Others
- Sum
- The Egg by Andy Weir
- The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories