Reading
What I read, and what it shaped — one shelf per year. 831 books read since 2013, 10 open on the desk now, and 1,300 still waiting.
Pick any spine to see what I thought of it. The blue-footed ones made it into the writing.
Spine size follows page count
On the desk 10 in progress On Board
Streets of Laredo
Streetwise
The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
The Eureka Machine
The Network State
The Scaling Era
The Sound of Life
The Upside of Stress
Whole Earth
In the writing 18 books across 8 essays Whistler Bel Canto These Precious Days Commonwealth Tom Lake The Dutch House Accelerando The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI A debt of The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI Cory Doctorow · The Last Frontier
Consilience God, Human, Animal, Machine The Nation We Knew Named in The Nation We Knew Steven Douglas Shepard · Fewer Secrets
How to Rule the World This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage Run State of Wonder Introduction to AI Safety, Ethics, and Society Author cited in Introduction to AI Safety, Ethics, and Society Dan Hendrycks · The Interruption
The Storyteller Co-Intelligence Author cited in Co-Intelligence Ethan Mollick · The Last 5%
2026 43 read · 22 at five stars Islands in the Stream
Train Dreams
Shibumi
Satori
From Grassroots to Greatness
Agentic Design Patterns
The Way of Excellence
The Unpublished David Ogilvy
The Field Guide to Design Futures
The New Lunar Society
Runnin' Down a Dream
Lonesome Dove
Breakneck
Good Writing
Data Strategy
The Scaling Curve
The Philosopher in the Valley
The Infinity Machine
We Are as Gods
The Last Economy
A Far-Flung Life
I Am Not a Robot
How to Rule the World
The AI Paradox
Incorruptible
Head Cases
Wind, Sand and Stars
Inside Man
A Room with a View
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Whistler
God, Human, Animal, Machine
Investing
Theo of Golden
The Deliberate Storyteller
The Algorithm
The Age of Spiritual Machines
On Writing
Two Paths to Prosperity
The Detective Up Late
The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI
On Grand Strategy
The CEO
2025 62 read · 32 at five stars Pastures of the Empty Page
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers
Horseman, Pass By
Tartine Bread
The Hunter
Think Again
Upstream
Stolen Focus
Magic Pill
The Old Man
Trust
Still Pictures
Janet Malcolm
The Nvidia Way
Onyx Storm
Gambling Man
All the Pretty Horses
The Bright Side
Introduction to AI Safety, Ethics, and Society
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
Reset
Private Equity
Building AI-Powered Products
The War of Art
Mindset
Thinking In Systems
The Secret of Cooking
Consilience
From Strength to Strength
Feeding the Machine
The Experimentation Machine
Always Day One
Supremacy
Empire of AI
Careless People
More Everything Forever
Let Him Go
Abundance
Proust and the Squid
Baking with Julia
This Is Strategy
The Technological Republic
Causal Artificial Intelligence
This Is Marketing
The Book of Why
Causal Inference
The View From Lake Como
When It All Burns
Upgrade
Say Nothing
Could Should Might Don't
The Missing Billionaires
Humanly Possible
Click Here
Accelerando
The Uncool
Marketcrafters
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
The First 90 Days
Imaginable
They Say / I Say
Exponential Organizations 2.0
2024 58 read · 36 at five stars The Ministry for the Future
Big Bets
How Innovation Works
Attention Span
Iron Flame
The Geek Way
Demon Copperhead
The Code of the Extraordinary Mind
Outline
Better Days
The Creative Act
Burn Book
Hidden Potential
The Blue Zones Secrets for Living Longer
A Brief History of Intelligence
Poor Charlie's Almanack
Gene Machine
Chain-Gang All-Stars
Fight Right
A Gentleman in Moscow
The Opposable Mind
Playing to Win
The Best Minds
The Worlds I See
Somehow
Co-Intelligence
The Outsiders
Think Remarkable
Rules of Civility
How to Know a Person
Not the End of the World
Growth Levers and How to Find Them
Table for Two
Slow Productivity
James
Amp It Up
City in Ruins
Mastering AI
LIT
Supercommunicators
Infectious Generosity
Klara and the Sun
Quantum Radio
Thanks for the Feedback
Nexus
Vines & Vision
The Digitalist Papers
I Am Pilgrim
If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?
Navigating Ambiguity
The Singularity Is Nearer
Playground
Creative Hustle
Doppelganger
Make Possibilities Happen
The Every
Artificial Intelligence
Gilead
2023 71 read · 49 at five stars The Art of Cooking Omelettes
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Why We Sleep
Booze & Vinyl Vol. 2
Life Force
Chip War
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Exponential Technology Series)
Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series)
Smart Brevity
Abundance: The Inner Path to Wealth
The Trees
The Signals Are Talking
The Big Nine
The Rational Optimist
Proof of Stake
Young Forever
The Genesis Machine
Pitchology
7 Powers
Designing Your Life
Gnar Country
Let My People Go Surfing
How Will You Measure Your Life?
Dr. No
Excellent Advice for Living
Sustainable
The Sky's the Limit
Your Erroneous Zones
The Anthropocene Reviewed
The Fault in Our Stars
Looking for Alaska
Creative Company
The Carbon Almanac
Your Next Season
The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy
The Master Algorithm
Pulling Your Own Strings
In the Company of Giants
Mastering Uncertainty
The Messy Middle
The Novel
The Paradox of Choice
Razorblade Tears
Impromptu
The Power of Crisis
I, Me, Mine
Horse
Tom Lake
Quench
Outlive
Anatomy of a Breakthrough
Tales of the South Pacific
The Last Flight
State of Wonder
The Zen of Therapy
Run
Commonwealth
Killers of the Flower Moon
These Precious Days
Power and Progress
Bel Canto
The Coming Wave
The Psychopath Test
The Hero's Farewell
Firing Back
Fourth Wing
Clear Thinking
Man's Search for Meaning
This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
The Alter Ego Effect
Beyond Good and Evil
2022 78 read · 47 at five stars Cookies
Booze and Vinyl
Snow Crash
Taste
Hell of a Book
When We Cease to Understand the World
AI 2041
Great Circle
The Writing Life
Dieter Rams
The Anomaly
Bird by Bird
Jacques Pépin Celebrates
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The New Map
How to Decide
Our Country Friends
The Laws of Simplicity
The Book of Hope
How to Speak Machine
Fauci
The Obstacle Is the Way
The Age of AI and Our Human Future
A Visit from the Goon Squad
In the Margins
Deep Sleep
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 50th Anniversary Edition
Farm (and Other F Words)
The Stranger
The Candy House
Here Let Us Feast
Build
Sea of Tranquility
City on Fire
The Hawke Method
The Midnight Library
The Psychology of Money
Reap3r
Greenlights
Silicon Valley Porn Star
The Power Law
Manhattan Beach
The Lost Daughter
Mastery
The Storyteller
The Metaverse
The Elements of Pizza
Sandworm
The Cold Start Problem
The Business of Venture Capital
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Thirst
Navigating the Metaverse
The Suitcase Clone
What We Owe the Future
Water Always Wins
The Success Equation
Immortality, Inc.
Adrift
Picasso's War
Winners Take All
The Future Is Faster Than You Think
Post Corona
Falling
The Chaos Machine
How Buildings Learn
The Flavor Bible
The Emperor of All Maladies
The Extraordinary Power of Leader Humility
Winter Work
Our Missing Hearts
Tracers in the Dark
White Noise
Reader, Come Home
American Dirt
Lighter
The Food Lab
2021 73 read · 49 at five stars Writers & Lovers
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION
Transcendent Kingdom
Homegoing
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
A Promised Land
The Sentinel
Humankind
Tiny Love Stories
This Idea Is Brilliant
The Girl Beneath the Sea
Black Coral
A Time for Mercy
Attack Surface
Writers & Lovers
The Nation We Knew
The Bourne Identity
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Nomad
The Last Days of John Lennon
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
The Practice
Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
Dark Sky
The Fate of Food
The Four
Eternal
The Venice Sketchbook
Jim Wagner, Taos
Lifespan
The Code Breaker
Blacktop Wasteland
The Mamba Mentality
Start with Why
Noble Ultimatum
Exhalation
Enough
The Circle
Under a White Sky
The Pattern Seekers
Draft No. 4
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends
Burn
The Art of Impossible
The Rise of Superman
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Stealth War
Sprinting Through No Man's Land
The Premonition
World Travel
The Hacker and the State
The Hellfire Club
Manifesto for a Moral Revolution
The Spy and the Traitor
Bewilderment
The Lincoln Highway
Project Hail Mary
The Sweetness of Water
Silverview
Forget the Alamo
Gourmet Today
The Overstory
Atomic Habits
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
Enemy at the Gates
The Dutch House
How to Cook Everything
Meditations
Speed & Scale
One Big Table
Cloud Cuckoo Land
Call Us What We Carry
2020 66 read · 40 at five stars The Best American Food Writing 2018
Subscription Marketing
Of Windmills and War
In Defense of Food
Technology-as-a-Service Playbook
Quantum Lens
The Turing Exception
The One Device
It Takes What It Takes
The Dream Machine
Fierce Heart
When
The Seventh Sense
Superminds
The Membership Economy
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
The Forever Transaction
Owning Game-Changing Subcategories
Last Bus to Wisdom
The Tides of Mind
A Year in Provence
Ego Is the Enemy
The Infinite Retina
Toujours Provence
Communicating
Veil
All Those Things We Never Said
Obviously Awesome
Cheater's Game
Breaking Smart
A Woman Like Her
Solomon vs. Lord
Replay
Best Food Writing 2016
Boundless Ambition
Kill All the Lawyers
Perilous Bounty
Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It? (Global Futures)
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking
Mastering Pasta
The Last Monument
The Critical Mind
Winter World
The Solar War
The Best American Food Writing 2019 (The Best American Series)
The Road
Soup, Beautiful Soup
The Lost Colony
Long Range
The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet
2030
Squeeze Me
How to Lead
In This Together
Special Circumstances
Pandemic
Genome
The Right Man for Revenge
A Man Made for Killing
Tips for Living
Invent and Wander
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Get the Word Out
Authorpreneur
The Connection Algorithm
2019 88 read · 48 at five stars The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
The Art of Eating
Ava's Man
Non-Obvious 2019
What Child Is This
The Story of Arthur Truluv
Past Tense
The Sound of Cherry Blossoms
The First Conspiracy
The Sommelier's Atlas of Taste
The Last of the Stanfields
Secrets of the Sommeliers
If Only It Were True
The Physiology of Taste
Gridiron Genius
Twist and Turn
Chasing Ivan
Falling Stars
The Lies of Spies
The Border
Blue Highways
Eating Words
The Killer Collective
Eat to Beat Disease
Livia Lone
Beyond the Shadow of Night
The Winemaker's Secret
The Omnivore's Dilemma
Breach
The Price of Time
The Botany of Desire
The Night Trade
The Last Unknowns
AI Superpowers
Where the Forest Meets the Stars
Benjamin Franklin
Down the River Unto the Sea
The Gourmet Cookbook
Bouchon Bakery (The Thomas Keller Library)
Goodbye Paris
Little Scarlet
Hagakure
Elon Musk
Red Russia
Three Weeks To Say Goodbye
Mrs. Kennedy and Me
Tender at the Bone
Devil in a Blue Dress
The Chain
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
Save Me the Plums
The Farm
Dodgers
Happiness Is Baking
Wolf Pack
Plainsong
Daisy Jones & The Six
Eventide
Machine, Platform, Crowd
The Spatial Web
Open Season
Benediction
The Writers Success Code
The Woman in Our House
Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain
Correspondents
Old Heart
All the Devils
The Soul of America
The Man with No Borders
A Curve in the Road
In Farleigh Field
Dark Matter
Straight Man
Hackers & Painters
SYSTEMANTICS. THE SYSTEMS BIBLE
Grain Brain
Empire Falls
Permanent Record
Chances Are . . .
All Over But the Shoutin'
Ray K. Metzker
Thank You for Being Late
Recursion
Trillion Dollar Coach
That Wild Country
Subscribed
An Equal Justice
2018 66 read · 34 at five stars Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste
Decanting a Murder
Confessions of the Pricing Man
Summary: Thinking, Fast and Slow: by Daniel Kahneman
Book of Five Rings
Unlimited Memory
Fire and Fury
Cork Dork
A River in Darkness
Platform Revolution
A Hard Man to Forget
Thin Line
The Kremlin's Candidate
Feel Free
Bringing It Home
Skin in the Game
A Tangled Mercy
Life 3.0
The Disappeared
Swell
Bandwidth
I Wrote This For You
Ricochet Joe
True Fiction
WTF?
Non-Obvious 2018 Edition
Always Eat Left Handed
The Vine Whisperer
Take Off Your Shoes
That Month in Tuscany
Avogadro Corp
A.I. Apocalypse
The Tuscan Child
The Last Firewall
Bad Blood
Calypso
Star of the North
Kitchen Confidential
Lies that Bind Us
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste
The Terminal List
The Voyage of the Cormorant
War on Peace
One Rough Man
Coach Wooden and Me
The Runaway Species
Leonardo da Vinci
Invisible
How to Change Your Mind
The Wizard of Menlo Park
Building the Web of Things
The Escape Artist
UNSUB
Before We Were Yours
Creativity, Inc.
The Power of the Dog
November Road
The Dawn Patrol
Borderless
Dark Sacred Night
The Best Cook in the World
Educated
Dance with the Enemy
Paddling My Own Canoe
Paula Scher
2017 81 read · 37 at five stars Everybody Matters
Whiplash
How Google Works
A Fine Line
The Unlimited Self
Hustle
Normal
Night School
Inca Gold, Spanish Blood
Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series)
Exponential Organizations
Digital Fortress
The Book of Joy
The Sellout
Chaos Monkeys
Who
The Upstarts
Stories of Your Life and Others
Noble Beginnings
Where the Water Goes
The Fix
No Middle Name
Essentialism
Killing Floor
No Limits
The Black Ice
Scaling Up
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
The Lost City of the Monkey God
Daring Greatly
A Song for the Asking
American Wino
True Blue (A Short Story)
Change Agent
Simply Brilliant
Tangled Vines
How We Got to Now
Writing Dialogue
Quiet
Dead Certain
The Man Who Planted Trees
The Late Show
Homo Deus
Paradise Valley
Liminal Thinking
Pushing Brilliance
Build The Fort
The Start-Up J Curve
Red Eye
Pirate Utopia
Grit
IoT Inc.
Mirror Worlds
Uncorking a Lie
The Art of War
Principles: Summary
The One Inside
Our Souls at Night
Scale
Origin
A Deadly Distance
The Designer
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Two Kinds of Truth
The Quantum Spy
The Midnight Line
Artemis
Merry Christmas, Mr. Brown
A Brave Day for Harold Brown
The Lean Startup
P.S. from Paris
Only the Rain
The Undoing Project
The Startup Way
Startup Boards
When Breath Becomes Air
The Boys in the Boat
Principles: Life and Work
Saltwater Buddha
Brunch at Bobby's
2016 52 read · 22 at five stars The Future Chronicles
Make Me
Hooked
Hardwired
The Survivor
The Martian
To Speak for the Dead
The Crossroads of Should and Must
The Guilty
INSIGHTS
Life
The Term Sheet
Uncommon Stock: Version 1.0
Uncommon Stock: Power Play
Uncommon Stock: Exit Strategy
Bit by Bit
Badlands
The Startup of You
Future Perfect
Cheat Sheet
Summary: Mindset The New Psychology of Success…in 2 Minutes - The Fast and Practical Summary of Carol Dweck's Best Selling Book
Leading Digital
The Third Wave
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
The Coaching Habit
Anticipating 2025
White Sands
Twelve Tomorrows 2016
The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things
The Inevitable
Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink
It's a Long Story
Seveneves
Why Diets Make Us Fat
Connectography
Barbarian Days
Hardpressed
Mastering Massive Complexity
Psycho-Cybernetics
Big Data
Extreme Ownership
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Cumulus
Overcomplicated
The Code Thief
A Truck Full of Money
Inventing Wine
Choose Yourself
Neon Fever Dream
Shoe Dog
Tools of Titans
The Alchemist
2015 25 read · 8 at five stars No Better Time
Playing for Pizza
Jony Ive
Illuminations
McNally's Bluff
The Burning Room
Twelve Days
Personal
Becoming Steve Jobs
Endangered
Memory Man
The Cartel
Black List
Hidden Order
Act of War
Code of Conduct
Palace of Treason
Red Sparrow
Wired
Amped
Darknet
Small Wars
The Second Machine Age
Trillions
Future Visions
2014 6 read · 3 at five stars Smarter Than You Think
Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook
Startup CEO
Steve Jobs
Stone Cold
Deliver Us from Evil
2013 4 read · 4 at five stars Unbroken
The Winner
Last Man Standing
Absolute Power
Read, date not logged 58 books Angels & Demons
Brightstar
Catching Fire
City of Bones
Extraordinary Minds
Freakonomics
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Home Again in Paris
How to Win Friends & Influence People
In Cold Blood
Inferno
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Joy of Cooking
Many Lives, Many Masters
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Mockingjay
Neuromancer
Night Vision
Orbiting the Giant Hairball
Plum Island
Romeo and Juliet
Sapiens
Savages
Scaling Up Excellence
Serve It Forth
Stories of Rell Sunn
The Anomaly
The Black Swan
The Bridges of Madison County
The Crossing
The Da Vinci Code
The Finding
The Founder's Dilemmas
The Gastronomical Me
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
The Giving Tree
The Goal
The Good Earth
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games Trilogy Boxset
The Idea Factory
The Innovator's Solut!on
The Kings of Cool
The Lincoln Lawyer
The Lost Symbol
The Millionaires
The Old Man and the Sea
The Prophet
The Road Less Traveled
The Silence of the Lambs
The Tipping Point
To Kill a Mockingbird
Tuesdays with Morrie
Venture Deals
Web Squared
What is Web 2.0
Zero to One
Kept on Goodreads and current to October 19, 2026.
Links to essays are chosen by hand.