Bookshelf

A list of books (and other pieces) I enjoyed reading and would rate anywhere from “worth checking out” to “completely changed how I view the world”. Particularly great ones are marked with an asterisk.

I also track most of my reading on goodreads, so feel free to follow me over there.

Textbooks

• * Molecular Biology of the Cell
• * Statistical Rethinking

Non-Fiction

• * An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
• Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design
• Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader
• Complexity: A Guided Tour
• Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
• Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
• The Design of Everyday Things
• Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
• * The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology
• * Energy and Civilization: A History
• Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
• Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech
• Gottlieb Duttweiler
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
• Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations
• How Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life
• The Laws of Trading: A Trader’s Guide to Better Decision-Making for Everyone
• Living With Complexity
• The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993
• Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
• Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
• Notes on the Synthesis of Form
• On The Move: A Life
• The Periodic Table
• Poor economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
• * The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Mkaing Us Smarter
• * Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
• Seven Days in the Art World
• The Soul of a New Machine
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer
• Thinking, Fast and Slow
• Uncle Tungsten: Memoirs of a Chemical Boyhood
• Unflattening
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News
• Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design
• * The World of Yesterday
• Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019

Fiction

• * The Aleph and Other Stories
• Americanah
• * Anna Karenina
• Breakfast of Champions
• The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
• * Exhalation
• * Fictions
• * Invisible Cities
• The Left Hand of Darkness
• The Machine Stops
• My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels)
• The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
• Pnin
• * Stories of Your Life and Others
• The Trial

Blog Posts, Essays, Papers

• Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory
• Stop aggregating away the signal in your data
• How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily
• Four Ways to Scale Up: Smart, Dumb, Forced, and Fumbled
• What Is Code?
• The Eleven Laws of Showrunning
• The Use of Knowledge in Society
• Towards a theory of conceptual design for software
• Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?
• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
• Schleps, Puzzles, and Packages: Solving Complex Problems the Iron Man Way
• Reality has a surprising amount of detail
• Driven by Compression Progress
• What Colour are your bits?
• I should have loved biology
• The Bitter Lesson

Other People’s Shelves

I found a lot of the best books I’ve read through other people’s recommendations. The best way to do that is to just follow interesting people online, but some maintain interesting lists on their own websites:

• Bret Victor
• Geoffrey Litt
• Patrick Collison
• Tyler Cowen
• Gavin Leech’s list of books and technical books
• Jacob Kimmel
• Gordon Brander