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.
This page was last updated on: 12/31/2020.
Recently Finished
- Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding
- Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe
- Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge
- Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror
- Laura Spinney, Pale Rider
- Benn Steil, The Marshall Plan
- Robert McKee, Dialogue
- Five Culture novels by Iain M. Banks
Now Reading (Fast)
- MOAR Culture novels
Now Reading (Slow)
- David Landes, Revolution in Time
- J. T. Fraser, Time, The Familiar Stranger
- Benjamin Bratton, The Stack
Queued/Maybe
- Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Europe
- Alexander Field, A Great Leap Forward
- Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
Recently Abandoned
- Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor
Respectable Dent
- James Scott, Against the Grain
- James Carse, The Religious Case Against Belief
- Andrew Grove, High Output Management
- Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things
- Robert Sapolsky, Behave
- Alfred T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History
- Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War
- Paul Feyerabend, Against Method
Antilibrary
- Morris Bishop, Petrarch and His World
- Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude
- James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy
- Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues
- David Lewis, We the Navigators
- Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand
- Burton G. Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street
- Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan
- Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild
- Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Politican Judgement
- Roger Schank, Tell me a Story
- Alfred Chandler, Scale and Scope
- Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
- David F. Noble, Forces of Production
- Brad Stone, The Everything Store
- Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
- Steven Levy, In the Plex
- David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect
- Rose George, The Big Necessity
- Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton
- Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form
- Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
- Marcus du Sautoy, Symmetry
- Ian Stewart, Why Beauty is Truth
- José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses
- José Ortega y Gasset, Towards a Philosophy of History
Top Recommendations
- Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
- Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic
- Tom Gauld, Mooncop
- Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror
- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
- Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix Plus
- Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay
- Bruno de Mesquita, The Dictator’s Handbook
- Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
- James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
- James Gleick, Time Travel: A History
- Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft
- Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile
- James Scott, Seeing Like a State
- Keith Johnstone, Impro
- Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
- Ron Chernow, Titan
- Charles Morris, The Tycoons
- T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon
- Pankaj Ghemawat, World 3.0
- Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order
- Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
- Samuel Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering
- William Whyte, The Organization Man
Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization - Marc Levinson, The Box
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
- Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches
- Carlotta Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
- Chet Richards, Certain to Win
- Robert Coram, Boyd
- Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail
- Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies
- George Steiner, Nostalgia for the Absolute
- Edmund S. Phelps, Mass Flourishing
Honorable Mentions
- James Gleick, The Information
- Vernor Vinge, Rainbow’s End
- George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral
- John Kay, Obliquity
Papers/Articles
- Karl Weick, What Theory is Not, Theorizing is
- Meyer and Rowan, Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony
- David Murray, That’s Interesting
- Juergen Schmidhuber, Driven by Compression Progress
- Douglas North, Institutions
- Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit
Video
(I only post/cite video content when the ideas are not available in book form)
- Bruce Sterling Reboot 11 Talk (transcript)
- Adam Curtis, Century of the Self
- Elizabeth Gilbert, TED talk on “daemons” and genius