Books I’ve read.
2026
- The Complete Fables — Aesop, Temple translation (pre-500 BCE / 1998)
- Tao Te Ching — Laozi (~300 BCE / 1988)
- The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano — Olaudah Equiano (1789)
- Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad (1899)
- Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse (1922)
- The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner (1929)
- In Praise of Idleness — Bertrand Russell (1935)
- Ask the Dust — John Fante (1939)
- On Writing — Charles Bukowski (1945-93)
- 1984 — George Orwell (1949)
- Casino Royale — Ian Fleming (1953)
- The World’s Religions — Huston Smith (1955)
- Giovanni’s Room — James Baldwin (1956)
- Nobody Knows My Name — James Baldwin (1961)
- The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin (1963)
- Going To Meet The Man — James Baldwin (1965)
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
- The Eye You See With — Robert Stone (1971-2013 / 2020)
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — Hunter S. Thompson (1971)
- Open Veins of Latin America — Eduardo Galeano
- No Name in the Street — James Baldwin (1972)
- If Beale Street Could Talk — James Baldwin (1974)
- Cointelpro — Nelson Blackstock (1975)
- The Devil Finds Work — James Baldwin (1976)
- The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind — Julian Jaynes
- Just Above My Head — James Baldwin (1979)
- Heartburn — Nora Ephron (1983)
- Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media — Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky
- Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy (1985)
- Bird by Bird — Anne Lamott (1994)
- Infinite Jest — (1996)
- Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life I — J. M. Coetzee (1997)
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies — Jared Diamond (1997)
- Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II — J. M. Coetzee (2002)
- Are Prisons Obsolete? — Angela Davis (2003)
- Everything and More — David Foster Wallace
- The Ancient Olympics: A History — Nigel Spivey (2004)
- Rwanda Means The Universe — Louise Mushikiwabo (2006)
- Nothing to Envy — Barbara Demick (2009)
- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness — Michelle Alexander
- Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner — Martin Gardner (2013)
- Yes Please — Amy Poehler (2014)
- Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow — Yuval Noah Harari (2015)
- Blood, Sweat, and Pixels … Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made — Jason Schreier (2017)
- The Color of Law: … How Our Government Segregated America — Richard Rothstein
- There Is No Antimemetics Division (2020)
- The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann — Ananyo Bhattacharya (2021)
- Yearbook — Seth Rogan
- An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence — Zeinab Badawi (2024)
- Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment — Jason Schreier
- The Invention of Design — Maggie Gram (2025)
- The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource — Chris Hayes
2025
- Candide — Voltaire (1759)
- The Double — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1846)
- Moby Dick — Herman Melville (1851)
- The House of the Dead — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1862)
- Notes From Underground — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864)
- Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)
- The Idiot — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1869)
- The Eternal Husband — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1870)
- Devils — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1872)
- The Adolescent — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1875)
- A Gentle Creature — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1876)
- The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)
- Life on the Mississippi — Mark Twain (1883)
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)
- John Brown — W. E. B. Du Bois (1909)
- Go Tell It On the Mountain — James Baldwin (1952)
- Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin (1955)
- Memories, Dreams, Reflections — Carl Jung (1961)
- Another Country — James Baldwin (1962)
- The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)
- Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind — Shunryu Suzuki (1970)
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Robert M. Pirsig (1974)
- A People’s History of the United States — Howard Zinn (1980)
- Dostoevsky Vol 3: The Stir of Liberation — Joseph Frank (1986)
- Dostoevsky Vol 4: The Miraculous Years — Joseph Frank (1995)
- Nonviolent Communication — Marshall B. Rosenberg, PhD (1999)
- Dostoevsky Vol 5: The Mantle of the Prophet — Joseph Frank (2002)
- Tinkers — Paul Harding (2008)
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson Vol 4: The Passage of Power — Robert A. Caro (2012)
- Quack This Way — David Foster Wallace (2013)
- String Theory — David Foster Wallace (2014)
- Based on a True Story: Not A Memoir — Norm MacDonald (2016)
- Hillbilly Elegy — JD Vance (2016)
- Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women — Kate Moore
- How to Write An Autobiographical Novel — Alexander Chee (2018)
- Lost in Math — Sabine Hossenfelder (2018)
- Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex — Angela Chen (2020)
- The Gambler Wife — Andrew Kaufman (2021)
- Cinema Speculation — Quentin Tarantino (2022)
- Patriot: A Memoir — Alexei Navalny (2024)
- The Trading Game — Gary Stevenson
- The Singularity is Nearer — Ray Kurzweil
- Everything is Tuberculosis — John Green (2025)
2024

- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin — Benjamin Franklin (1791)
- Poor Folk — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1846)
- The Communist Manifesto — Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx (1848)
- The Village of Stepanchikovo — (1859)
- Humiliated and Insulted — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1861)
- The Gambler — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)
- The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
- On Writing — Ernest Hemingway (1925-59 / 1984)
- Why I Write — George Orwell (1931-46)
- The World As I See It — Albert Einstein (1934)
- Murder in Mesopotamia — Agatha Christie (1936)
- The Martian Chronicles — (1950)
- The Complete Stories Volume I — Isaac Asimov (1953-56)
- Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings — Philip Arthur Fisher (1957)
- Hell’s Angels — Hunter S. Thompson (1966)
- Dostoevsky Vol. 1: The Seeds of Revolt — Joseph Frank (1976)
- Women, Race and Class — Angela Davis (1981)
- Dostoevsky Vol 2: The Years of Ordeal — Joseph Frank (1983)
- One Up On Wall Street — Peter Lynch (1989)
- The Oxford History of the French Revolution — William Doyle (1989)
- The Things They Carried — Tim O’Brien (1990)
- Zen and the Art of Ariting — Ray Bradbury
- Beating the Street — Peter Lynch (1993)
- Long Walk to Freedom — Nelson Mandela (1994)
- All About Love — Bell Hooks (1999)
- On Writing — Stephen King (2000)
- The Medici — Paul Strathern (2003)
- Delivered from Distraction — Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey ()
- Consider the Lobster — David Foster Wallace (2005)
- Mao: The Unknown Story — Jung Chang, Jon Halliday (2004)
- Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution — T. J. English (2007)
- The History of White People — Nell Irvin Painter (2010)
- Debt: The First 5000 Years — David Graeber (2011)
- Killing Lincoln — Bill O’Reilly
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind — Yuval Noah Harari
- Roll the Bones — David G. Schwartz (2013)
- Novelist as a Vocation — Haruki Murakami (2015)
- Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India — Shashi Tharoor (2017)
- On Tyranny — Timothy D. Snyder
- So You Want to Talk About Race — Ijeoma Oluo (2018)
- Working — Robert Caro (2019)
- Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America — Ijeoma Oluo (2020)
- The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel (2020)
- Why We’re Polarized — Ezra Klein
- About Time — David Rooney (2021)
- Dopamine Nation — Anna Lembke, MD
- High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out — Amanda Ripley
- Laziness Does Not Exist — Devon Price
- No Bad Parts — Richard C. Schwartz, PHD
- Richer Wiser Happier —William Green (2021)
- Unwell Women — Elinor Cleghorn
2020-2023
- The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway (1926)
- Security Analysis — Benjamin Graham and David Dodd (1934)
- How to Win Friends and Influence People — Dale Carnegie (1936)
- A Mathematician’s Apology — G. H. Hardy (1940)
- On the Road — Jack Kerouac (1957)
- Dune — Frank Herbert (1965)
- The Peregrine — J. A. Baker (1967)
- Pimp: The Story of My Life — (1967)
- Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty_Dance with Death — Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1969)
- Post Office — Charles Bukowski (1971)
- The Stand — Stephen King (1978)
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid — Douglas Hofstadter (1979)
- Critical Path — Buckmister Fuller (1981)
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson Vol 1: The Path to Power — Robert A Caro (1982)
- Grunch of Giants — Buckminster Fuller (1983)
- Emergence — Temple Grandin (1986)
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson Vol 2: Means of Ascent — Robert A Caro (1990)
- The Last Night of the Earth Poems — Charles Bukowski (1992)
- Leading with the Heart: Coach K’s Successful Strategies … — Mike Krzyzewski (2000)
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson Vol 3: Master of the Senate — Robert A Caro (2002)
- The Singularity is Near — Ray Kurzweil (2005)
- Born On a Blue Day — Daniel Tammet (2006)
- Mozart and the Whale: An Asperger’s Love Story — Jerry Newport and Mary Newport
- The Strangest Man — Graham Farmelo (2009)
- Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker: The Essential Guide — Jonathan Little (2011)
- Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing — David Farland (2012)
- The Fault in Our Stars — John Green
- Expert Heads Up No Limit Hold’em Play: Strategies for Multiple Streets — (2014)
- The Murderbot Diaries — Martha Wells (2017-2023)
- The Order of Time — Carlo Rovelli (2017)
- An Absolutely Remarkable Thing — Hank Green (2018)
- Modern Poker Theory: … based on GTO principles — Michael Acevedo (2019)
- Play Optimal Poker: Practical Game Theory for Every Poker Player — Andrew Brokos
- Play Optimal Poker 2: Range Construction — Andrew Brokos (2020)
- The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet — John Green (2021)
- Unmasking Autism — Dr. Devon Price (2022)
- What I Mean When I Say I’m Autistic: Unpuzzling a Life on the Autism Spectrum — Annie Kotowicz
- The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation — Cory Doctorow (2023)
- The Nineties: A Book — Chuck Klosterman