Also see movies, games, and other lists.
N.K. Jemisin – The City We Became
qntm –
Fine Structure
Martin Kleppmann – Designing Data Intensive Applications
Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
Vernor Vinge – Across Realtime
Stewart Brand – The Maintenance Race
Vaclav Smil – Numbers Don’t Lie
Michael S. Malone – The Big Score
Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan – The Demon-Haunted World
Chris Hanson, Gerald Sussman – Software Design For Flexibility
Donald Knuth – The Art Of Computer Programming (all volumes)
Gene Wolfe –
The Book Of The New Sun,
The Fifth Head Of Cerberus
John Cornwell et al – Nature’s Imagination
Kim Stanley Robinson – The Ministry For The Future
Colson Whitehead – The Underground Railroad
Peter Galison – Image and Logic
Freeman Dyson – The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet
Ian McEwan – Machines Like Me
Mariana Mazzucato – The Value of Everything
Rana Dasgupta – After Nations
Ayn Rand – The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged
Ruth Ozeki – A Tale For The Time Being
Terry Pratchett – The Long Earth,
The Long Mars, etc.
Adrian Hon – A New History Of The Future In 100 Objects
Ken Kesey – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Te Ping Chen – Land Of Big Numbers
qntm – There Is No Antimemetics Division
Ted Chiang – Stories of Your Life
Charles Dickens – Bleak House
Fritz Leiber – Our Lady Of Darkness
Howard Baetjer Jr. – Software As Capital
David Berry – The Philosophy of Software
Jeffrey Eugenides – The Marriage Plot
Spike Milligan – War Memoirs
Balaji Srinivasan – The Network State
David Mitchell – The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet
Michael Lopp – The Art of Leadership
Robin Sloan – Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Stewart Brand – The Clock of the Long Now
Kenneth Grahame – The Wind In The Willows
James Malcolm Rymer – The String Of Pearls (aka Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)
Christopher Booker – The Seven Basic Plots
Joseph Campbell – The Hero With A Thousand Faces
Amor Towles – A Gentleman In Moscow
James C. Scott – Seeing Like A State
Donald Braben – Scientific Freedom
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra – Don Quixote
Dan Davies – Lying For Money
Lawrence Kesteloot – Coding Machines (short story)
Mark Twain –
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
John le Carré – The Spy Who Came In From The Cold_
Amartya Sen – Development As Freedom
Richard Powers –
Galatea 2.2
Matt Ridley – How Innovation Works
Konstantinos Dimopoulos – Virtual Cities
Tom Nichols – The Death Of Expertise
Rana Dasgupta – Tokyo Cancelled
Jerome K. Jerome – Three Men in a Boat
Arkady Martine – A Memory Called Empire
Jeff Vandermeer – Annihilation
Andrew McAfee – More From Less
Erin Morgenstern – The Night Circus
Carmen Maria Machado – Her Body And Other Parties
Ellen Ullman – Life in Code
William Thackeray – Vanity Fair
Nick Suttner – Shadow Of The Colossus
Paul Hawken et al – Drawdown
Black Elk – The Sacred Pipe
Benjamin Grant – Overview: A New Perspective Of Earth
The Gentle Author – The Creeping Plague Of Ghastly Facadism
Richard Powers – The Overstory
C. P. Snow – The Two Cultures And The Scientific Revolution
Yanis Varoufakis – Talking To My Daughter About The Economy
David Gray – Liminal Thinking
Douglas Laux – Left Of Boom
Bill Buford – Among The Thugs
The Arabian Nights / The Thousand and One Nights
Neal Stephenson – Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell
Lewis Carroll – Alice In Wonderland, Through The Looking Glass
Italo Calvino –
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Ursula K Le Guin – The Disposessed
Paul Feyerabend – Against Method
Thomas Pynchon – Bleeding Edge
N.K. Jemisin – The Fifth Season
Robert Jackson Bennett – City Of Stairs
P.G. Wodehouse – Right Ho, Jeeves
Italo Calvino –
The Complete Cosmicomics
Mark Z. Danielewski – House Of Leaves
Tom Wolfe – The Right Stuff
Daniel Lerch et al – The Community Resilience Reader
Stewart Brand – How Buildings Learn
Junot Diaz – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor – Welcome to Night Vale
(web site)
Ann Leckie – Ancillary Justice
Philip Roth – Goodbye, Columbus
Robert Louis Stevenson – Treasure Island
G. H. Hardy – A Mathematician’s Apology
Joshua Foer, Ella Morton, Dylan Thuras – Atlas Obscura (site)
Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale
Michael Lopp – Managing Humans
Kevin Kelly – The Inevitable
Cixin Liu – The Three Body Problem
Chuck Klosterman – But What If We’re Wrong?
Jane Nelsen – Raising Self-Reliant Children in a Self-Indulgent World
Daniel Lisi – World Of Warcraft
George Polya – How To Solve It
H.P. Lovecraft – The Call Of Cthulhu
Philip K. Dick – Vulcan’s Hammer
Thomas Paine – Common Sense
Jorge Luis Borges – The Garden of Forking Paths
David Gerrold – The Man Who Folded Himself
Edward Albee – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Jaron Lanier – Who Owns the Future?
I felt the exact same way about this that I did about his last book: “Thoughtfully contrarian, in a good way. I didn’t find all of his arguments compelling, but I’m very, very glad that someone’s making them!”
Randall Munroe – Thing Explainer
Walter M. Miller Jr. – A Canticle for Leibowitz (St. Leibowitz, #1)
Roland Barthes – Death Of The Author
Joshua Cohen – Book Of Numbers
Much heralded. I wanted to like it, and I did like the first section, but the
second section, a long transcribed interview with a billionaire tech founder,
just didn’t work. Maybe it’s because I live in that world, but the language and
tone felt totally, gratingly wrong. Sad.
John Brockman – By the Late John Brockman
Jon Irwin – Super Mario Bros. 2
William Gibson – The Peripheral
Mikito Takada – Distributed Systems: for fun and profit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Michael Faber – The Book Of Strange New Things
Meh. Forgettable. None of the character or settings really grabbed me, nor did
the themes of relationships, faith, and evangelism. Not horrible, but not great
either.
Ed Finn – Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future
David Mitchell – The Bone Clocks
David Foster Wallace – The Soul is Not a Smithy
Jennifer Senior – All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood
A must read if you’re a parent, or even just curious. Way more useful than all the popular how-to, what-to-expect, and reference books. The last chapter is mixed, but the rest more than makes up for it.
Mark Russell – God Is Disappointed in You
Pretty damn funny. And a surprisingly good cliff’s notes, to boot.
Ernest Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises
Very very very not my kind of thing.
Adrian Hon – A History of the Future in 100 Objects
Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
Pierre Bayard – How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
Maybe I should have taken the author’s advice and written this without reading
the book. :P I couldn’t tell how much was serious and how much was a joke. Not a
great sign. My sense of humor may not be refined enough, but of his main points,
only one made sense to me:
- Reading/not reading a book isn’t binary but a spectrum. You can hear about a book, read parts of it, read it and then forget some of it, or even forget you read it at all. (OK.)
- We all interpret books differently, and our interpretations are more important and valuable than the books themselves. (Um…not so much.)
- It’s usually better not to read any given book than to read it, since it’s mostly unnecessary and it imposes an opportunity cost. (Um…not so much.)
- Finally, the ultimate aim of thinking and talking about books (and other works of art) is to be creative, in particular about ourselves. (Creative, sure, but about ourselves? Narcissism, no thanks.)
Daniel C. Dennett – Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
Meh. I love Dennett’s work in general, but this just didn’t hang together well enough for me. The bulk of it isn’t intuition pumps at all, but loosely connected essays on topics like computation, evolution, and free will, lightly interspersed with the titular thought experiments.
Dennett himself describes it best: “Some readers…expressed surprise and disappointment that [this book] didn’t include some of my best-known intuition pumps.” Yup.
Meg Wolitzer – The Interestings
Not much of a plot, but great characters and relationship arcs.
Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince
Not nearly as crazy or controversial as its reputation suggests. I was expecting over-the-top malicious, underhanded, downright sadistic stories and techniques, but it was actually pretty tame, even logical and common sense.
Sadly, that also made it less exciting. Lots of politics, campaigning, managing employees and projects, governance and public policy, etc. Important topics, to be sure, but we’ve learned a bit more about them since Machiavelli’s day.
Denis Johnson – Jesus’ Son
Felt like Haruki Murakami meets Hunter S. Thompson…except I like both of them, and I definitely didn’t like this. Ah well.
Ted Chiang – The Lifecycle of Software Objects
Umberto Eco – Foucault’s Pendulum
Jon Gertner – The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
The list of Bell Labs’s inventions is simply stunning: the transistor, switched networking, microwave and satellite communication, digital information theory, fiber optics, cellular radio and telephony, Unix and C, the CCD. Add in a few things from Fairchild and Xerox PARC, like the IC, and you have pretty much all modern computer and telecom technology. This is worth reading as a reminder of that alone.
Michel Houellebecq – The Elementary Particles
Ernest Cline – Ready Player One
Marilynne Robinson – Gilead
Not my style. Wish it was. Ah well.
James Joyce – Dubliners
John Brockman – This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works
Lots of great content! The format isn’t ideal, though. The essays are only a couple pages each or so, so you bounce between ideas a bit too fast. Still good in small doses though.
Leonard Richardson – Constellation Games
Gillian Flynn – Gone Girl
Very fast, very dark, pretty damn good.
Annalena McAfee – The Spoiler
I gave up about a third of the way in. It’s slow, uninteresting, joyless, and devoid of any characters I can relate to at all. I’m sure it works for some people, but not for me.
Steven Pinker – The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
The first half or so, parts 1 through 3, are great. Read them alone and you have a five star book. Parts 4 and 5 got too unfocused, though, at least for me.
David Foster Wallace – The Pale King
Finished, this could have been a great book. Unfinished, it’s just too disjointed, even for DFW. It may not be experimental fiction, exactly, but it’s not far off. It’s basically a series of loosely related vignettes, some short, some longer, with a handful of recurring characters. It’s still enjoyable, and occasionally rises to the brilliance I’d hoped for, but as a whole it’s nowhere near the level of Infinite Jest or Broom of the System. Ah well!
Jaron Lanier – You Are Not a Gadget
Thoughtfully contrarian, in a good way. I didn’t find all of his arguments compelling, but I’m very, very glad that someone’s making them!
Hunter S. Thompson – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Thomas Pynchon – Gravity’s Rainbow
I know there’s a brilliant book hidden in here somewhere, but I couldn’t get through enough to find it. I stopped about halfway through. :/
Tom Wolfe – The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test
Steven Johnson – Where Good Ideas Come From
John Keegan – A History of Warfare
Philippa Perry – How To Stay Sane
David Brin – Existence
Michael Nielsen – Reinventing Discovery
Lawrence Osborne – The Forgiven
Thomas Sowell – A Conflict Of Visions
Max Ernst – Une Semaine de Bonté
Brendan Keogh –
Killing Is Harmless
Kevin Kelly – What Technology Wants
Stewart Brand – Whole Earth Discipline
David Byrne – How Music Works
David MacKay – Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air
Cory Doctorow and
Charles Stross –
The Rapture Of The Nerds
Beowulf
Ben Marcus –
The Flame Alphabet
Lewis Carroll – The Hunting Of The Snark
Siddhartha Mukherjee – The Emperor Of All Maladies
Thomas Pynchon – Gravity’s Rainbow
John Berendt – Midnight in the garden of good and evil
Téa Obreht – The Tiger’s Wife
Daniel Solove –
Nothing to Hide
China Mieville – Embassytown
Alan Lightman – Einstein’s Dreams
Bruce Schneier – Liars and Outliers
Cormac McCarthy –
Blood Meridian
Bret Easton Ellis – Less Than Zero
Jay McInerney –
Bright Lights Big City
Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow
Tyler Cowen – The Great Stagnation
Richard K. Morgan – Altered Carbon
Italo Calvino –
Invisible Cities
Kurt Vonnegut – Sirens of Titan
Tom McCarthy – C
Charles Perrow – Normal Accidents
T. S. Eliot – The Waste Land
Daniel Paul Schreber – Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
David Foster Wallace –
Infinite Jest
Dashiell Hammett –
The Maltese Falcon
Terry Pratchett –
The Color of Magic
Jennifer Egan – A Visit from the Goon Squad
Gever Tulley – Beware Dangerism
Raymond Chandler –
The Big Sleep
Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now
Hank Taggart – How to Purchase Anonymously on the Internet
Douglas Hofstadter – I Am a Strange Loop
Alan Moore, David Gibbons – Watchmen
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – The Little Prince
Monkey: A Journey to the West
Matt Ridley – The Rational Optimist
Lynd Ward – Woodcut Novels
Gods’ Man
Sep Kamvar, Jonathan Harris – We Feel Fine
Jonathan Franzen – The Corrections
Nassim Nicholas Taleb – The Black Swan
Michael Pollan – Food Rules
Robert J. Sawyer –
Flash Forward, etc.
Gary Taubes –
Good Calories, Bad Calories
Vernor Vinge – A Fire Upon the Deep
Robert Heinlein – Stranger in a Strange Land
Jonah Lehrer – How We Decide
E.M. Forster – The Machine Stops
Ted C. Fishman – China Inc.
Clay Gordon – Discover Chocolate
Clive Cussler – Atlantis Found
Scott McCloud – Understanding Comics
Andy Oram, Greg Wilson et al – Beautiful Code
Stieg Larsson –
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
US Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual
Michael Chabon – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Peter Seibel – Coders at Work
Iain M Banks – The Algebraist
Richard Bach – Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Dan Simmons –
Hyperion
David Foster Wallace –
The Broom of the System
William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury
Kurt Vonnegut –
Slaughterhouse 5
Bertrand Russell – The Problems of Philosophy
Tom Wolfe –
Bonfire of the Vanities
J.D. Salinger – The Catcher in the Rye
Philip Roth – American Pastoral
Jill Taylor – My Stroke of Insight
Aubrey de Grey – Ending Aging
William Strunk, E. B. White – The Elements of Style
Dave Eggers – What Is the What
Chloé Doutre-Roussel – The Chocolate Connoisseur
Blastland, Dilnot – The Tiger That Isn’t
Rebecca Walker – What Makes a Man
Iain Simons – Inside Game Design
Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle –
The Mote in God’s Eye
Khaled Hosseini –
The Kite Runner –
Geoffrey Stone – War and Liberty
Chris DiBona –
Bruce Napoleon, Vampire Veterinarian
James W. Loewen – Lies My Teacher Told Me
John Perkins – Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Cory Doctorow –
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Daniel Solove –
I’ve Got Nothing to Hide…
Haruki Murakami –
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Vernor Vinge –
True Names
Edge – The 100 Best Videogames
Christof Koch – The Quest for Consciousness
Freeman Dyson – Our Biotech Future
and Joyce Carol Oates – Lest We Forget,
from the New York Review of Books
Daniel Gilbert – Stumbling on Happiness
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
(available for free!)
Etgar Keret – The Bus Driver who Wanted to be
God
Raby, Ruggeri – How To Protect Your Personal Information
Orson Scott Card – Getting Lost
Bruce Sterling –
The Difference Engine
Robert Charles Wilson –
Spin
Ken MacLeod – Learning The World
J. J. Luna – Invisible Money
Scott Rosenberg – Dreaming in Code
David Simon –
Homicide
Salman Rushdie – Shalimar the Clown
Lewis et al – A General Theory of Love
James Gwartney et al – Common Sense Economics
Thomas Nagel – Concealment and Exposure
Bobby Henderson – The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
Mike Cohn – Agile Estimating and Planning
Jeff Hawkins – On Intelligence
Penny Arcade – Attack of the Bacon Robots!
William Gibson –
Neuromancer
J. J. Luna – How to Be Invisible
Terry Grossman and Ray Kurzweil – Fantastic Voyage
Ellen Fein, Sherrie Schneider – The Rules
Michael Roizen, Mehmet Oz – You, The Owner’s Manual
Steven Johnson –
Everything Bad is Good for You
Bruce Schneier – Beyond Fear
Lauren Weisberger – The Devil Wears Prada
Thomas Kuhn – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Stephen Wolfram – A New Kind of Science
Joel Spolsky – The Best Software Writing I
Michael J. Behe – Darwin’s Black Box
John Allen Paulos – Innumeracy
Freeman Dyson – Disturbing the Universe
Susan Blackmore – The Meme Machine
Matt Ridley –
Genome
Drew McDermott – Mind and Mechanism
Frank Close – Lucifer’s Legacy
John F. X. Sundman – Acts of the Apostles
John Compton Sundman – Cheap Complex Devices
Randy Cohen – The Good, The Bad and The Difference
Mark Haddon – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Matt Ruff – Set this House in Order
Sean Stewart – Perfect Circle
Bill Bryson – A Short History of Nearly Everything
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi –
Flow
Ray Kurzweil –
The Age of Spiritual Machines
Thomas Friedman –
Longitudes & Attitudes
Lawrence Lessig –
The Future of Ideas
Richard Dawkins –
The Selfish Gene
Steven Levy –
Hackers
Neal Stephenson –
The Diamond Age
Neal Stephenson – In the Beginning…Was the Command Line
Charles Stross –
Accelerando
China Miéville –
Perdido Street Station
James Trefil – 101 Things You Don’t Know about Science and No On Else Does Either
Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman – Godel’s Proof
Stewart Brand – The Media Lab
Stephen R. Covey – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Alec Mackenzie – The Time Trap
Michael E. Edleson – Value Averaging
Jeff Fischer – Investing Without a Silver Spoon
David and Tom Gardner – The Motley Fool Investment Guide
Percival Everett – American Desert
Richard Feynman –
Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman
Stephen Hawking – Black Holes and Baby Universes
Dave Eggers –
You Shall Know Our Velocity
Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Tao Te Ching
Shunryu Suzuki – Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
Paul Reps and Nyugen Senzaki – Zen Flesh Zen Bones
Leonard Shlain – Sex, Time, and Power
Gabriel Garcia Marquez –
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs, and Steel
Richard Adams –
Watership Down
Laura Schlessinger –
Ten Things Women Do to Mess Up their Lives
Richard Watson – Cogito, Ergo Sum
T. R. Reid – Confucius Lives Next Door
Guy Gavriel Kay –
Tigana
Arnold C. Schonberg – The Great Pianists
Nick Bollettieri – My Aces, My Faults
John Nunn – Secrets of Rook Endings
A. J. Gillam – Simple Checkmates
Suparna Damany and Jack Bellis – It’s Not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome!
Eric Raymond –
The Cathedral and The Bazaar,
The Art of Unix Programming
Frank Herbert –
Dune
Douglas Adams –
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish,
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, etc.
Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides – Design Patterns
Robert Silverberg –
Lord Valentine’s Castle,
Valentine Pontifex,
Majipoor Chronicles, etc.
Stephen King –
The Stand,
It,
Needful Things,
Cujo, etc.
Melvin Rader and Jerry H. Gill – The Enduring Questions
Immanuel Kant – Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
Rene Descartes – Collected Writings
David Hume –
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights
Charles Dickens – Great Expectations
Bernard Williams – Morality
William James – Essays in Pragmatism
Thomas Aquinas – On Law, Morality, and Politics
Lex Williford and Michael Martone – The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction
Michael Crichton –
Rising Sun,
Sphere,
The Andromeda Strain,
The Terminal Man,
Congo
Orson Scott Card –
Ender’s Game,
Speaker for the Dead,
Xenocide,
Children of the Mind,
Ender’s Shadow,
Shadow of the Hegemon,
Shadow Puppets,
Shadow Of the Giant
Piers Anthony –
A Spell for Chameleon
and the Xanth series, the Incarnations series, and many others
Books I’ve read Blinkist summaries of:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Skin In The Game, Fooled By Randomness
Malcolm Gladwell – David And Goliath, Blink, Outliers
Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson – _It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work_
Lisa Damour – Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions Into Adulthood
Robert M. Pirsig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Paul Bloom – Against Empathy
Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish – How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk
James Carse – Finite And Infinite Games
The Almost Nearly Perfect People
Steven Pinker – _Enlightenment Now__
J. Craig Venter – Life at the Speed of Light
Thanks for reading my novel!
I want recommendations!
done!
Recommendations duly added to my list :)
Pingback: Ryan Barrett
Cool to see you link to Blinkist :) I’ve been using them for the past few months to summarize books since I’m so busy. Great service overall. We’ve reviewed them & collected a bunch of user reviews and most people like them. Just a handful of people who say their book summaries are not that good.