Reading List
A collection of books that have shaped my thinking across computation, biology, and philosophy. Hover for detail, click for reference.
Recommended Reads
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
Nick Bostrom
Who Owns the Future?
Jaron Lanier
The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
The Moral Landscape
Sam Harris
The Book of Why
Judea Pearl & Dana Mackenzie
Tales from Both Sides of the Brain
Michael S. Gazzaniga
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
Daniel C. Dennett
Philosophy of New Music
Theodor W. Adorno
Reasons and Persons
Derek Parfit
The Character of Physical Law
Richard P. Feynman
The Inevitable
Kevin Kelly
Technology, Programming & AI
9 items Who Owns the Future?
Jaron Lanier
The Inevitable
Kevin Kelly
AI and Machine Learning for Coders
Laurence Moroney
Algorithms to Live By
Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths
Basic Python in Finance
Bob Mather
Data Science from Scratch
Joel Grus
Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow
Aurélien Géron
Python Programming: 3 Books in 1
Ryan Turner
The Technological Republic
Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska
Science, Medicine & Bioinformatics
15 items The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
Tales from Both Sides of the Brain
Michael S. Gazzaniga
The Character of Physical Law
Richard P. Feynman
Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Bioinformatics: Sequence and Genome Analysis
David W. Mount
Brief Candle in the Dark
Richard Dawkins
Childhood Disrupted
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
Gel Electrophoresis of Proteins
B.D. Hames
Miracle Medicines
Robert L. Shook
Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum
Leonard Susskind & Art Friedman
Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words
David Lindsay
The Laws of Medicine
Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Strange Order of Things
Antonio Damasio
Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain
Michael S. Gazzaniga
Your Astonishing Brain
Robert L. Kuhn
Business, Finance & Leadership
12 items
48 Laws of Power
Robert Greene
Habit 1: Be Proactive
Stephen R. Covey
How Big Things Get Done
Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner
How to Win Friends & Influence People
Dale Carnegie
Joan Garry's Guide to Nonprofit Leadership
Joan Garry
Options Trading
Garth McCalister
The Lean Startup
Eric Ries
The Little Book of Behavioral Investing
James Montier
The Long View
Brian Fetherstonhaugh
The War on Normal People
Andrew Yang
Thick Face, Black Heart
Chin-Ning Chu
Think and Grow Rich
Napoleon Hill
Philosophy, Religion & Personal Growth
35 items Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
Nick Bostrom
The Moral Landscape
Sam Harris
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
Daniel C. Dennett
Philosophy of New Music
Theodor W. Adorno
Reasons and Persons
Derek Parfit
A History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
David Hume
Being and Time
Martin Heidegger
Beyond Good and Evil
Friedrich Nietzsche
Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant
Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World
Nick Bostrom
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Michel Foucault
Ethics in the Real World
Peter Singer
Fear and Trembling
Søren Kierkegaard
From Bacteria to Bach and Back
Daniel C. Dennett
Healthy Habits Suck
Dayna Lee-Baggley
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari
Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
Mastering the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense
Suzette Haden Elgin
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations on First Philosophy
René Descartes
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks
Yuval Noah Harari
Philosophy of Religion: An Audio Guide
Charles Taliaferro
Predictably Irrational
Dan Ariely
The Beginning of Infinity
David Deutsch
The End of Faith
Sam Harris
The Most Good You Can Do
Peter Singer
The Way of Zen
Alan Watts
Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Donella H. Meadows
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
Sam Harris
Why Buddhism is True
Robert Wright
History, Politics & Society
23 items The Book of Why
Judea Pearl & Dana Mackenzie
A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Robert M. Sapolsky
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
Tom O'Neill
Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire
Kurt Andersen
Manufacturing Consent
Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky
On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal
Naomi Klein
On Tyranny
Timothy Snyder
Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl
Skin in the Game
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
Yanis Varoufakis
The Dictator's Handbook
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith
The Echo Machine
David Pakman
The New Class War
Michael Lind
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli
The Shock Doctrine
Naomi Klein
The Square and the Tower
Niall Ferguson
And Yet...
Christopher Hitchens
God Is Not Great
Christopher Hitchens
Hitch-22: A Memoir
Christopher Hitchens
Letters to a Young Contrarian
Christopher Hitchens
The Trials of Henry Kissinger
Christopher Hitchens
Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism
Maajid Nawaz
Fiction, Classics & Memoirs
21 items
The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear
Walter Moers
1984 / Animal Farm
George Orwell
Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Darkness at Noon
Arthur Koestler
East of Eden
John Steinbeck
Ham: Slices of a Life
Sam Harris (Actor)
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
News from Nowhere
William Morris
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Caves of Steel
Isaac Asimov
The Eye of the World (Wheel of Time)
Robert Jordan
The Fyodor Dostoyevsky Complete Collection
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
The Stranger
Albert Camus
The Time Machine
H.G. Wells
Ulysses
James Joyce
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion