▨ Jamie McHale

Reading

You can find me on Goodreads.

In addition to regular reading I enjoy a reading project. Here's what I've been working on:

Rise and Fall of Civilisations

My current reading project is to put a dent in The Rise and Fall of Civilisations: A Reader Course by Tanner Greer . This is not yet the full list, but I will add a few more books as I get through them.

  • Robert J. Gordon: The Rise and Fall of American Growth
  • Azar Gat: War in Human Civilization
  • Francis Fukuyama: Political Order and Political Decay
  • Francis Fukuyama: The Origins of Political Order
  • Francis Spufford: Red Plenty
  • Hendrick Spruyt : The World Imagined
  • James C. Scott: Seeing Like a State
  • Joe Studwell: How Asia Works
  • Joel Mokyr: The Lever of Riches
  • Joseph Tainter: The Collapse of Complex Societies
  • Machiavelli: Discourses on Livy
  • Mancur Olson: The Rise and Decline of Nations
  • Michael Mann: The Sources of Social Power Volume 1
  • Michael Mann: The Sources of Social Power Volume 2
  • Paul Kennedy: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
  • Peer Vries: State, Economy and the Great Divergence
  • Ronald Findlay and Kevin O'Rouke: Power and Plenty
  • Thomas Ertman: Birth of the Leviathan

Interintellect - Reading the Greats

In 2021 I took part in the Interintellect, Reading the Greats salon series. This monthly book club took us on a tour of some of the most well known works of the western canon.

  • (Anon): Beowulf
  • Austen: Pride and Prejudice
  • Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children
  • Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France
  • Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
  • Dante: The Divine Comedy
  • Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy
  • Homer: Iliad
  • Huxley: Brave New World
  • Machiavelli: The Prince
  • Orwell: 1984
  • Plato: The Last Days of Socrates
  • Shelly: Frankenstein
  • Sophocles: Antigone
  • Woolf: Mrs Dalloway

Reading

2024

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
J. Bradford DeLong
Why War? (Pelican Books)
Richard Overy
Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart Again
Robert Kagan
The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism
John Gray
Endure: Mind, Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance
Alex Hutchinson
Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health
Daniel E. Lieberman
Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation
Anton Howes
The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
Yascha Mounk
Great Britain?: How We Get Our Future Back
Torsten Bell
How To Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
David Brooks
Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
Chris Miller
The Russo-Ukrainian War
Serhii Plokhy
Politics On the Edge: A Memoir From Within
Rory Stewart
We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience
Lyndsey Stonebridge
Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change
W. David Marx
Stories of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World
David Deutsch
The Making of the English Working Class (Modern Classics)
E.P. Thompson
So Late in the Day
Claire Keegan
An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace
Tamar Adler
How to Keep House While Drowning
K.C. Davis
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800–1906 (Penguin History of Britain)
David Cannadine

2023

The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution, 1700-1850
Joel Mokyr
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy
The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England
Jonathan Healey
The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown
Anna Keay
The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Study on Happiness
Robert Waldinger
The Precipice: ‘A book that seems made for the present moment’ New Yorker
Toby Ord
How to Be You: Simone de Beauvoir and the art of authentic living
Skye Cleary
Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians
Tara Isabella Burton
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World Book 70)
Robert J. Gordon
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
Jenny Odell
Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders From Polynesian
James Belich
You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters
Kate Murphy
International Relations: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Christian Reus-Smit
Red Notice: A True Story of Corruption, Murder and One Man’s Fight for Justice
Bill Browder
Red Crosses
Sasha Filipenko
Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream
Francis Spufford
Thud! (Discworld, #34; City Watch, #7)
Terry Pratchett
The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (Veritas Paperbacks)
Mancur Olson
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000
Paul Kennedy
Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Michael Freeden

2022

How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth
Mark Koyama
Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential
Tiago Forte
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships
Robin I.M. Dunbar
What We Owe the Future
William MacAskill
How Religion Evolved
Robin I.M. Dunbar
Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
Francis Fukuyama
The Great Disruption
Francis Fukuyama
Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment
Francis Fukuyama
Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy
Francis Fukuyama
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
Francis Fukuyama
Liberalism and Its Discontents
Francis Fukuyama
The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
Daron Acemoğlu
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
Daron Acemoğlu
The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life
Paul Millerd
The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century
Louise Perry
Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Graz Schumpeter Lectures)
Joel Mokyr
The Gospels: A New Translation
Sarah Ruden
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft
Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind
Tom Holland
Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through: The Surprising Story of Britain’s Economy from Boom to Bust and Back Again
Duncan Weldon
Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World
Tim Harford
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Anthony Bourdain
Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
Michael J. Sandel
On Politics
Alan Ryan
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
Jonathan Haidt
Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
Johnjoe McFadden
The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
Joseph Henrich
Why Orwell Matters
Christopher Hitchens
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
1984
George Orwell
Orwell: A Man Of Our Time
Richard Bradford
The Timeless Way of Building
Christopher W. Alexander
Doughnut Economics: The must-read book that redefines economics for a world in crisis
Kate Raworth
Virginia Woolf
Alexandra Harris
Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
Deirdre Nansen
The Glasgow Effect: A Tale of Class, Capitalism & Carbon Footprint
Ellie Harrison
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
William Dalrymple

2021

Mother Courage and Her Children (Modern Classics)
Bertolt Brecht
Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
It's All in Your Head
Suzanne O'Sullivan
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future
Steven Levitsky
Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain
Sathnam Sanghera
Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography (BOOKS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD Book 10)
Christopher Hitchens
The Writings of Thomas Paine - Volume 2 (1779-1792): the Rights of Man
Thomas Paine
Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology
Azeem Azhar
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
Julia Galef
Reflections on the Revolution in France
Edmund Burke
Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It
Oliver Burkeman
Science Fictions
Stuart Ritchie
What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
Michael J. Sandel
Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny
Kate Manne
The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice
Shon Faye
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality
Helen Joyce
Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot
Vaxxers
Sarah Gilbert
Shakespeare in a Divided America
James Shapiro
The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
Joseph Henrich
Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics
Stephen Greenblatt
The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606
James Shapiro
Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends
Anne Applebaum
Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment
Robert Wright
Descartes: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides)
Harry M. Bracken
How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics
Michael Pollan
Meditations on First Philosophy, with Selections from the Objections and Replies
René Descartes
Chaucer: A European Life
Marion Turner
Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
Adam M. Grant
Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind
Dan Charnas
The Medici
Mary Hollingsworth
The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior: The Intersecting Lives of Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped
Paul Strathern
The Prince: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton Critical Editions)
Niccolò Machiavelli
Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People What to Fear
Patrick Boucheron
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli
This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe
Robert Tombs
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
Bill Gates
Whole Earth Discipline
Stewart Brand
Reading Dante (The Open Yale Courses Series)
Giuseppe Mazzotta
The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals its Secrets
Michael Blastland
Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity
Prue Shaw
The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso
Dante Alighieri
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
Hans Rosling
Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Donella H. Meadows
Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
Jon Kabat-Zinn
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
Colin Bryar
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes
Political Philosophy (The Open Yale Courses Series)
Steven B. Smith
Grendel
John Gardner
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
Nadia Eghbal
A World Without Email: Find Focus and Transform the Way You Work Forever (from the NYT bestselling productivity expert)
Cal Newport
Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell
Unknown
Beowulf
Unknown
Beowulf
Seamus Heaney
The Aeneid
Virgil
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
Mortimer J. Adler
A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor
John Berger
The Ancient Guide to Modern Life
Natalie Haynes
Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind
Alan Jacobs
Meno and Other Dialogues: Charmides, Laches, Lysis, Meno
Plato
Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths
Natalie Haynes
The Last Days of Socrates
Plato
Home Fire
Kamila Shamsie
The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles' Antigone
Seamus Heaney
How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy
Julian Baggini
Antigone, Oedipus the King and Electra
Sophocles
Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don't Have To
David A. Sinclair
The Wim Hof Method: Activate Your Full Human Potential
Wim Hof
The Iliad: A New Translation by Caroline Alexander
Homer

2020

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Bessel van der Kolk
Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
Abhijit V. Banerjee
Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion
Paul Bloom
Cleopatra: A Life
Stacy Schiff
Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture
Sudhir Hazareesingh
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
James Clear
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
James Nestor
Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States
David Hackett Fischer
Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change
Eitan D. Hersh
Birdstories: A History of the Birds of New Zealand
Geoff Norman
El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America
Carrie Gibson
The Choice: Embrace the Possible
Edith Eger
History Has Begun
Bruno Maçães
Dreams of Leaving and Remaining: Fragments of a Nation
James Meek
Tools for Conviviality
Ivan Illich
Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
James P. Carse
The Living Mountain
Nan Shepherd
Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights
Molly Smith
How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers
Sönke Ahrens
The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop
Adam Kucharski
Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health
David J. Nutt
Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons from the World’s Limits
Richard Davies
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Olivia Laing
Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation
Kyo Maclear
The Last
Hanna Jameson
The Natural History of Selborne
Gilbert White
Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement
Buster Benson
Night Boat to Tangier
Kevin Barry

2019

Adam Smith
Jesse Norman
Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science
Alice Domurat Dreger
The Meaning of Birds
Simon Barnes
Girl, Woman, Other
Bernardine Evaristo
Spirit to the Stone: Building the Old Ghost Road
Marion Boatwright
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
Mary Beard
Pixar Storytelling: Rules for Effective Storytelling Based on Pixar’s Greatest Films
Dean Movshovitz
Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin
Deschooling Society
Ivan Illich
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Benedict Anderson
The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
Raghuram G. Rajan
The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History
David Hackett Fischer
The Anxious Triumph: A Global History of Capitalism, 1860-1914
Donald Sassoon
The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
Astra Taylor
The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career
Scott H. Young
All That Remains: A Life in Death
Sue Black
The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
Martin Gurri
An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
Will Larson
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
David Epstein
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel
Normal People
Sally Rooney
Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Caroline Criado Pérez
Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
Eric Kaufmann
Digital Minimalism
Cal Newport
Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging
Afua Hirsch
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Jenny Odell
American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
Joseph J. Ellis
National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy
Roger Eatwell
The Chinese Machiavelli
Dennis Bloodworth
Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business
Paul Jarvis
It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work
Jason Fried
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
Kai-Fu Lee
Metaphors We Live By
George Lakoff
The Park Bench
Christophe Chabouté
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking
Samin Nosrat
Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders
Singapore, Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency
Nicholas Walton
Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order
Bruno Maçães
The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future
Ryder Carroll

2018

The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman
The Gene: An Intimate History
Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy
Tim Harford
This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor
Adam Kay
The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)
Liu Cixin
Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
Jonathan Haskel
Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation
Serhii Plokhy
Arbitrary Stupid Goal
Tamara Shopsin
Notes on a Nervous Planet
Matt Haig
Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin
The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook
Niall Ferguson
On Directing Film
David Mamet
The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy
Mariana Mazzucato
Closely Watched Trains
Bohumil Hrabal
Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult
Bohumil Hrabal
Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia
Michael Vatikiotis
The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken
The Secret Barrister
A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen
David Hockney
The Dawn of Eurasia
Bruno Maçães
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking
Oliver Burkeman
So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
Cal Newport
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
Gordon S. Wood
Equal Power: A Handbook for Men and Women
Jo Swinson
The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
Douglas Murray
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
Norse Mythology
Neil Gaiman
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia
Peter Pomerantsev
Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life
John B. Arden
Principles: Life and Work
Ray Dalio

2017

The Penguin History of New Zealand
Michael King
The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding
Robert Hughes
Down Under
Bill Bryson
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America
Colin Woodard
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1)
Robert M. Pirsig
Making Sense of the Troubles: The Story of the Conflict in Northern Ireland
David McKittrick
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race
Reni Eddo-Lodge
How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
Lisa Feldman Barrett
The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
Daniel J. Levitin
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari
Micromastery: Learn Small, Learn Fast, and Find the Hidden Path to Happiness
Robert Twigger
If This Is a Man • The Truce
Primo Levi
The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848
Eric J. Hobsbawm
Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now?
Ian Dunt
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari
Prisoners of Geography
Tim Marshall
World Order
Henry Kissinger
The Case Against Sugar
Gary Taubes
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
Cal Newport
Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
Timothy Ferriss

2016

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
James C. Scott
Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution (The American Revolution Series)
Nathaniel Philbrick
Who Governs Britain?
Anthony King
The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time
Alex Korb
Politics: Between the Extremes
Nick Clegg
The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine--A Tale of Two Narratives
Padraig O'Malley
Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual
Yvon Chouinard
The Wealth of Humans: Work and its Absence in the Twenty-First Century
Ryan Avent
Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours
Slavoj Žižek
When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
J.D. Vance
What's Left?
Nick Cohen
Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy
Peter Mair
Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
Don Tapscott
Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)
William Poundstone
The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder
Peter Zeihan
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Christopher Hitchens
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
Eric Hoffer
What Got You Here Won't Get You There
Marshall Goldsmith
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami

2015

The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
Peter M. Senge
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
Jeff Sutherland
Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies
C. Otto Scharmer
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves
Stephen Grosz
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Empathy Exams
Leslie Jamison
Become What You Are
Alan W. Watts
A Death in the Family (My Struggle #1)
Karl Ove Knausgård
The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business
Clayton M. Christensen
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Milan Kundera
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Raymond Carver
John Adams
David McCullough
The Art of Negotiation: How to Improvise Agreement in a Chaotic World
Michael A. Wheeler
The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health
Justin Sonnenburg
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
David Eagleman
Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World
Donald Sull
Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy
Jonathan Rauch
Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works
A.G. Lafley
Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It
Dorie Clark
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
Dava Sobel
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Gabriel García Márquez
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
David Graeber
Joy at Work
Dennis W. Bakke
Germany: Memories of a Nation
Neil MacGregor
The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
Brian Greene
Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)
Christian Rudder
The Martian
Andy Weir
The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America
Mike McIntyre
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
Karen E. Fields
The Scientist as Rebel (New York Review Books (Paperback))
Freeman Dyson
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond

2014

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness
Russell "Russ" Roberts
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Atul Gawande
1491: The Americas Before Columbus
Charles C. Mann
Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery
Henry Marsh
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World
Steven Johnson
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
Marie Kondō
Sam Walton: Made In America
Sam Walton
The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age
Reid Hoffman
The Art of Profitability
Adrian J. Slywotzky
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
The Call of the Wild
Jack London
The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage
Ryan Holiday
Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks 1960-1969
Alan W. Watts
How Google Works
Eric Schmidt
Tao of Leadership: Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching Adapted for a New Age
John Heider
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel
Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
Shane Snow
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, #1)
Robin Sloan
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
Ed Catmull
Everyday Sexism
Laura Bates
My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel
Ari Shavit
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries)
Alice Goffman
Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
At the Loch of the Green Corrie
Andrew Greig
Twelve Years a Slave
Solomon Northup
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Ben Horowitz
My Share of the Task: A Memoir
Stanley McChrystal
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
William B. Irvine
The Outsider
Albert Camus
How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character
Paul Tough
Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time
Keith Ferrazzi
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
Erik Brynjolfsson
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
It's Not All About Me: The Top Ten Techniques for Building Quick Rapport with Anyone
Robin Dreeke
Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence
Daniel Goleman
The Naked and the Dead
Norman Mailer
Poor White
Sherwood Anderson
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
Marshall B. Rosenberg
The Motivation Hacker
Nick Winter

2013

On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes
Alexandra Horowitz
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
Maria Konnikova
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed
Art and Fear
David Bayles
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Brad Stone
Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
Tyler Cowen
Einstein’s Dreams
Alan Lightman
Love's Executioner
Irvin D. Yalom
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
David Foster Wallace
The Yankee Tea-party Or, Boston in 1773
Henry Clay Watson
Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential
Carol S. Dweck
Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way To Swim Better, Faster, and Easier
Terry Laughlin
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
Cancer Ward
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish
Christopher Hitchens
Making Great Decisions in Business and Life
David R. Henderson
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
How Will You Measure Your Life?
Clayton M. Christensen
The Halo Effect: How Managers let Themselves be Deceived
Philip M. Rosenzweig
Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work
Chip Heath
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Capitalism and Freedom
Milton Friedman

2011

The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck