Hi there! I like to read books. Here I share and summarize what I’ve been reading each week. You can get a copy by subscribing below.
If you’d like to get a quick sense of what I look at, I keep a running list below. The ones I found particularly worthwhile are in bold.
The Power Law (Sebastian Mallaby)
The Culture Code (Daniel Coyle)
Masters of Doom (David Kushner)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas S. Kuhn)
Order Without Design (Alain Bertaud)
Skunk Works (Ben Rich and Leo Janos)
The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve (Peter Conti-Brown)
Invisible China (Natalie Hell and Scott Rozelle)
The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin)
Mythologies (Roland Barthes)
Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich)
Asian American Dreams (Helen Zia)
Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
Addiction by Design (Natasha Dow Schüll)
Practical Programming for Strength Training (Mark Rippetoe and Andy Baker)
Gödel, Escher, Bach (Douglas R. Hofstadter)
How to Change Your Mind (Michael Pollan)
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (René Girard)
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Charles Mackay)
The Cold Start Problem (Andrew Chen)
The Elements of Eloquence (Mark Forsyth)
Four Thousand Weeks (Oliver Burkeman)
America Against America (Wang Huning)
The Not So Wild, Wild West (Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill)
Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)
Think Tank Aesthetics (Pamela M. Lee)
Masters of Scale (Reid Hoffman)
Stranger in the Shogun’s City (Amy Stanley)
The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman)
A Billion Voices (David Moser)
Endless Forms Most Beautiful (Sean B. Carroll)
The Tyranny of Merit (Michael J. Sandel)
Breaking News (Alan Rusbridger)
The Sports Gene (David Epstein)
The Alignment Problem (Brian Christian)
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (Jason K. Stearns)
The Precipice (Toby Ord)
Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert)
Impro (Keith Johnstone)
Creativity, Inc. (Ed Catmull)
Seeing Like a State (James C. Scott)
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (Ken Liu)
Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal (Joel Salatin)
Kitchen Confidential (Anthony Bourdain)
A Still Forest Pool (Ajahn Chah, compiled by Jack Kornfield and Paul Breiter)
Unconventional Success (David F. Swensen)
How to Read a Book (Mortimer J. Adler)
The Singapore Story (Lee Kuan Yew)
The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
The Evolution of Cooperation (Robert Axelrod)
Lean Analytics (Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz)
World Order (Henry Kissinger)
Dune (Frank Herbert)
East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
Why We Sleep (Matthew Walker)
The Soul of a New Machine (Tracy Kidder)
Shoe Dog (Phil Knight)
The Stranger (Albert Camus)
The Idea Factory (Jon Gertner)
Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut)
A Mathematician’s Apology (G. H. Hardy)
The Arabian Nights (translated by Husain Haddawy, edited by Muhsin Mahdi)
Pachinko (Min Jin Lee)
The Vital Question (Nick Lane)
Born Red (Gao Yuan)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho, translated by Alan R. Clarke)
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels (Jason Schreier)
The Language Instinct (Steven Pinker)
Hard Drive (James Wallace)
Breath from Salt (Bijal Trivedi)
Death’s End (Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu)
Zero to One (Peter Thiel with Blake Masters)
Bad Blood (John Carreyrou)
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
