Books I want to read
Updated on .
Science
- Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World
- Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
- Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
- The Curious World of Seaweed
- Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
- Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education
- Viruses, Plagues, and History: Past, Present, and Future
- Letters to a Young Scientist
- Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
- Moonbound: Apollo 11 and the Dream of Spaceflight
- Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
- Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo
- Eating Animals
- Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
- Astronomical Mindfulness: Your Cosmic Guide to Reconnecting with the Sun, Moon, Stars, and Planets
Statistics
- The Data Detective
- Introduction to Empirical Bayes: Examples from Baseball Statistics
- Statistics Done Wrong
- Millions, Billions, Zillions: Defending Yourself in a World of Too Many Numbers
Travel
- Kissa by Kissa
- Mountains and Marshes: Exploring the Bay Area’s Natural History
- Europe’s Best Bakeries
- Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It
- Bicycle Diaries
Social
- White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
- The Year of Magical Thinking
- How to Argue with a Racist
- Exhalation: Stories
- Breasts and Eggs
- Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
- The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice
- What Are People For?
- A Promised Land
- The Truths We Hold: An American Journey
- How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
- The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape
- Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America
- Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
- Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
- The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
- The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t
- Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
- Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life
- Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
- The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
Infrastructure
- Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
- Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
- Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom
- Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America
- Tactical Urbanism: Short-Term Action for Long-Term Change
- Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of The American Automobile
- Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives
Writing
- Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing
- Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
- Several Short Sentences about Writing
- On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
- Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace
- On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Woodworking
Japanese
- Simple Japanese Furniture
- Measure and Construction of the Japanese House: 250 Plans and Sketches Plus Illustrations of Joinery
- The Complete Japanese Joinery
- The Genius of Japanese Carpentry: Secrets of an Ancient Woodworking Craft
- Sharpening and the Japanese Hand Plane
- Japanese Woodworking Tools: Their Tradition, Spirit and Use
Western
- Sharpen This
- Euclid’s Door: Building the Tools of ‘By Hand & Eye’
- The Solution at Hand
- Ingenious Mechanicks
- Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman
- The Art of Spoon Carving
- Carpentry and Joinery Illustrated
- Essential Woodworking Hand Tools
- Worked: A Bench Guide to Hand-Tool Efficiency
- Joinery, Joists and Gender: A History of Woodworking for the 21st Century
- Joined: A Bench Guide to Furniture Joinery
Wood
- Cut & Dried: A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology
- With the Grain: A Craftsman’s Guide to Understanding Wood
- Wood and Traditional Woodworking in Japan
- Japanese Wood and Carpentry
Technology
- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
- Reamde
- The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage
- In the Beginning… Was the Command Line
- Ghost in the Wires
- The Phoenix Project: A Novel about It, Devops, and Helping Your Business Win
- Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
- Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age
- A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
- Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure
- A People’s History of Computing in the United States
- Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age
- The Computer Boys Take Over
- The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child
- Software Rights: How Patent Law Transformed Software Development in America
- A New History of Modern Computing
- Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything
- Laserwriter II
- Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
- The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
- Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet
Engineering
- Working Effectively with Legacy Code
- Brutal Refactoring: More Working Effectively with Legacy Code
- Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
- Noise Matters: The Evolution of Communication
- UNIX: A History and a Memoir
- The Timeless Way of Building
- Software Design for Flexibility
- Dreaming in Code
- Let Over Lambda
- The Art and Craft of Geometric Origami
- The Complete Book of Origami Polyhedra
- Designed for Use
- Software Design X-Rays
- The Pragmatic Programmer
- The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
- An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
- The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
- Getting Started with CNC: Personal Digital Fabrication with Shapeoko and Other Computer-Controlled Routers
- Make: Geometry
- Database Internals: A Deep Dive Into How Distributed Data Systems Work
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
- Understanding Software Dynamics
- Generative Art in Go
Business
History
- The Things They Carried
- Tracks, Tires, & Wires: Public Transportation in California’s Santa Clara Valley
- Bart: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System
- Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle
- History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America
- Astounding
- In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation
- Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon
- No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History
- Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of El Faro
- The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story
- 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed
- Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
- The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York
- The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars
- The All-Road Bike Revolution
Sci-Fi
Humor
Fiction
Art
Lists
I’ve collected other people’s book lists for inspiration:
- Patrick Collison
- Tom Macwright
- Ole Begemann
- Samuel Thomas Davies
- Simon Hørup Eskildsen
- Dave Rupert
- Brandur
- Derek Sivers
- Paul Stamatiou
- James Clear
- Jeremy Keith
- Gwern
- The Rabbit Hole
- Maggie Appleton
- Bret Devereaux
- Christina Cacioppo
- Warren Ellis
- Vellum
- Dan Luu
- Eli Bendersky
- Dustin
- Jamie
- Brendan Schlagel’s Antilibraries
- Gordon Brander
- Liam Cook
- Devine Lu Linvega
- Chris Krycho
- Wes De Silvestro
- Calvin French-Owen
- Clarity
- mrusme
- Jestem Króliczkiem
- Ben Overmyer
- Phil Eaton
- David Golden’s Craft of coding reading list
- superkuh’s hard sci-fi