Books I've Read

2026

• An Ethic of Excellence — Ron Berger (October 2026)
• Where I Was From — Joan Didion (October 2026)
• Experience and Education — John Dewey (September 2026)
• Blue Nights — Joan Didion (September 2026)
• Working — Robert Caro (September 2026)
• The White Album — Joan Didion (September 2026)
• Under The Volcano — Malcolm Lowry (August 2026)
• Play It As It Lays — Joan Didion (August 2026)
• Emerson: The Mind on Fire — Robert Richardson Jr (August 2026)
• American Scripture — Pauline Maier (July 2026)
• Gilead — Marilynne Robinson (July 2026)
• Stoner — John Williams (July 2026)
• The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoyevsky (June 2026)
• Effective Java — Joshua Bloch (May 2026)
• Scum of the Earth — Arthur Koestler (April 2026)
• Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson (March 2026)
• Washington's Crossing — David Hackett Fischer (February 2026)
• Coming Into the Country — John McPhee (February 2026)
• Jesus Before the Gospels — Bart Ehrman (January 2026)
• The Kindly Ones — Jonathan Littell (January 2026)
• Warlock — Oakley Hall (January 2026)

2025

• Papyrus — Irene Vallejo (November 2025)
• A Short Stay in Hell — Steven Peck (October 2025)
• Lonesome Dove — Larry McMurtry (July 2025)
• Jax Trax — Jack Olive (May 2025)
• On Booze — F. Scott Fitzgerald (May 2025)
• Sula — Toni Morrison (May 2025)
• The Moral Basis of Democracy — Eleanor Roosevelt (April 2025)
• Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl (March 2025)
• The Diamond Age — Neal Stephenson (March 2025)
• Sovietistan — Erika Fatland (February 2025)
• The Tower — Kelly Cordes (January 2025)
• The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 — Gordon S. Wood (January 2025)

2024

• Founding Brothers — Joseph J. Ellis (November 2024)
• Sometimes a Great Notion — Ken Kesey (August 2024)
• Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It — M. Nolan Gray (June 2024)
• Levels of the Game — John McPhee (May 2024)
• Desert Solitaire — Edward Abbey (May 2024)
• What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems — Kim Addonizio (March 2024)
• Stay True — Hua Hsu (March 2024)
• Star Maker — Olaf Stapledon (March 2024)
• The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami — David Bentley Hart (January 2024)
• The Disappearance of God — Richard Elliott Friedman (January 2024)

2023

• Beloved — Toni Morrison (December 2023)
• The Control of Nature — John McPhee (December 2023)
• Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary — Linus Torvalds (November 2023)
• House of Light — Mary Oliver (November 2023)
• I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World — Rachel Nuwer (November 2023)
• The Bluest Eye — Toni Morrison (October 2023)
• The Tsar of Love and Techno — Anthony Marra (October 2023)
• Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke (September 2023)
• God's Playground: A History of Poland — Norman Davies (June 2023)
• Spare — Prince Harry (May 2023)
• The Year of Magical Thinking — Joan Didion (April 2023)
• Letters from the Earth — Mark Twain (April 2023)
• Who Wrote the Bible? — Richard Elliott Friedman (March 2023)
• VALIS — Philip K. Dick (February 2023)
• Europe Central — William T. Vollmann (February 2023)

2022

• Peacemaking among Primates — Frans de Waal (November 2022)
• Everything Flows — Vasily Grossman (October 2022)
• The Right Stuff — Tom Wolfe (August 2022)
• Where the Crawdads Sing — Delia Owens (June 2022)
• Life and Fate — Vasily Grossman (July 2022)
• Stalingrad — Vasily Grossman (April 2022)
• Mother Night — Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (March 2022)
• The Curve of Binding Energy — John McPhee (January 2022)
• Childhood's End — Arthur C. Clarke (January 2022)

2021

• Player Piano — Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (August 2021)
• A Scanner Darkly — Philip K. Dick (June 2021)
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch — Philip K. Dick (May 2021)
• Dispatches — Michael Herr (May 2021)
• Love, Kurt: The Vonnegut Love Letters, 1941-1945 — Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (April 2021)
• A Contract With God — Will Eisner (March 2021)
• Slaughterhouse-Five — Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (March 2021)
• Jax Trax — Jack Olive (February 2021)
• The Sirens of Titan — Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (January 2021)
• A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language — David Moser (January 2021)
• Zero K — Don DeLillo (January 2021)

2020

• Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook — Edward N. Luttwak (December 2020)
• Cat's Cradle — Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (December 2020)
• Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson (November 2020)
• Zen in the Art of Writing — Ray Bradbury (July 2020)
• Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin — Piers Bizony; Jamie Doran (April 2020)
• All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror — Stephen Kinzer (March 2020)
• Becoming Mrs. Lewis — Patti Callahan (March 2020)
• Last and First Men — Olaf Stapledon (January 2020)

2019

• God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian — Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (December 2019)
• Warts and All — Drew Friedman; Josh Alan Friedman (December 2019)
• Black Cracker — Josh Alan Friedman (November 2019)
• Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China — Philip P. Pan (November 2019)
• The Man in the High Castle — Philip K. Dick (September 2019)
• John Adams — David McCullough (August 2019)
• To the Finland Station — Edmund Wilson (May 2019)
• Darkness at Noon — Arthur Koestler (April 2019)
• Ho Chi Minh: A Life — William J. Duiker (April 2019)
• Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam — Frances FitzGerald (March 2019)
• Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir — Linnie Marsh Wolfe (February 2019)
• Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action — Elinor Ostrom (February 2019)
• Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction — Philip E. Tetlock; Dan Gardner (February 2019)
• Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (February 2019)
• The Hidden Wound — Wendell Berry (January 2019)
• The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America — Daniel J. Boorstin (January 2019)
• Annals of the Former World — John McPhee (January 2019)
• My Century — Günter Grass (January 2019)

2018

• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind — Julian Jaynes (December 2018)
• Cat's Cradle — Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (October 2018)
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed — James C. Scott (October 2018)
• Libra — Don DeLillo (September 2018)
• Vanity of Duluoz — Jack Kerouac (August 2018)
• American Pastoral — Philip Roth (July 2018)
• Encounters with the Archdruid — John McPhee (July 2018)
• Mastering the VC Game — Jeffrey Bussgang (May 2018)
• Sometimes a Great Notion — Ken Kesey (May 2018)
• Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor — Seth A. Klarman (April 2018)
• Venture Deals — Brad Feld; Jason Mendelson (April 2018)
• Ham on Rye — Charles Bukowski (April 2018)
• Childhood — Leo Tolstoy (April 2018)
• The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac — Graham Farmelo (April 2018)
• Fifteen Dogs — André Alexis (March 2018)
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest — Ken Kesey (March 2018)
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future — Peter Thiel (March 2018)
• East of Eden — John Steinbeck (February 2018)
• Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality — Jaron Lanier (February 2018)
• Bright Dead Things — Ada Limón (February 2018)
• A Farewell to Arms — Ernest Hemingway (February 2018)
• Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History — Art Spiegelman (February 2018)
• The Pale King — David Foster Wallace (January 2018)

Beyond

• 1984 — George Orwell
• A Confederacy of Dunces — John Kennedy Toole
• A Random Walk Down Wall Street — Burton G. Malkiel
• A Visit From the Goon Squad — Jennifer Egan
• Animal Farm — George Orwell
• Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
• Antifragile — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Ape and Essence — Aldous Huxley
• Between Heaven and Hell — Peter Kreeft
• Big Sur — Jack Kerouac
• Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
• Breakfast of Champions — Kurt Vonnegut
• Capital in the Twenty-First Century — Thomas Piketty
• Cod — Mark Kurlansky
• Cosmopolis — Don DeLillo
• Cosmopolitan Greetings — Allen Ginsberg
• Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Crome Yellow — Aldous Huxley
• Digest — Gregory Pardlo
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep — Philip K Dick
• Dogeaters — Jessica Hagedorn
• Dream Cities — Wade Graham
• Dreams of a Final Theory — Steven Weinberg
• East Eats West — Andrew Lam
• Einstein — Walter Isaacson
• Einstein's Dreams — Alan Lightman
• Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1) — Orson Scott Card
• Eyeless in Gaza — Aldous Huxley
• Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
• Fight Club — Chuck Palahniuk
• Foundation (Foundation, #1) — Isaac Asimov
• Go — John Clellon Holmes
• Gold in the Water — P.H. Mullen
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid — Douglas R. Hofstadter
• Guns, Germs, and Steel — Jared Diamond
• Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad
• History of the Peloponnesian War — Thucydides
• Homage to Catalonia — George Orwell
• Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace
• Into The Wild — Jon Krakauer
• Into Thin Air — Jon Krakauer
• Ishmael — Daniel Quinn
• Island — Aldous Huxley
• It's Not About the Bike — Lance Armstrong
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull — Richard Bach
• Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park, #1) — Michael Crichton
• Leda — Aldous Huxley
• Lonely Planets — David Grinspoon
• Look Homeward, Angel — Thomas Wolfe
• Lord of the Flies — William Golding
• Lords of Finance — Liaquat Ahamed
• Mao II — Don DeLillo
• Neuromancer — William Gibson
• Nightwood — Djuna Barnes
• On the Road — Jack Kerouac
• Open — Andre Agassi
• Prisoners of Geography — Tim Marshall
• Revelations — Elaine Pagels
• Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari
• Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse
• Steppenwolf — Hermann Hesse
• Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! — Richard P. Feynman
• Swimming to Antarctica — Lynne Cox
• The Accidental Universe — Alan Lightman
• The Beautiful and Damned — F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger
• The Dharma Bums — Jack Kerouac
• The Doors of Perception — Aldous Huxley
• The Emperor of All Maladies — Siddhartha Mukherjee
• The First Third — Neal Cassady
• The Genius and the Goddess — Aldous Huxley
• The Giver — Lois Lowry
• The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
• The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams
• The Ice Man — Philip Carlo
• The Iliad — Homer
• The Journey to the East — Hermann Hesse
• The Last Lecture — Randy Pausch
• The Lean Startup — Eric Ries
• The Metaphysical Club — Louis Menand
• The Mortifications — Derek Palacio
• The Outsiders — S.E. Hinton
• The Particle At the End of the Universe — Sean Carroll
• The Prince — Machiavelli
• The Shawl — Cynthia Ozick
• The Society of Mind — Marvin Minsky
• The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain — Kevin Nelson
• The Stranger — Albert Camus
• The Subterraneans — Jack Kerouac
• The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway
• The Things They Carried — Tim O'Brien
• The True Believer — Eric Hoffer
• This Boy's Life — Tobias Wolff
• This Side of Paradise — F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Three Lives — Gertrude Stein
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche
• To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
• Tuesdays with Morrie — Mitch Albom
• Ubik — Philip K Dick
• Uranium — Tom Zoellner
• Underworld — Don DeLillo
• Waging Nonviolent Struggle — Gene Sharp
• Walden — Henry David Thoreau
• When Google Met Wikileaks — Julian Assange
• White Noise — Don DeLillo
• Young Widower — John W. Evans
• Zealot — Reza Aslan
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Robert M. Pirsig