Now Reading

This is a partial view of my reading pipeline. The left column is based on the last few years. The right column is a lifetime list. Links are affiliate links.

Pandemic Reading

Finished/In-Progress

  1. Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding
  2. Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe
  3. Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge
  4. Safi Bahcall, Loonshots

Live reads twitter thread

Queued

  1. Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror
  2. Laura Spinney, Pale Rider
  3. Benn Steil, The Marshall Plan
  4. Alexander Field, A Great Leap Forward
  5. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

Maybes

  1. Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Europe
  2. Gina Kolata, Flu
  3. Alfred Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic
  4. John Barry, The Great Influenza

Now Reading (ON HOLD)

  1. David Landes, Revolution in Time
  2. J. T. Fraser, Time, The Familiar Stranger
  3. Benjamin Bratton, The Stack

Recently Finished

  1. 30 Terry Pratchett Discworld Novels
  2. Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic
  3. Jomny Sun, Everyone’s an Aliebn When You’re an Aliebn Too
  4. Philip K. Dick, A Maze of Death
  5. Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed
  6. Daniel Yergin, The Quest
  7. Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
  8. Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar’s Guide to the City
  9. Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor
  10. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft

Respectable Dent

  1. James Scott, Against the Grain
  2. James Carse, The Religious Case Against Belief
  3. Andrew Grove, High Output Management
  4. Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things
  5. Robert Sapolsky, Behave
  6. Alfred T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History
  7. Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War
  8. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method

Antilibrary

  1. Morris Bishop, Petrarch and His World
  2. Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude
  3. James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy
  4. Deirdre McCloskey, The  Bourgeois Virtues 
  5. David Lewis, We the Navigators
  6. Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand
  7. Burton G. Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street
  8. Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan
  9. Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild
  10. Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Politican Judgement
  11. Roger Schank, Tell me a Story
  12. Alfred Chandler, Scale and Scope
  13. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
  14. David F. Noble, Forces of Production
  15. Brad Stone, The Everything Store
  16. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
  17. Steven Levy, In the Plex
  18. David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect
  19. Rose George, The Big Necessity
  20. Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton
  21. Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form
  22. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
  23. Marcus du Sautoy, Symmetry
  24. Ian Stewart, Why Beauty is Truth
  25. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses
  26. José Ortega y Gasset, Towards a Philosophy of History

Recently Abandoned

Top Recommendations

  1. Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read 
  2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
  3. Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix Plus
  4. Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay
  5. Bruno de Mesquita, The Dictator’s Handbook
  6. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
  7. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
  8. Gregory Berns, Satisfaction
  9. James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
  10. James Gleick, Time Travel: A History
  11. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
  12. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile
  13. James Scott, Seeing Like a State
  14. Keith Johnstone, Impro
  15. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
  16. Ron Chernow, Titan
  17. Charles Morris, The Tycoons
  18. T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon
  19. Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided
  20. David Allen, Getting Things Done
  21. Pankaj Ghemawat, World 3.0
  22. Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order
  23. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
  24. Samuel Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering
  25. William Whyte, The Organization Man
  26. Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization
  27. Marc Levinson, The Box
  28. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
  29. Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches
  30. Carlotta Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
  31. Chet Richards, Certain to Win
  32. Robert Coram, Boyd
  33. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail
  34. Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies
  35. George Steiner, Nostalgia for the Absolute
  36. Edmund S. Phelps, Mass Flourishing

Honorable Mentions

Papers/Articles

Video

(I only post/cite video content when the ideas are not available in book form)