The following are books I found worth reading. Titles in bold are my favorites and/or the books I recommend most often.

Non-Fiction

  • Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
  • The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
  • Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom
  • The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham
  • The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
  • Profiles of the Future by Arthur C. Clarke
  • The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch
  • The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
  • Enchiridion by Epictetus
  • Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman
  • What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynman
  • The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: by Michel Foucault
  • The Diary of Young Girl by Anne Frank
  • Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
  • Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
  • The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges
  • The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmore
  • Genius by James Gleick
  • Chaos by James Gleick
  • The Second Coming of the KKK by Linda Gordon
  • The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
  • The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming
  • Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
  • A Mathematician’s Apology by GH Hardy
  • Lying by Sam Harris
  • The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
  • Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
  • Leonardo DaVinci by Walter Isaacson
  • Think on These Things by Krishnamurti
  • Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeil
  • The Way to Love by Anthony De Mello
  • Awareness by Anthony de Mello
  • The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz
  • The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
  • Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
  • Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker
  • The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
  • How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
  • A New World Begins by Jeremy Popkin
  • Skunk Works by Ben Rich
  • The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
  • Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
  • Lenin by Victor Sebestyen
  • Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
  • Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb
  • Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
  • Antifragile by Nassim Taleb
  • Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb
  • Zero to One by Peter Thiel
  • The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler
  • Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance
  • The Double Helix by James Watson
  • The Way of Zen by Alan Watts
  • The Book by Alan Watts
  • Physics of Wall Street by James Owen Weatherall
  • Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White, Jr.
  • Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe

Fiction

  • Foundation by Isaac Asimov
  • Persuasion by Jane Austen
  • Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  • The Fall by Albert Camus
  • The Plague by Albert Camus
  • The Stranger by Albert Camus
  • The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandle
  • Exhalation by Ted Chiang
  • The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  • As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
  • The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
  • Dead Souls by Nikolay Gogol
  • Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  • A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
  • The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  • Dune by Frank Herbert
  • Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
  • Brave New World by Arduous Huxley
  • Uzumaki by Junji Ito
  • The Castle by Franz Kafka
  • The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
  • The Trial by Franz Kafka
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  • Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  • 1984 by George Orwell
  • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
  • Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
  • Harry Potter (series) by JK Rowling
  • Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
  • No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
  • Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre
  • What Makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulberg
  • Hyperion by Dan Simmons
  • Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
  • The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
  • The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
  • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  • The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
  • Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  • The Martian by Andy Weir
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  • Stoner by John Williams
  • The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

Textbooks

  • Physical Chemistry by Peter Atkins
  • A Concise Introduction to Pure Mathematics by Martin Liebeck
  • The Organic Chemistry of Biological Pathways by John McMurry
  • Essential Calculus by James Stewart
  • Janeway’s Immunology by Casey Weaver



I generally wouldn’t recommend the following books

  • God’s Debris by Scott Adams
  • Facing the Anthropocene by Ian Angus
  • Getting Things Done by David Allen
  • Payoff: The Hidden Logic that Shapes Our Motivations by Dan Ariely
  • The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski
  • Bobos in Paradise (skimmed) by David Brooks
  • The Blue Zones Solution by Dan Buettner
  • Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich by McCloskey and Carden
  • How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
  • Influence by Robert Cialdini
  • Principles: Life & Work by Ray Dalio
  • The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
  • Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker
  • The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant
  • Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
  • The Meaning of It All by Richard Feynman
  • Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman
  • Six Not So Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman
  • Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
  • Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell
  • Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
  • Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
  • Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
  • Foundations of Applied Mathematics by Michael Greenberg
  • 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
  • Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari
  • Waking Up by Sam Harris
  • Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
  • Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath
  • The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday
  • Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday
  • Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
  • Einstein by Walter Isaacson
  • Thinking, Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman
  • The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
  • The Vital Question by Nick Lane
  • The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
  • Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart by Gordon Livingston
  • The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
  • Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
  • The Science of Can and Can’t by Chiara Marletto
  • Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr
  • Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
  • What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars by Paul and Moynihan
  • 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson
  • When by Daniel Pink
  • Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It by Kamal Ravikant
  • How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley
  • The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
  • Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
  • How to Invest by David Rubenstein
  • Behave by Robert Sapolsky
  • What is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger
  • Nudge by Cass Sunstein & Richard Thaler
  • Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil Degrasse Tyson
  • Art of War by Sun Tzu
  • String Theory by David Foster Wallace
  • I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong
  • On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Quit early:

  • Barbarian Days by William Finnegan
  • The Crystal Frontier by Carlos Fuentes
  • His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem
  • The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss



Chronological order