Buying books and reading books are completely unrelated hobbies. Now that I have done the hoarding for you, you can focus on the latter.

I always enjoy reading others’ lists and browsing their bookshelves, but I’ve always found it odd when people see my collection and say “What a lot of books! Have you read all of them?” Behold my (non-exhaustive) antilibrary that would make Umberto Eco proud. All of them are worth reading, though as always it’s kinda hard to recommend books in the abstract.

Drop me an email if you’ve got recommendations! Always appreciated.

1. Philosophy of Science
2. History of Science
3. Complexity
4. Mathematics
5. Mathematicians
6. Computer Science
7. Physics
8. Physicists
9. Biology
10. Biologists
11. Medicine
12. Reasoning
13. Philosophy
14. Effective Altruism
15. Existential Risk
16. Progress Studies
17. Economics
18. Economic History
19. Technology
20. Technologists
21. Engineering
22. Space Flight
23. Firms
24. Startup
25. Business
26. Management
27. Leadership
28. Finance
29. Psychology
30. Clinical Psychology
31. Theory of Mind
32. Social Anthropology
33. Anthropology
34. Cultural Anthropology
35. Culture
36. Sociology
37. Parenting/Education
38. Politics
39. Geopolitics
40. Statesmen
41. Law
42. Military Strategy
43. Grand History
44. History
45. Wars
46. China
47. Chinese Economy
48. Chinese History
49. Chinese Philosophy
50. Chinese Literature
51. Religion
52. Autobiography/Memoir
53. Sports
54. Interviews
55. Essays
56. Urban Design
57. Architecture
58. Art
59. Design
60. Game Design
61. Film Making
62. Music
63. Writing
64. Literature
65. Epic Poetry
66. Comics
67. Hard Sci-Fi
68. Soft Sci-Fi
69. Space Opera
70. Cyberpunk
71. Biopunk
72. Military Sci-Fi
73. First Encounter Sci-Fi
74. Dystopian Sci-Fi
75. Time Travel Sci-Fi
76. Superhero Sci-Fi
77. Science Fantasy
78. Literary Sci-Fi
79. Sci-Fi Short Story
80. Fantasy Series
81. Fantasy
82. Wuxia
83. Children’s Fantasy
84. Horror
85. Short Stories
86. Classic Fiction
87. Fiction
88. Plays

Philosophy of Science

• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
• The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn by Richard Hamming
• Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization by Donald W. Braben
• Against Method by Paul Karl Feyerabend
• The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper
• Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen
• A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
• The Myths We Live by by Mary Midgley
• Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility: The Ideas Behind the World’s Slowest Computer by Stewart Brand

History of Science

• The Invention of Science: The Scientific Revolution from 1500 to 1750 by David Wootton
• Science Since Babylon: Enlarged Edition by Derek John de Solla Price
• The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski
• To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg
• Asimov’s New Guide To Science by Isaac Asimov
• From Galileo to Newton by A. Rupert Hall
• The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal by James Franklin

Complexity

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
• The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert A. Simon
• Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey B. West
• Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop
• Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Mathematics

• Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery by Imre Lakatos
• Mathematician’s Delight by WW Sawyer
• The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field by Jacques Hadamard
• How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method by George Pólya
• Problem-Solving Through Problems by Loren C. Larson
• The Nature of Mathematical Modeling by Neil Gershenfeld
• Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
• The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
• Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh
• Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by ET Jaynes
• Statistics by David Freedman
• How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff
• Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists by Joel Best
• The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

Mathematicians

• Leonhard Euler: Mathematical Genius in the Enlightenment by Ronald S. Calinger
• The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel
• A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar
• Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel by Rebecca Goldstein
• A Mathematician’s Apology by GH Hardy
• Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science by Karl Sigmund
• Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis

Computer Science

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson
• Feynman Lectures On Computation by Richard P. Feynman
• Elements of Information Theory by Thomas M. Cover
• Neural Networks and Deep Learning by Michael Nielsen
• Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Scott Aaronson
• Quantum Computing for The Very Curious by Michael Nielsen
• The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles by Noam Nisan
• Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal

Physics

• The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard P. Feynman
• The Character of Physical Law by Richard P. Feynman
• Cosmos by Carl Sagan
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
• The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose
• Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist’s Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature by Steven Weinberg
• The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe by Steven Weinberg
• QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman
• The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes–and Its Implications by David Deutsch
• The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought by Thomas S. Kuhn
• Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law by Peter Woit
• Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder
• The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin
• If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … Where Is Everybody?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb

Physicists

• Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
• “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman
• Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: Letters of Richard P. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman
• No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman by Richard P. Feynman
• Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics by George Johnson
• Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein by Abraham Pais
• Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
• The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family by Peter Byrne
• Alvarez by Luis W. Alvarez
• American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird
• Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the world he made up by KC Cole

Biology

• The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
• Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
• The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene by Richard Dawkins
• The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins
• The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us by Richard O. Prum
• The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley
• What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches
• Molecular Biology of the Cell by Bruce Alberts
• An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits by Uri Alon
• The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions by David Quammen
• Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams
• The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea by Callum Roberts
• Oranges by John McPhee
• Life in Our Phage World by Forest Rohwer

Biologists

• The Double Helix by James D Watson
• The Eighth Day of Creation by Horace Freeland Judson
• Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior by Jonathan Weiner
• The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82 by Charles Darwin
• The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann
• A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics by Nicholas Wright Gillham
• The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World by James Shreeve

Medicine

• Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine by Murray Longmore
• Dr. Pestana’s Surgery Notes: Top 180 Vignettes for the Surgical Wards by Carlos Pestana
• Top Knife: The Art and Craft of Trauma Surgery by Asher Hirshberg
• Practical Statistics for Medical Research by Douglas G. Altman
• The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
• Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
• Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating by Walter C. Willett
• The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat by Stephan Guyenet
• Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic by Ben Westhoff
• Ketamine: Dreams and Realities by Karl Jansen
• Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That’s Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power
• The Vaccinators: Smallpox, Medical Knowledge, and the ‘Opening’ of Japan by Ann Jannetta
• Smallpox: The Death of a Disease: The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer by DA Henderson
• Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky
• Miracle Cure: The Creation of Antibiotics and the Birth of Modern Medicine by William Rosen
• The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception by Michel Foucault
• Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs by Morton A. Meyers

Reasoning

• Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky
• Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock
• Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? by Philip E. Tetlock
• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t by Nate Silver
• The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef
• Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian
• Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows
• Thinking and Deciding by Jonathan Baron
• Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck by Eliezer Yudkowsky
• The Art Of The Long View: Planning For The Future In An Uncertain World by Peter Schwartz

Philosophy

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• On the Shortness of Life by Seneca
• Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse
• Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff
• At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell
• The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig
• Finding Our Sea-Legs: Ethics, Experience and the Ocean of Stories by Will Buckingham
• Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy by Nick Bostrom
• Walking by Henry David Thoreau
• On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
• Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony de Mello
• Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti by Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book For All And None by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima
• How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen
• The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering by Byung-Chul Han
• Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach

Effective Altruism

• Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit
• Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill
• Moral Uncertainty by William MacAskill
• 80,000 Hours: Find a fulfilling career that does good by Benjamin Todd
• The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology by Peter Singer
• The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty by Peter Singer
• Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

Existential Risk

• The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord
• Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom
• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom
• Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark

Progress Studies

• Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Tyler Cowen
• The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better by Tyler Cowen
• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
• Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker
• The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel
• Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950 by Charles Murray
• A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr
• A Brief History of How the Industrial Revolution Changed the World by Thomas Crump
• Men, Machines, and Modern Times by Elting E. Morison
• The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress by Joel Mokyr
• Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change by Edmund S. Phelps
• The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

Economics

• Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action by Elinor Ostrom
• Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas C. Schelling
• The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod
• The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups by Mancur Olson
• Incentives: Motivation and the Economics of Information by Donald E. Campbell
• Due Diligence: An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance by David Roodman
• The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson
• Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate by Rose George
• The Political Economy of American Trade Policy by Anne O. Krueger
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
• John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman by Robert Skidelsky

Economic History

• Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction by Robert C. Allen
• A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark
• The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze
• A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and US Economic Growth by Alexander J. Field
• The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert J. Gordon
• Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life by Fernand Braudel
• Progress and Poverty by Henry George
• The Invisible Hand?: How Market Economies Have Emerged and Declined Since AD 500 by Bas van Bavel
• Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium by Ronald Findlay
• How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region by Joe Studwell
• The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective by Robert C. Allen
• The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 by Joel Mokyr
• The Path to Sustained Growth: England’s Transition from an Organic Economy to an Industrial Revolution by EA Wrigley
• MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975 by Chalmers Johnson

Technology

• Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past by J Storrs Hall** **
• Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World by Kevin Kelly
• Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder
• Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford
• The Sources of Innovation by Eric von Hippel
• Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel
• What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
• The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

Technologists

• The Dream Machine: JCR Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop
• Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Ben R. Rich
• Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century by G. Pascal Zachary
• Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
• Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
• Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
• The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
• The Heroic Age of American Invention by L. Sprague de Camp

Engineering

• The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
• Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes
• The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution by TR Reid
• Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper
• The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum by Camila Russo
• The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu
• Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence by George Dyson
• Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach
• ​​Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress by Hasok Chang

Space Flight

• One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon by Charles Fishman
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
• Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon by Robert Kurson
• Moondust: In Search Of The Men Who Fell To Earth by Andrew Smith
• The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Firms

• The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
• The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT by Stewart Brand
• Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael A. Hiltzik
• Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer by Douglas K. Smith
• Doing the Impossible: George E. Mueller & the Management of NASA’s Human Spaceflight Program by Arthur L. Slotkin
• Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II by Jennet Conant
• Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development At China Lake by Ron Westrum
• In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy
• Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull
• The Notenki Memoirs: Studio Gainax and the Men Who Created Evangelion by Yasuhiro Takeda

Startup

• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
• What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture by Ben Horowitz
• High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil
• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
• The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business by Clayton M. Christensen
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by James C. Collins
• Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

Business

• Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos by Thomas Petzinger Jr.
• ​​Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
• Andrew Carnegie by Joseph Frazier Wall
• Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight
• Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler
• The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company by Robert Iger
• Sam Walton: Made In America by Sam Walton
• Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy
• The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
• My Forty Years with Ford by Charles E. Sorensen
• The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean
• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
• Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac
• The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History by David Enrich
• Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough
• Business Adventures by John Brooks
• Who Is Michael Ovitz? by Michael Ovitz
• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace by Al Ries
• This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See by Seth Godin
• Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet by Tim Hwang

Management

• Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar
• An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson
• High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove
• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
• Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration by Warren Bennis
• Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers by Robert Jackall
• An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan
• The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space by Venkatesh G. Rao
• The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande
• Perspective on McKinsey by Martin Bower

Leadership

• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh
• Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
• Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg
• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson

Finance

• Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed
• Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann
• The Money Game by Adam Smith
• Supermoney by Adam Smith
• The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger by Charles T. Munger
• My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance by Emanuel Derman
• What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars by Jim Paul
• Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone
• Optionality: How to Survive and Thrive in a Volatile World by Richard Meadows
• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
• Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
• Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
• Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World by Dan Davies
• The Kelly Capital Growth Investment Criterion: Theory and Practice by Leonard C. Maclean
• A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing by Burton G. Malkiel
• The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
• The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason

Psychology

• The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development by Robert Kegan
• Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking by Cecilia Heyes
• The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich
• The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance by K Anders Ericsson
• Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by K. Anders Ericsson
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior by Geoffrey Miller
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
• Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want by Nicholas Epley
• Bias in Mental Testing by Arthur R. Jensen
• Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

Clinical Psychology

• Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation by Bruce Ecker
• Internal Family Systems Therapy by Richard C. Schwartz
• Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution by Paul Watzlawick
• Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World by J. Mark G. Williams

Theory of Mind

• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker
• The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist
• The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind by Nick Chater
• Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-To-Face Behavior by Erving Goffman

Social Anthropology

• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott
• Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer
• Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter
• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoğlu
• The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority
• The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
• Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block
• Get Together: How to build a community with your people by Bailey Richardson

Anthropology

• Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich
• The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich
• Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences by Alex Mesoudi
• Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution by Peter J. Richerson
• Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth by Peter Turchin

Cultural Anthropology

• Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by René Girard
• Violence and the Sacred by René Girard
• Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone
• Improvise.: Scene from the Inside Out by Mick Napier
• The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin Simler
• Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell
• The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat
• The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
• Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua D. Greene

Culture

• The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan
• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
• The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell
• The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram
• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondō

Sociology

• Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit by Ashley Mears
• Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model by Ashley Mears
• Gender in Modern East Asia by Barbara Molony
• The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
• Mate: Become the Man Women Want by Tucker Max
• Models: Attract Women Through Honesty by Mark Manson

Parenting/Education

• Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think by Bryan Caplan
• How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read by Larry Sanger
• ​​How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk
• The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris
• The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life by Jay Belsky
• Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert
• The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding by Kieran Egan

Politics

• The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
• The Discourses by Niccolò Machiavelli
• The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama
• The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama
• Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama
• Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
• Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government by Christopher H. Achen
• The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek
• Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
• Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman
• Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky by Noam Chomsky
• The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy by Thomas Sowell
• The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell
• Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell

Geopolitics

• The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
• World Order by Henry Kissinger
• Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han
• The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred W. McCoy
• The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin
• The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade by Andrew Feinstein
• Has the West Lost It?: A Provocation by Kishore Mahbubani
• The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order by Bruno Maçães
• Disunited Nations: Succeeding in a World Where No One Gets Along by Peter Zeihan
• The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate by Robert D. Kaplan

Statesmen

• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
• The Years of Lyndon Johnson Set: The Path to Power; Means of Ascent; Master of the Senate; The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro
• Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow
• Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times by Kenneth Whyte
• Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein
• The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew by Lee Kuan Yew
• The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea by Byung-Kook Kim
• Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix
• A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of TE Lawrence by John E. Mack

Law

• The Nonsense Factory: The Making and Breaking of the American Legal System by Bruce Cannon Gibney
• Legal Systems Very Different From Ours by David D. Friedman
• The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State by Bruce L. Benson

Military Strategy

• The Art of War by Sun Tzu
• A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy by Miyamoto Musashi
• Strategy by BH Liddell Hart
• Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War by Eliot A. Cohen
• The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century AD to the Third by Edward N. Luttwak
• Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice by William H. McRaven
• The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Grand History

• The Lessons of History by Will Durant
• Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris
• A History of Civilizations by Fernand Braudel
• From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
• Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
• Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
• Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers by Richard E. Neustadt
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
• War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires by Peter Turchin
• Secular Cycles by Peter Turchin
• The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
• Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill
• Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil
• A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor A History of the World in 100 Objects
• Memory of the World: The treasures that record our history from 1700 BC to the present day by UNESCO

History

• The Histories by Herodotus
• The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Russia and the Russians: A History by Geoffrey Hosking
• The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War by Graham Robb
• The English and their History by Robert Tombs
• How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman
• The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century by Peter Watson
• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
• Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik
• The Italians: A Full-Length Portrait Featuring Their Manners and Morals by Luigi Barzini
• The New Spaniards by John Hooper
• The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350 by Robert Bartlett
• The Arabs: A History by Eugene Rogan
• Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson
• Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy
• Korea: The Impossible Country by Daniel Tudor
• Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
• Crossroads: A Popular History of Malaysia and Singapore by Jim Baker
• From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 by Lee Kuan Yew
• Massacre in Malaya: Exposing Britain’s My Lai by Christopher Hale
• Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short
• Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present by Christopher I. Beckwith
• Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend
• The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Fernand Braudel
• The Beginnings of Rome: Italy from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars by Tim J. Cornell
• Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome & the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD by Peter RL Brown
• Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower
• Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer
• American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900 by HW Brands
• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman
• The Quest for El Cid by Richard Fletcher
• The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson
• Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus by Richard C. Carrier
• Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker

Wars

• The Conquest of Gaul by Gaius Julius Caesar
• The Punic Wars by Adrian Goldsworthy
• The Fall of Constantinople 1453 by Steven Runciman
• A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 by GJ Meyer
• The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman The Guns of August
• Why the Allies Won by Richard Overy
• The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won by Victor Davis Hanson
• Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe
• Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character by Jonathan Shay
• War by Sebastian Junger
• Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War by Mark Bowden

China

• Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos
• Knowing China: A Twenty-First Century Guide by Frank N. Pieke
• Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? by Graham Allison
• On China by Henry Kissinger
• Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel
• CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping by Kerry Brown
• From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party by Tony Saich
• China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed by Andrew G. Walder
• Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China by Philip P. Pan
• The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao by Ian Johnson
• River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler
• Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
• To Change China: Western Advisers in China by Jonathan D. Spence
• Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop
• Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop

Chinese Economy

• The Economic History of China by Richard von Glahn
• The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz
• The Rise of China’s Industrial Policy by Barry Naughton (pdf)
• The Chinese Economy, Second Edition: Adaptation and Growth by Barry J Naughton
• China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know by Arthur R. Kroeber
• Avoiding the Fall: China’s Economic Restructuring by Michael Pettis
• China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption by Yuen Yuen Ang

Chinese History

• Chinese History: A New Manual by Endymion Wilkinson
• The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 by Frank Dikötter
• Mao’s Great Famine: The History Of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 by Frank Dikötter
• The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976 by Frank Dikötter
• Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 by Yang Jisheng
• The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Ji Xianlin
• Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War by Stephen R. Platt
• The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream by Michael Wood
• Imperial China 900-1800 by Frederick W. Mote
• China: A New History by John King Fairbank
• A History of Chinese Civilization by Jacques Gernet
• The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties by Timothy Brook

Chinese Philosophy

• The Analects by Confucius
• Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries by Zhuangzi
• Mencius by Mencius
• Xunzi: The Complete Text by Xun Kuang
• The Scholars by Wu Jingzi
• The Art of War by Sun Tzu
• The Book of Lord Shang by Shang Yang

Chinese Literature

• A New Literary History of Modern China by David Der-wei Wang
• The Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong
• Outlaws of the Marsh by Shi Nai’an
• The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cáo Xuěqín
• The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei
• The Carnal Prayer Mat by Li Yu

Religion

• The Book of Job by Anonymous
• I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard
• The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
• Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer
• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book by Daniel M. Ingram
• Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by Robert Wright

Autobiography/Memoir

• Walden by Henry David Thoreau
• Pimp: The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
• Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
• The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell by Bertrand Russell
• The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
• Autobiography of Anthony Trollope by Anthony Trollope
• Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by JD Vance
• Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice by Bill Browder
• How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
• Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? By Max G Gergel
• Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel L. Everett
• Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Sports

• The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance by W. Timothy Gallwey
• Open by Andre Agassi
• Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder by Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
• Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

Interviews

• The Paris Review Interviews, I: 16 Celebrated Interviews by The Paris Review
• The Playboy Interview: The Essentials by Playboy Enterprises

Essays

• Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
• Urne Burial by Thomas Browne
• Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern by Douglas R. Hofstadter
• Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham
• Raw Thought, Raw Nerve: Inside the Mind of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz
• The Journal, 1837-1861 by Henry David Thoreau
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
• The Letters of JRR Tolkien by JRR Tolkien
• A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety by Donald Hall
• Popper Selections by Karl Popper
• Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology by Gregory Bateson
• The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem
• Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
• Hell Yeah or No: What’s Worth Doing by Derek Sivers
• Arguably: Selected Essays by Christopher Hitchens
• Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments by Michael Dirda
• Pandaemonium, 1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers by Humphrey Jennings

Urban Design

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud
• The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford
• Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser
• Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space by Keller Easterling
• The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald C. Shoup

Architecture

• How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built by Stewart Brand
• A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher W. Alexander
• Architecture: Form, Space, & Order by Francis DK Ching
• A Visual Dictionary of Architecture by Francis DK Ching
• Architects’ Data by Ernst Neufert
• The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
• In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki

Art

• The Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari
• The Story of Art by EH Gombrich
• Civilisation by Kenneth Clark
• The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form by Kenneth Clark
• The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle by Steven Pressfield
• Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles

Design

• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
• Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher W. Alexander
• Magic Ink Information Software and the Graphical Interface by Bret Victor
• Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons From Science Fiction by Nathan Shedroff
• Literary Machines by Theodor Holm Nelson
• Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte
• Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte
• The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
• Web Typography: A handbook for designing beautiful and effective responsive typography by Richard Rutter
• Logo Design Love: A Guide to Creating Iconic Brand Identities by David Airey

Game Design

• The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993–Illustrated Edition by Jordan Mechner
• The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell
• Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner
• The Digital Antiquarian Series by Jimmy Maher
• Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

Film Making

• The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje
• In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing by Walter Murch
• Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment by David Bordwell
• Hitchcock by François Truffaut
• Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky
• Charlie Chaplin My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin
• Roger Ebert’s Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the Finest Writing From a Century of Film by Roger Ebert
• The Great Movies by Roger Ebert

Music

• Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford
• Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap by Ben Westhoff
• Dirty South: OutKast, Lil Wayne, Soulja Boy, and the Southern Rappers Who Reinvented Hip-Hop by Ben Westhoff
• The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

Writing

• The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker
• On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser
• Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose by Francis-Noel Thomas
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
• Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro
• Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose

Literature

• The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom
• The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction by M.A. Orthofer
• The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
• How Fiction Works by James Wood
• Story Engineering: Character Development, Story Concept, Scene Construction by Larry Brooks
• The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner
• Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud
• Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form by Scott McCloud

Epic Poetry

• The Odyssey by Homer
• The Iliad by Homer
• Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained by John Milton
• The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
• The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous
• Beowulf by Unknown
• The Bhagavad Gita by Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
• The Conference of the Birds by Attar of Nishapur

Comics

• The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
• What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
• xkcd: volume 0 by Randall Munroe
• Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh
• Save Yourself, Mammal!: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection by Zach Weinersmith
• Homestuck by Andrew Hussie

Hard Sci-Fi

• Remembrance of Earth’s Past: The Three-Body Trilogy by Liu Cixin
• Radiance by Carter Scholz
• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
• Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
• The Martian by Andy Weir
• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
• The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
• Fine Structure by Sam Hughes
• The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
• Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Diaspora by Greg Egan
• Permutation City by Greg Egan
• Quarantine by Greg Egan
• Schild’s Ladder by Greg Egan
• Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott
• The Colonel by Peter Watts

Soft Sci-Fi

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
• A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
• Terra Ignota by Ada Palmer
• 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
• VALIS by Philip K. Dick
• Ubik by Philip K. Dick Ubik
• Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

Space Opera

• Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
• Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
• Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• The Culture Series by Iain M. Banks
• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
• Commonwealth Saga by Peter F. Hamilton

Cyberpunk

• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
• The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson
• Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling
• Accelerando by Charles Stross
• Singularity Sky by Charles Stross
• Glasshouse by Charles Stross
• A Signal Shattered by Eric S. Nylund
• Signal to Noise by Eric S. Nylund
• Void Star by Zachary Mason
• The Peripheral by William Gibson
• Jean le Flambeur Series by Hannu Rajaniemi
• City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams
• Friendship is Optimal by iceman
• The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams

Biopunk

• Blood Music by Greg Bear
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Military Sci-Fi

• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
• Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
• Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card
• The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
• Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
• Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
• Armor by John Steakley

First Encounter Sci-Fi

• Blindsight by Peter Watts
• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
• Contact by Carl Sagan
• Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
• Solaris by Stanisław Lem
• Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven
• Eon by Greg Bear
• Ringworld by Larry Niven
• The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

Dystopian Sci-Fi

• 1984 by George Orwell
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Time Travel Sci-Fi

• The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
• The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch
• 11/22/63 by Stephen King

Superhero Sci-Fi

• Watchmen by Alan Moore
• Worm by Wildbow
• The Metropolitan Man by Alexander Wales
• Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller

Science Fantasy

• The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
• Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
• Ra by Sam Hughes
• The Stand by Stephen King
• The Broken Earth by NK Jemisin

Literary Sci-Fi

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
• Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
• Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Sci-Fi Short Story

• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
• Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang
• The Egg by Andy Weir
• Reasons to be Cheerful by Greg Egan
• A Colder War by Charles Stross
• Axiomatic by Greg Egan
• The Study of Anglophysics and Other Stories by Scott Alexander
• I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

Fantasy Series

• The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
• The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien
• The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
• The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss
• His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
• Discworld by Terry Pratchett
• The Sandman by Neil Gaiman
• Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson
• The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson
• A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin
• The Dark Tower by Stephen King
• The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay
• Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan
• The First Law by Joe Abercrombie
• Gentleman Bastard by Scott Lynch
• The Mistborn Saga by Brandon Sanderson
• The Broken Empire by Mark Lawrence
• The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
• Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales
• The Wandering Inn by Pirateaba
• Mother of Learning by Nobody103

Fantasy

• Unsong by Scott Alexander
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky
• Chili and the Chocolate Factory: Fudge Revelation by gazemaize
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman
• Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
• Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
• A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay
• The Princess Bride by William Goldman
• The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant by Nick Bostrom
• Declare by Tim Powers

Wuxia

• The Legend of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong
• The Return of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong
• The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber by Jin Yong
• Demigods and Semi-Devils by Jin Yong
• The Deer and the Cauldron by Jin Yong
• The Smiling Proud Wanderer by Jin Yong
• The Book and The Sword by Jin Yong

Children’s Fantasy

• Watership Down by Richard Adams
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
• The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
• The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
• The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Horror

• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
• The Shining by Stephen King
• It by Stephen King
• The Interface Series by _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9
• The Gormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peake
• The Complete Works of HP Lovecraft by HP Lovecraft

Short Stories

• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
• Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov
• The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq by Hassan Blasim
• Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
• Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol by Nikolai Gogol
• The Complete Works of Isaac Babel by Isaac Babel
• The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

Classic Fiction

• Moby-Dick or, the Whale by Herman Melville
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Faust
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Hadji Murád by Leo Tolstoy
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• Immortality by Milan Kundera
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Fiction

• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Min kamp Series by Karl Ove Knausgård
• The House of God by Samuel Shem
• The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea
• Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys
• A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys
• Darconville’s Cat by Alexander Theroux
• The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
• The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq
• The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
• Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell
• The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis
• Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
• Shōgun by James Clavell
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
• The Godfather by Mario Puzo
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Plays

• Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
• Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
• A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt