Books I want to read

Emphasized books are at the top of the list.‌

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
• 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
• The Future of Fusion Energy
• The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science
• The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann
• The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast
• Toxic Exposure: The True Story behind the Monsanto Trials and the Search for Justice

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
• A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There
• There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster – Who Profits and Who Pays the Price

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
• Engineering in Plain Sight: An Illustrated Field Guide to the Constructed Environment
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities

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
• 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
• Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop
• The Complete Kitchen Cabinetmaker
• Foundations of Woodworking: Essential Joinery Techniques and Building Strategies
• The Why & How of Woodworking: A Simple Approach to Making Meaningful Work
• Tools a Visual History: The Hardware That Built, Measured and Repaired the World

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
• Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
• Computer Graphics and Computer Animation: A Retrospective Overview

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
• Pieces of the Action
• Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT
• Inventing the Future
• The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

Business

• The Psychology of Money
• When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm
• Just Keep Buying

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
• Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology
• The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal

Sci-Fi

• Anathem
• The Overstory
• Seveneves
• The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age

Humor

• Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema
• No One Asked for This

Fiction

• The Remains of the Day
• Circe
• Middlemarch
• This Is How You Lose The Time War
• Stories of Your Life and Others

Art

• Computational Drawing
• Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

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
• Tickfoot