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