Bookshelf

A collection of books I’ve enjoyed, with brief notes on each.

Fiction

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - The funniest science fiction ever written. Earth is demolished, the answer is 42, and don’t forget your towel.

• The Rider by Tim Krabbé - A cycling race told in real time from inside the rider’s head. The best book about what it feels like to suffer on a bike.

• The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach - A college baseball novel about talent, pressure, and the pursuit of perfection. Melville references included.

• Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng - Suburbia, motherhood, and secrets in Shaker Heights. What happens when a mysterious artist upends a planned community.

• Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs - A hallucinatory trip through addiction and control. Not for everyone, but unforgettable.

• The Stranger by Albert Camus - Meursault kills a man on a beach. A short, strange novel about absurdity and indifference.

• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway - Expatriates drinking their way through 1920s Paris and Pamplona. Hemingway at his sparest.

History

• Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky - Microhistory at its finest. How a single species of fish shaped world history, from Viking expeditions to the colonization of America to modern environmental collapse.

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari - The story of how an unremarkable ape came to dominate the planet. Big-picture thinking about what makes humans human.

• The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell - The dream of precision bombing and the moral complexities of aerial warfare in WWII.

• Loonshots by Safi Bahcall - Why big organizations kill radical ideas and how to structure teams to nurture them instead.

• 10 Drugs by Thomas Hager - Ten medications that changed medicine and the world. Stories of discovery, luck, and unintended consequences.

• The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution by C.P. Snow - The famous lecture on the divide between literary intellectuals and scientists. Still relevant decades later.

• The Quants by Scott Patterson - How a group of math geniuses took over Wall Street and nearly destroyed it.

Biography & Memoir

• On Character by General Stanley McChrystal - Reflections on who we are and who we choose to become. Character = Convictions × Discipline.

• The Gambling Man by Lionel Barber - The wild story of Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank. From a shanty town to a $1 trillion tech empire, including the WeWork debacle. Borderline magical realism.

• How to Build a Car by Adrian Newey - Autobiography of F1’s most successful car designer. Part memoir, part technical manual, covering 36 years at the pinnacle of motorsport.

• Born to be Wired by John Malone - The cable industry’s most successful dealmaker on building an empire through leverage, deal-making, and aggressive tax optimization.

• A Place of My Own by Michael Pollan - Building a writing hut from scratch. A meditation on architecture, craftsmanship, and making something with your hands.

• Gumption by Nick Offerman - Profiles of people Offerman admires, from his woodworking heroes to founding fathers.

• Call Me Ted by Ted Turner - The autobiography of the man who built CNN, won the America’s Cup, and owned the Braves. Larger than life.

• Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way by Christian Williams - Ted Turner’s leadership philosophy distilled into practical lessons.

• A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp - The mathematician who beat the casinos and then beat the markets. Card counting, options pricing, and quantitative investing from the man who pioneered it all.

Business & Decision-Making

• Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke - Think about decisions the way poker players think about hands. Separate decision quality from outcome quality. Think in confidence levels, not certainties.

• The Missing Billionaires by Victor Haghani and James White - Why don’t more smart investors compound wealth the way they should? The Kelly Criterion and our psychological inability to follow it.

• Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss - Negotiation tactics from an FBI hostage negotiator. Tactical empathy and calibrated questions.

• Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Why symmetry of risk matters. Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t have something to lose.

• The Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The technical companion to Taleb’s other work. Why standard statistics fail in the real world.

• The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Aphorisms and philosophical one-liners. Best consumed in small doses.

• Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Things that gain from disorder. How to thrive in an uncertain world by embracing volatility.

• Boomerang by Michael Lewis - Lewis travels to Iceland, Greece, Ireland, and Germany to understand how the financial crisis played out differently in each place.

• Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson - The mechanics of venture capital term sheets explained clearly. Required reading for anyone raising money.

Outdoors

• The Backyard Adventurer by Beau Miles - Stories of adventure found close to home. Running a marathon one mile at a time between daily tasks.

• Where the Deer and the Antelope Play by Nick Offerman - Offerman on the American landscape, wilderness, and our relationship with nature.

• Water, Wood, and Wild Things by Hannah Kirshner - A year in a Japanese mountain village learning traditional crafts. Sake brewing, woodworking, and foraging.

Philosophy

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius - The private journal of a Roman emperor. Stoic philosophy written for an audience of one.

• On the Brevity of Life by Seneca - We waste our lives on trivialities. A short, sharp reminder to stop postponing what matters.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace - Essays on tennis, state fairs, and a luxury cruise. Wallace’s singular voice on American culture.

Parenting

• What to Expect When You’re Expecting by Heidi Murkoff - The classic pregnancy guide. Week by week through the whole process.

• Moms on Call by Laura Hunter and Jennifer Walker - Sleep schedules and routines for newborns. Saved our sanity.

Atlanta

• Peachtree Creek by David Kaufman - The natural and human history of Atlanta’s most important watershed. Local history through the lens of a creek.

Reading List

Books I haven’t gotten to yet but plan to read:

• Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
• Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong
• Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger (currently reading)
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush edited by G. Pascal Zachary
• Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
• The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
• Longitude by Dava Sobel
• The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
• When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
• The Outsiders by William Thorndike
• Titan by Ron Chernow
• Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
• Essays by Michel de Montaigne

If you have suggestions for books I might enjoy based on this list, I’d love to hear them. You can find my contact info on the about page.