Bookshelf

Below is a list of books I either own in hard copy or have read (title bolded) listed alphabetically by author’s last name, plus or minus a few mistakes. Books that I have read but do not own (e.g. borrowed from a friend or library) are denoted with an asterisk*. This list is far from complete, but hopefully will be there someday.

I also include bits of my commentary for some books. Maybe one day I’ll actually write some blog posts about these.

Nonfiction

  • Daron Acemoglu, Why Nations Fail
  • Stephone Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students
  • Stephen L. Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
  • Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
  • John Carreyrou, Bad Blood
  • Nicholas Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
  • Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
  • Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
  • Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?
  • Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley, As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom
    • Excellent for anyone interested in the history of Silicon Valley, and a must-read for anyone in the tech industry or a student at Stanford.
  • James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science
  • James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
  • Ted Gioia, How to Listen to Jazz
  • Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
    • Probably the best book I’ve ever read, and one that everyone should read.
  • Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
    • Sapiens is probably the best I’ve read, but Homo Deus is the book I think about the most.
  • Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons For The 21st Century
  • Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe
  • Walter Isaacson, The Innovators
  • Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
  • Mineko Iwasaki and Rande Gail Brown, Geisha of Gion
  • Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
    • One of the other best books I’ve read, and another must-read for anyone.
  • Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World
  • Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough*
  • Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind
  • Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
  • Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour
  • Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men
  • Camille Paglia, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars
  • Camille Paglia, Provocations
  • Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae
    • If you know what “chthonic” means then, you’ll enjoy this book.
  • Judea Pearl, The Book of Why
  • Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
  • Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning
  • P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media
  • Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
  • Jean Twenge, iGen: Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood–and What That Means for the Rest of Us
  • William von Hippel, The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy
  • M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine
  • Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis

Fiction

  • Isaac Asimov, Foundation
  • Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire
  • Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation
  • Isaac Asimov, Foundation’s Edge*
    • I am Gaia.
  • Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Earth
  • Isaac Asimov, Prelude to Foundation
  • Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation
  • Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
  • J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
  • J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
  • Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
    • I read this 10 times my senior year of high school for the Academic Decathlon competition (the same one as in Spiderman: Homecoming) and I don’t think I’ve been right ever since. The horror, the horror.
  • Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
  • Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
  • Michael Crichton, The Lost World
  • Michael Crichton, Micro
  • Michael Crichton, Prey
  • Michael Crichton, State of Fear
  • Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
  • David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
  • Kevin Kwan, Crazy Rich Asians
  • Kevin Kwan, China Rich Girlfriend
  • Kevin Kwan, Rich People Problems
  • Min Jin Lee, Pachinko
  • Francie Lin, The Foreigner
  • Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
  • Cormac McCarthy, The Road
  • Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
  • Ian McEwan, Atonement
  • Ian McEwan, Saturday
  • Haruki Murakami, After Dark*
  • Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
  • Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
  • Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women
  • Haruki Murakami, Norweigian Wood
  • Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
  • Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura
  • Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
    • What is quality?
  • J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
  • John Steinbeck, Canary Row
  • John Steinbeck, East of Eden
  • John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
  • John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat
  • George R. Stewart, Earth Abides

Textbooks and Reference

  • Boyd and Vandenberghe, Convex Optimization
  • Evans, Partial Differential Equations
  • Golub and Van Loan, Matrix Computations
  • Mallat, A Wavelet Tour of Signal Processing: The Sparse Way
  • Nocedal and Wright, Numerical Optimization
  • Pawitan, In All Likelihood
  • Pearl, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference