Bookshelf

Updated 12/07/2025

Currently Reading

• Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System–and Themselves, by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Here’s an incomplete list of books I’ve read or started and didn’t finish¹.

Recent

• The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
  • I also recommend the audiobook version read by the author.
• The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 , by Lawrence Wright
• Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, by Joby Warrick
• Apollo 13, by James Lovell & Jeffrey Kluger
• First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, by James R. Hansen
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers―Straight Talk on the Challenges of Entrepreneurship, by Ben Horowitz
  • The audioboook is also excellent. Narrated by Kevin Kenerly.
• Project Hail Mary: A Novel, by Andy Weir
• DevSecOps for Azure: End-to-end supply chain security for GitHub, Azure DevOps, and the Azure cloud, by David Okeyode & Joylynn Kirui

Full list

• Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking, Catherine Collins & Douglas Frantz

• The Winds of Change…And Other Stories, Isaac Asimov

• The Robots of Dawn, Isaac Asimov

• I, Asimov: A Memoir, Isaac Asimov

• Robots and Empire, Isaac Asimov

• Enemies, A Love Story, Isaac Singer

• The Stars, Like Dust, Isaac Asimov

• The Great SF Stories, Isaac Asimov

• Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov

• Foundation, Isaac Asimov

• The Best of Wednesday Crosswords, Will Shortz

• The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein

• Deception Point, Dan Brown

• When the Air Hits Your Brain, Frank T. Vertosick Jr.

• The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene

• The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene

• From Eternity to Here, Sean Carroll

• The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard Feynman

• The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James

• The King of the Fields, Isaac Bashevis Singer

• Dialogues Conerning Natural Religion, David Hume

• The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins

• The Annotated Turing, Charles Petzold

• Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman

• QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard Feynman, With A.Zee (Introduction)

• The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

• The Particle at the End of the Universe, Sean Carroll

• Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant

• On Liberty, John Stuart Mill

• Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, Julian Baggini

• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

• Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin

• The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks

• Awakening, Oliver Sacks

• Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan

• Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks

• Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip Thorne

• The Perfect Theory, Pedro G. Ferreira

• A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking

• Who Owns the Future, Jaron Lanier

• You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier

• Plato at the Googleplex, Rebecca Goldstein

• Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Golstein

• Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris

• The End of Faith, Sam Harris

• The Meaning of Human Existence, E.O. Wilson

• The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

• The Call of the Wild and Other Stories, Jack London

• A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell

• Essays in Skepticism, Bertrand Russell

• The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr

• The Shallows, Nicholas Carr

• Alone Together, Sherry Turkle

• Going to Meet the Man: Stories, James Baldwin

• The Alchemy of Air, Thomas Hager

• Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane

• Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

• Paris in the Twentieth Century, Jules Verne

• The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky

• A Friend of Kafka, and Other Stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer

• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

• Persuasion, Jane Austin

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

• How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates

• Girl With Curious Hair, David Foster Wallace

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace

• The Ancestors Tale, Richard Dawkins

• Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R. Hofstadter

• I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter

• The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins

• How to Prove It: A Structured Approach, Daniel J. Velleman

• Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach, Morris Kline

• A Book of Abstract Algebra, Charles C. Pinter

• Real Analysis: A Long-Form Mathematics Textbook, Jay Cummings

• Introduction to Graphy Theory, Richard J. Trudeau

• Introductoin to Algorithms, 3rd Edition, Cormen et al

• Gravitation, MTW (Misner, Thorne, Wheeler)

• General Relativity, Robert M. Wald

• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, David Deutsch

• The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch

• The Trial, Franz Kafka

• On The Road, Jack Kerouac

• The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac

• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Ideas and Opinions, Albert Einstein

• The Naked Sun, Isaac Asimov

• Intruder in the Dust, William Faulkner

• Forward the Foundation, Isaac Asimov

• Foundation’s Edge, Isaac Asimov

• Asimov on Physics, Isaac Asimov

• Nemesis, Isaac Asimov

• The Metamorhosis, Franz Kafka

• The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis

• The Sea Wolf, Jack London

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

• The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

• The Rosie Project, Graeme Simpsion

• The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

• Common Sense and Other Writings, Thomas Paine

• Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis

• The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

• The Federalist Papers, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay

• The Impact of Science on Society, Bertrand Russell

• The Myth of the Framework, Karl Popper

• It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis

• The Martian, Andy Weir

• Walden and Other Writings, Henry David Thoreau

• The Giver, Lois Lowry

• The Things They Carried, O’Brien

• The Postmortal, Drew Magary

• Love and Other Near Death Experiences, Mil Millington

• All The King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren

• Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

• The Awakening, Kate Chopin

• Catch 22, Joseph Heller

• The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris

• The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris

• Waking Up, Sam Harris

• The Mind’s I, Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

• Metamagical Themas, Douglas R. Hofstadter

• The Plague, Albert Camus

• Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel C. Dennett

• Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

• The Republic, Plato

• The Symposium, Plato

• The Stranger, Albert Camus

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

• The Wasteland and Other Poems, T.S. Elliot

• Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn

• Mindfulness in Plain English, Gunaratana

• Breaking the Spell, Daniel C. Dennett

• Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

• The Confessions, Saint Augustine

• The Divine Comedy, Dante

• Holy Bible

• The Book of Mormon

• Crime and Punishment, Dosteoevsky

• The Better Angels of our Nature, Steven Pinker

• The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker

• The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker

• How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker

• The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 2 Volumes

• The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

• The Complete Sherklock Holmes, Sir Arthu Conan Doyle

• Alan Turing: The Enigma, Andrew Hodges

• East of Eden, John Steinbeck

• Becoming, Michelle Obama

• Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond

• Collapse, Jared Diamond

• A People’s History of The United States, Howard Zinn

• Introduction to Real Analysis, Bartle & Sherbert

• Vector Analysis, Louis Brand

• Advanced Calculus, Wilfred Kaplan

• Topology, 2nd Edition, James Munkres

• Introduction to Electrodynamics, Griffiths

• Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, Griffiths

• Electricity and Magnetism, Purcell

• Introduction to Classical Mechanics, Morin

• Special Relativity for the Enthusiastic Beginner, Morin

• A Student’s Guide to Maxwell’s Equations, Daniel Fleisch

• Quantum Computing Since Democritus, Scott Aaronson

• Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Nielsen & Chuang

• Introduction to Linear Algebra, Gilbert Strang

• Spacetime Physics, Taylor & Wheeler

• Basic Training in Mathematics, R. Shankar

• Cracking the Coding Interview, Gayle McDowell

• Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

• Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur, Tom Lancaster

• Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals, Richard Feynman

• An Introduction to Information Theory, John R. Pierce

• Introduction to the Theory of Computation, Michael Sisper

• Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies

• Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity, Sean M. Carroll

• A Tour of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup

• CompTIA Security+: SY0-601 Certification Guide, 2nd Edition, Ian Neil

• This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race, Nicole Perlroth. I highly recommend listening to Nicole Perlroth on the Darknet Diaries podcast, EP 98: Zero Day Brokers.

• The Cuckoos Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, Cliff Stoll

• Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shaped Online Speech, Jeff Kosseff

• The Hardware Hacking Handbook: Breaking Embedded Security with Hardware Attacks

• Zero to Production in Rust: An opinionated introduction to backend development