My Reading Years

2024

• Anaximander (Carlo Rovelli)

  

• The Eudemian Ethics (Aristotle)

  

• Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout (Cal Newport)

  

• Parmenides (Plato)

  

• Mister Miracle (Tom King)

  

• We Can Build You (Philip K. Dick)

  

• The Stars My Destination (Alfred Bester)

  

• Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (Philip K. Dick)

  

• Elon Musk (Walter Isaacson)

  

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J.K. Rowling)

  

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (J.K. Rowling)

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling)

• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (J.K. Rowling)

  

• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J.K. Rowling)

  

• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J.K. Rowling)

  

• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (J.K. Rowling)

  

• King Lear (William Shakespeare)

  

• Leonardo: The Complete Drawings (Frank Zöllner, Johannes Nathan)

  

• Valis (Philip K. Dick)

  

• The Cyberiad (Stanisław Lem)

  

• God Emperor of Dune (Frank Herbert)

  

• Children of Dune (Frank Herbert)

  

• Raphael: The Drawings (Catherine Whistler)

  

• Oration on the Dignity of Man (Giovanni Pico della Mirandola)

  

• Monday Starts on Saturday (Arkady & Boris Strugatsky)

  

• Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (Yamamoto Tsunetomo)

  

• The Path to Power (Robert Caro)

  

2023

• The World as Will and Representation (Arthur Schopenahuer)

• Lord of Light (Roger Zelazny)

• The True Life (Alain Badiou)

• Education as World-Building (Thomas Davidson)

• The Essential Jung: Selected Writings (Carl Jung, Anthony Storr)

• Roadside Picnic (Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky)

• The Little Book of Hygge (Meik Wiking)

• The Excellent Mind (Nathan L. King)

• My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla (Nikola Tesla)

• Tao Te Ching (Lao Tsu)

• Atomic Habits (James Clear)

• Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev)

• The Infinite Game (Simon Sinek)

• The Dream Master (Roger Zelazny)

• Islands in the Sky (Arthur C. Clarke)

• The City and the Stars (Arthur C. Clarke)

• The Epic of Gilgamesh (Anonymous)

• To Pixar and Beyond (Lawrence Levy)

• Childhood’s End (Arthur C. Clarke)

• Camp Concentration (Thomas M. Disch)

• How Big Things Get Done (Bent Flyvbjerg)

• Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert)

• Taste: My Life through Food (Stanley Tucci)

• How to Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie)

• Cratylus (Plato)

• The Time Machine (H.G. Wells)

• Philebus (Plato)

• A River Runs Through It (Norman Maclean)

• Relativity (Albert Einstein)

• The Bullet Journal Method (Ryder Carroll)

• The Habit of Excellence (Langley Sharp)

• The Magic of Thinking Big (David Schwartz)

• The Ride of a Lifetime (Robert Iger)

• The World as I See It (Albert Einstein)

• Current Controversies in Philosophy of Perception (Bence Nanay)

• Build (Tony Fadell)

• Start with Why (Simon Sinek)

• Associative Engines (Andy Clark)

• Make Something Wonderful (Steve Jobs)

• Possible Worlds and Other Stories (Rachel Handley)

• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Philip K. Dick)

• The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)

• Creativity, Inc (Ed Catmull)

• The Lean PhD (Julian Kirchherr)

• Attention and Mental Control (Carolyn Dicey Jennings)

• Foundations of Classical Oil Painting (Lea Colie Wright)

• Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)

• The Road (Cormac McCarthy)

• Steppenwolf (Hermann Hesse)

• Idealism: The History of a Philosophy (Jeremy Dunham, Iain Hamilton Grant, Sean Watson)

• The Undiscovered Self (Carl Jung)

• The Art Spirit (Robert Henri)

• Dune (Frank Herbert)

• Philosophy and Human Flourishing (ed. John Stuhr)

• The Lost Tools of Learning (Dorothy Sayers)

• Lonesome Traveler (Jack Kerouac)

• Quantum Electrodynamics: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Richard Feynman)

2022

• Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery (Roger Kneebone)

• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)

• Fact, Fiction and Forecast (Nelson Goodman)

• The Iliad (Homer)

• Attention (Wayne Wu)

• The Art of Creative Writing (Lajos Egri)

• Lysis (Plato)

• Blue Horses (Mary Oliver)

• Why I Wake Early (Mary Oliver)

• Dream Work (Mary Oliver)

• An Immense World (Ed Yong)

• Philosophy of Neuroscience (William Bechtel)

• The Metaphysics of Biology (John Dupre)

• On Philosophical Style (Brand Blanshard)

• Representation in Cognitive Science (Nicholas Shea)

• How to Study Natural History (Charles Kingsley)

• The Modularity of Mind (Jerry Fodor)

• What are Mental Representations? (ed. Joulia Smortchkova)

• Hemingway’s France: Images of the Lost Generation (Winston Conrad)

• Watchmen (Alan Moore)

• Johnny Mnemonic (William Gibson)

  

• Ghost in the Shell (Masamune Shirow)

  

• Hemingway Lives! (Clancy Sigal)

  

• Creative Selection (Ken Kocienda)

• The Library (Sarah Stewart)

  

• Principles of Color Design (Wucius Wong)

  

• Symbol (Angus Hyland)

  

• The Icon Book: Visual Symbols for Computer Systems and Documentation (William Horton)

  

• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design (Jason Beaird)

  

• Spinoza (Stuart Hampshire)

• Companions to Ancient Thought Vol 2: Psychology (ed. Stephen Everson)

  

• The Godfather (Mario Puzo)

  

• Too Loud a Solitude (Bohumil Hrabal)

  

• In the Margins (Elena Ferrante)

  

• Mockingbird (Walter Tevis)

  

• Ubik (Philip K. Dick)

  

• The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (Ernest Hemingway)

  

• The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)

  

• A Clean Well-Lighted Place (Ernest Hemingway)

  

• The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Ernest Hemingway)

  

• The Veldt (Ray Bradbury)

  

• Replay (Ken Grimwood)

  

• Impossible Dreams (Tim Pratt)

  

• Stein on Writing (Sol Stein)

  

• Lysistrata (Aristophanes)

  

• The Presentation of Reality (Helen Wodehouse)

  

• The Practice (Seth Godin)

  

• 265 Troubleshooting Strategies for Writers (Barbara Fine Clouse)

• The Mind’s Eye: The Art of Omni (Jeremy Frommer)

  

• Writing to Be Understood (Anne Janzer)

  

• Aristotle’s Way (Edith Hall)

  

• On the Characteristics of Animals Vol. 2 (Aelian)

  

• Super Thinking (Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann)

  

• The Man Who Fell to Earth (Walter Tevis)

  

• The Art of Rhetoric (Aristotle)

• Your Deceptive Mind (Steven Novella)

  

• Rhetoric to Herennius (Cicero)

  

• The Orator’s Education Books 9-10 (Quintilian)

  

• The Orator’s Education Books 6-8 (Quintilian)

  

• The Orator’s Education Books 1-2 (Quintilian)

• On the Orator Books 1-2 (Cicero)

• Ancient Rhetoric from Aristotle to Philostratus (Thomas Habinek)

• Phaedrus (Plato)

• Pleasure in Ancient Greek Philosophy (David Wolfsdorf)

• Seven Against Thebes (Aeschylus)

• Funding the Humanities PhD (J. Martin)

• Euthydemus (Plato)

• Laches (Plato)

• The Odyssey (Homer)

  

• Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus)

  

• Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche)

  

• Kitchen Confidential (Anthony Bourdain)

• Perspective Made Easy (Ernest Norling)

• The Dry Heart (Natalia Ginzburg)

• Queen of Teeth (Hailey Piper)

• New and Selected Poems Vol.2 (Mary Oliver)

• On Memory (Aristotle)

The Scout Mindset (Julia Galef)

• Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir)

2021

• Anton Wilhelm Amo: the intercultural background of his philosophy (Jacob Emmanuel Mabe)

• Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman)

• The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson)

• The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

• The Joy of Science (Robert M. Hazen)

• New York: Finger Paintings (Jorge Colombo)

• The Writer’s Desk (Jill Krementz)

• Strengths Based Leadership (Tom Rath, Barry Conchie)

• The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

• Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery: The 1758-60 Hertel Edition of Ripa’s ‘Iconologia’ with 200 Engraved Illustrations (Cesar Ripa, Edward Maser)

• Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (Baruch de Spinoza)

• Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism (Erwin Schrödinger)

• How the Two Ivans Quarrelled (Nikolai Gogol)

• The Tell-Tale Heart (Edgar Allan Poe)

• They’re Made Out of Meat (Terry Bisson)

• Felicity (Mary Oliver)

• The Balloon (Donald Barthelme)

• Nature (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

• Theaetetus (Plato)

• On Writing (Stephen King)

• Man Alone with Himself (Friedrich Nietzsche)

• First You Write a Sentence (Joe Moran)

• The Symposium (Plato)

• The Dharma Bums (Jack Kerouac)

• Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (Dr. Seuss)

• I Had Trouble in getting to Solla Sollew (Dr. Seuss)

• The Rings of Saturn (W.G. Sebald)

• Principal Doctrines and Letter to Menoeceus (Epicurus)

• The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

• Fragments (Democritus)

• Hot Water Music (Charles Bukowski)

• Enchiridion (Epictetus)

• Creative Writing: From Think to Ink (Simeon Lindstrom)

• Hour of the Star (Clarice Lispector)

• New and Selected Poems, Vol 1 (Mary Oliver)

• De Anima (Aristotle)

• The Velveteen Rabbit (Margery Bianco)

• The Mind of the Artist (Cicely Binyon)

• You & a Bike & a Road (Eleanor Davis)

• The Fragments (Heraclitus)

• The Overcoat (Nikolai Gogol)

• South of No North (Charles Bukowski)

• Eight O’Clock in the Morning (Ray Nelson)

• The Wedding Album (David Marusek)

• Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome)

• Ikonologia (Cesare Ripa)

• Down and Out in Paris and London (George Orwell)

• Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life (Jordan Peterson)

• Hunger (Knut Hamsun)

• Aesop’s Fables (Aesop)

• Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise (Katherine Rundell)

• The Bat-Poet (Randall Jarrell)

• Write No Matter What (Joli Jensen)

• Artforum (César Aira)

• How to Write a Thesis (Umberto Eco)

• A Room of One’s Own (Virginia Woolf)

• In the Theater of Consciousness (Bernard Baars)

• Art & Fear (David Bayles, Ted Orland)

• Happy Days (Samuel Beckett)

• Algorithms to Live By (Brian Christian)

• Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett)

• The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)

• On the Move: A Life (Oliver Sacks)

• A Promised Land (Barack Obama)

• On Drinking (Charles Bukowski)

• The Decision Book (Mikael Krogerus)

• Animal Farm (George Orwell)

  

2020

• Hemingway on Writing (Larry W. Phillips)

• My Second Home: Sylvia Plath in Paris, 1956 (Dave Haslam)

• A Doll’s House, Part 2 (Lucas Hnath)

• Obama: The Historic Presidency in Photographs (Pete Souza)

• The Godather (Mario Puzo)

• Painting on Location: Secrets to Plein Air Painting (David Curtis)

• In Search of Lost Time, Vol 1: Swann’s Way (Marcel Proust)

• Endurance (Scott Kelly)

• Beauty (Roger Scruton)

• Perception (Brian J. Rogers)

• Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide (Daniel J. Barrett)

• Autobiography (Laura Marcus)

• How to Write a Lot (Paul J. Silvia)

• Gateway (Frederik Pohl)

• Children of Time (Adrian Tchaikosvky)

• The Essence of Watercolour (Hazel Soan)

• The Urban Sketching Handbook: Architecture and Cityscapes (Gabriel Campanario)

• The Abolition of Man (C.S. Lewis)

• Becoming Steve Jobs (Brent Schlender)

• The Demon in the Machine (Paul Davies)

• Keep Going (Austin Kleon)

• You Are Here (Chris Hadfield)

• A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway)

• Working (Robert Caro)

• Draft No. 4 (John McPhee)

• One Man’s Wilderness (Richard Proenneke, Sam Keith)

• When (Daniel Pink)

• Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)

• Other Minds (Peter Godfrey-Smith)

• Never Split the Difference (Chris Voss)

• The Road (Cormac McCarthy)

• I Am Legend (Richard Matheson)

  

2019

• Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)

• Shoe Dog (Phil Knight)

• Blood, Sweat, and Pixels (Jason Schreier)

• On Writing (Stephen King)

• Essentialism (Greg McKeown)

• String Theory: On Tennis (David Foster Wallace)

• Zero to One (Peter Thiel)

• Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott)

• Why We Disagree about Human Nature (Elizabeth Hannon)

• The Yellow Wall-Paper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

• Born of Man And Woman (Ricard Matheson)

• Bad Blood (John Carreyrou)

• Can’t Hurt Me (David Goggins)

• Button, Button (Richard Matheson)

• On Writing Well (William Zinsser)

• Spinoza: Philosophy in an Hour (Paul Strathern)

• Show Your Work! (Austin Kleon)

• Rendezvous with Rama (Arthur C. Clarke)

• Steal Like an Artist (Austin Kleon)

• Daily Painting (Carol Marine)

• How to Paint Fast, Loose and Bold (Patti Mollica)

• The New New Journalism (Robert S. Boynton)

• The Millionaire Next Door (Thomas J. Stanley)

• Ultralearning (Scott H. Young)

• The Great Mental Models (Shane Parrish)

• Elon Musk (Ashlee Vance)

• Be Obsessed or Be Average (Grant Cardone)

• A Scanner Darkly (Philip K. Dick)

2018

• Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)

• What is Life? (Erwin Schrodinger)

• Mind in a Physical World (Jaegwon Kim)

• Mental Causation and Ontology (Sophie Gibb)

• Educated (Tara Westover)

• Philosophy of Biology (Elliott Sober)

• Sense and Nonsense (Kevin Laland, Gillian Brown)

• Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)

• Dreams from My Father (Barack Obama)

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn)

• Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari)

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

• The Alchemist (Paolo Coehlo)

• A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson)

• Descartes’ Error (Antonio Damasio)

• Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)

  

2017

• Structures (J.E. Gordon)

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain)

• Killing Time (Paul Feyerabend)

• More of My Life (Alfred Jules Ayer)

• The Demolished Man (Alfred Bester)

• The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett)

• The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)

2016

• The Man Who Fell to Earth (Walter Tevis)

• The Martian (Andy Weir)

• Ringworld (Larry Niven)

• The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)

• Van Gogh in Arles (Alfred Nemeczek)

• Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Quentin Skinner)

• On the Shortness of Life (Seneca)

  

• Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)

• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (John Locke)

• The Universe in a Mirror (Robert Zimmerman)

• Theory and Reality (Peter Godrey-Smith)

• Philosophy of Mind (Jaegwon Kim)

• The Problems of Philosophy (Bertrand Russell)

• No One Writes to the Colonel (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

• Foundation (Isaac Asimov)

• Stoner (John Williams)

• Philosophical Investigations (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

• The Art of War (Sun Tzu)

• The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)

• 

• Cosmos (Carl Sagan)

• Part of My Life: The Memoirs of a Philosopher (Alfred Jules Ayer)

2015

• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (David Hume)

• The Doors of Perception (Aldous Huxley)

• Earth Abides (George R. Stewart)

• Apology (Plato)

• The Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle)

• Theaetetus (Plato)

2014

• In Cold Blood (Truman Capote)

• The First Men in the Moon (H.G. Wells)

• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)

• Meditations on First Philosophy (Rene Descartes)

• Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Mark Haddon)

• The Outsider (Albert Camus)

• The Trial (Franz Kafka)

• Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)

• Siddhartha (Herman Hesse)

• Charmides (Plato)

• The Republic (Plato)

• Protagoras (Plato)

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S. Thomson)

• The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (David Chalmers)

• Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes)

• The Forever War (Joe Haldeman)

• Ready Player One (Ernest Cline)

• The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins)

• Climbing Mount Improbable (Richard Dawkins)

• I, Robot (Isaac Asimov)

2012

• Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (George Berkeley)

2008

• The Dice Man (Luke Rhinehart)

• The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)

2002

• The Wind Singer (William Nicholson)

Other reading lists I like:

• Austin Kleon
• Melanie Richards
• Art Garfunkel
• Christof Koch
• Derek Sivers
• Roger Strunk
• Frank Chimero
• Ben Kowalski
• Winston Hearn
• Jordan Koschei
• Chase M.
• Boris.
• Tom Critchlow
• Dave Rupert
• Mandy Brown
• Alan Kay
• Dustin Senos
• Juvoni Beckford
• Venkatesh Rao
• Linda Xie
• Ian Smith
• David Klein
• Diana Mounter
• David Chapman
• Gordon Brander