Book Pipeline
Last updated: February 2025. If this gets too out of date, I’d appreciate a reminder.
For a full read and to be read list, click here.
Books read and reviewed, by year
2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016
Currently Reading
- Gringo Viejo, Carlos Fuentes
- Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
On Deck / Hoping To Read Soon
- Works and Days and Theogony, Hesiod - recommended by Stephen Pimentel
- The Western Canon, Harold Bloom
- Accelerate, Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim
- Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
- The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim
- Mutual Aid, Peter Kropotkin
- Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson
- Capitalism, Alone, Branko Milanovic
- La Promesa, Silvina Ocampo
- Open Society, Karl Popper
- Fin-De-Siecle Vienna, Carl Schorske
- Katalin Street, Magda Szabo
- Notes On Complexity, Neil Theise
- The Need for Roots, Simone Weil
- The world of yesterday, Stefan Zweig
My Recommendations
Biography/Memoir
- Zealot, Reza Azlan (review)
- Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain (review)
- Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, Jennifer Burns
- Hamilton, Ron Chernow
- Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates (review)
- The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (review)
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman (review)
- Acid for the Children, Flea (review)
- The Storyteller, Dave Grohl (review)
- In Other Words, Jumpha Lahiri (review)
- Inside Out: A personal history of Pink Floyd, Nick Mason (review)
- A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz (review)
- A Primate's Memoir, Robert Sapolsky (review)
Computer Science
- Hackers and Painters, Paul Graham (review)
- Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter - recommended by Max Faingezicht
- Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky
- In The Beginning, There Was The Command Line, Neal Stephenson (review)
Culture
- What Tech Calls Thinking, Adrian Daub (review)
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion (review)
- But What If We're Wrong?, Chuck Klosterman - recommended by Russ Roberts (review)
Design
- The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman (review)
Economics
- The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly - recommended by Richard Walker
- Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman
- Individualism and Economic Order, Friedrich Hayek - recommended by Russ Roberts (review)
- Flash Boys, Michael Lewis (review)
- The Value of Everything, Mariana Mazzucato - recommended by Tim O'Reilly (review)
- Radical Markets, Glen Weyl, Eric Posner (Twitter thread, review)
- What Money Can't Buy, Michael Sandel - recommended by Meghan Fraley
- The Company of Strangers, Paul Seabright - recommended by Richard Walker
Entrepreneurship/Management
- The Manager’s Path, Camille Fournier (review)
- Founders at Work, Jessica Livingston (review)
- The Power Law, Sebastian Mallaby (review)
- What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, Tim O'Reilly (review)
- Zero to One, Peter Thiel (Twitter thread)
- The Founder's Dilemmas, Noam Wasserman - recommended by Leo Polovets
- Founder vs Investor, Elizabeth Zalman and Jerry Neumann ([review](/articles/2024/12/30/books-23/#founder-vs-investor)
- The Making of a Manager, Julie Zhuo (review)
Fiction
- La casa de los Espíritus, Isabel Allende (review)
- Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory, Raphael Bob-Waksberg (review)
- Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
- Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino (review)
- La invención de Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares (review)
- Rayuela, Julio Cortázar (review)
- Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin
- Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco - recommended by Gustavo Solórzano (review)
- The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- My Brilliant Friend (Series), Elena Ferrante (review)
- Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg - recommended by Hannah Doherty (review)
- 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Rebecca Goldstein
- Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse - recommended by Goldy Levy (review)
- Telex From Cuba, Rachel Kushner - recommended by Hannah Doherty (review)
- Un Verdor Terrible, Benjamín Labatut
- The Namesake, Jumpha Lahiri (review)
- Pachinko, Min Jin Lee - recommended by Nicole Zhu
- Los Palimpsestos, Aleksandra Lun - recommended by Alvaro Videla (review)
- Severance, Ling Ma (review)
- La Hojarasca, Gabriel García Márquez (review)
- Crónica de una muerte anunciada, Gabriel García Márquez
- Cien Años de Soledad, Gabriel García Márquez (review)
- Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky
- Las batallas en el desierto, José Emilio Pacheco
- Life: A User's Manual, Georges Perec (review)
- The Overstory, Richard Powers (review)
- Blindness, José Saramago ([review](/articles/2024/12/30/books-23/#blindness)
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (review)
- In The First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - recommended by Russ Roberts (review)
- La Ciudad y Los Perros, Mario Vargas Llosa (review)
- Candide, Voltaire - recommended by Hannah Doherty (review)
- Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (review)
History
- Lords of Finance, Liaquat Ahamed
- Against The Gods, Peter L. Bernstein (review)
- Alaric The Goth, Douglas Boin (review)
- Vanished Kingdoms, Norman Davies (review)
- Slouching Towards Utopia, J. Bradford DeLong (review)
- Turing's Cathedral, George Dyson (review)
- The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson (review)
- Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan - recommended by Alvaro Videla (review)
- Pumpkinflowers, Matti Friedman - recommended by Russ Roberts
- Black Mass, John Gray (review)
- The Yellow Wind, David Grossman (review)
- These Truths, Jill Lepore - recommended by Russ Roberts, Amol Mody (review)
- Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell - recommended by Noah Smith
- A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit (review)
- Zionism and the Fin de Siècle, Michael Stanislawski
- Season of the Witch, David Talbot (review)
- Everything and More, David Foster Wallace - recommended by Vipul Ved Prakash (review)
- The Verge, Patrick Wyman
Philosophy
- For the Time Being, Annie Dillard (review)
- Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl - recommended by Dana Szlak (review)
- This Life, Martin Hägglund (review)
- Wild Problems, Russ Roberts (review)
- Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (review)
- Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (review)
- The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Political Science
- Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson - recommended by Marco Blanco (review)
- Cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah - recommended by Michael S. Roth (review)
- Invisible Countries, Joshua Keating - recommended by Balaji Srinivasan (review)
- Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick (review)
- What is Progress, Aldo Schiavone (review)
- Seeing like a State, James C. Scott - recommended by Quinn Norton (review)
- The Age of Surveilance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff - recommended by Russ Roberts (Twitter thread, review)
Science
- The Mind of God, Paul Davies
- The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
- The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch
- Chaos, James Gleick (review)
- A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking - recommended by Max Faingezicht
- Why Information Grows, César Hidalgo - recommended by Russ Roberts (review)
- Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows (review)
Science Fiction
- Story of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang - recommended by Aadik Shekhar
- Three Body Problem, Liu Cixin (This is a trilogy, where I’d rate the books as 3 > 1 > 2, review, review.)
- Ready Player One, Ernest Cline
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick (review)
- Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow (review)
- Radicalized, Cory Doctorow (review)
- Walkaway, Cory Doctorow (review)
- Permutation City, Greg Egan
- Neuromancer, William Gibson - recommended by Richard Walker (review)
- Infomocracy (Centenal Cycle trilogy), Malka Older (review)
- Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson - recommended by Stephen Pimentel, Amy Campbell (review)
Urban
- Order without Design, Alain Bertaud (review)
- Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs (review)
- Cool Gray City of Love, Gary Kamiya (review)
- Infinite City, Rebecca Solnit (review)