My full reading list is available on Goodreads. This list is ordered chronologically with more recent reads at the top.
The Summer Book
by Tove JanssonCharming vignettes of life on an island in the Gulf of Finland during summer. Nostalgic yet (somehow) not overly sentimental.
A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
by Robert SapolskyPeople mistake this for a popular science book, but it's actually one of the best travel books anyone has written.
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
by Nadia EghbalReally good at highlighting how the economic and social incentives around maintaining open source software greatly differ from what most people think.
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
by Gordon S. WoodPsychologically astute biography of Franklin that cuts through all the mythology. I was shocked how interesting and different his story is compared to what I thought I knew.
Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific 1944-1945
by Ian W. TollHelped me appreciate how miraculous it is that the War in the Pacific ended without even greater bloodshed.
Piranesi
by Susanna ClarkeA strange and wonderful puzzle. It reminds me more of games like Myst or The Witness than of any other book.
Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
by Melanie MitchellA useful reality check on the possibility of general AI in the near future.
How to Take Smart Notes
by Sonke AhrensReally about how thought and writing are intertwined and what the implications of that might be for education.
Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help
by Larissa MacFarquharSeveral critics failed to recognize that this book's refusal to draw moral conclusions about its subjects is a great strength, rather than a failing.
Secondhand Time: An Oral History of the Fall of the Soviet Union
by Svetlana AlexievichInterviews with people who can remember what it was like before modernity.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
by Timothy SnyderVery grim, as you might expect. It can be useful, though, to remember history's great capacity for inhumanity.
Inhuman Land
by Józef CzapskiStunning first-person account of a Polish officer's experience of World War II. I envy Czapski's sensitivity to art and poetry.
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail BulgakovAnti-Soviet satire. But the real attraction here is the novel's characterization of Satan.
The Right Stuff
by Tom WolfeDidion once said that writers are always selling somebody out. Presumably, she had Tom Wolfe in mind. This is a hatchet job. But god damn if it's not artfully done.
The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands 1942-1944
by Ian W. TollA perfect survey of the war in the Pacific theater. By the way, that part of the war remains grossly underrated as a historical subject.
The Conflict Shoreline: Colonialism as Climate Change in the Negev Desert
by Eyal Weizman and Fazal SheikhA forensic history of the Negev desert, but channeling Braudel and James C. Scott. I don't share the authors' political views and it still drew me in.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
by Atul GawandeChanged how I think about aging. So much so that I felt almost physically ill as I read it.
The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature
by David George HaskellNominally about forest ecology. Really about the limits of human observation and mindfulness. Those limits are further out than most of us realize.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
by Philip TetlockI would start here if I ever needed to make serious predictions.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
by Thomas KuhnSo much of the existing thought about our future would benefit from taking Kuhn more seriously.
The Last Samurai
by Helen DeWittUltimately, this one is about how to cope with the world when it fails to live up to our expectations.
Suttree
by Cormac McCarthyMcCarthy channeling a gothic Huck Finn. As close to self-recommending as you can get.
The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
by Bryan CaplanWell argued and persuasive, but perhaps too radical for its own good. In my experience, few people who read this change their behavior, but should that count against the book or against the people?
The Magic Mountain
by Thomas MannMann covers so much ground and has so many ideas that this is like reading twenty novels interwoven together.
Awakenings
by Oliver SacksMakes you feel like the world is bigger and more alien than you imagined. We could all use more of that on a day-to-day basis.
Pnin
by Vladimir NabokovNabokov's most underrated novel. Ridiculously charming, while still capable of being quite sad.