Books Read Since Blogging
This is a list of most of the books I have read since starting up this blog in November 2009. Of the reviews, some are shorter and are more like lists of good quotes, whereas others are more fleshed out.
2016
- Hive Mind – Garrett Jones
- Superforecasting – Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner
- The Selfie Vote – Kristen S. Anderson
- Fighting God – David Silverman
- Galileo’s Middle Finger – Alice Dreger
- How to Read a Book – Mortimer J. Adler
- Crippled America – Donald J. Trump
- Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds – Charles Mackay
- The Mathematics of Love – Hannah Fry
- Liar’s Poker – Michael Lewis
- The Age of Em – Robin Hanson
2015 – [batch review at end of this post]
- The Occupy Wall Street Handbook – Various Authors
- A Random Walk Down Wall Street – Burton G. Malkiel
- The Millionaire Next Door – Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko
- Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
- On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
- Average is Over – Tyler Cowen
- The Great Stagnation – Tyler Cowen
- The Myth of the Rational Voter – Bryan Caplan
- The Intelligent Investor – Benjamin Graham
- The Sense of Style – Steven Pinker
- The Price of Inequality – Joseph Stiglitz
- Humans Are Underrated – Geoff Colvin
- Islam and the Future of Tolerance – Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz
- Brief Candle in the Dark – Richard Dawkins
- You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) – Felicia Day
2014
- Getting Things Done – David Allen
- The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan
- The Better Angels of Our Nature – Steven Pinker
- Armchair Reader: The Book of Useless Information – Editors of Publications International Ltd.
- The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
- The Revenge of Geography – Robert Kaplan
- An Appetite for Wonder – Richard Dawkins
- The Big Short – Michael Lewis
- Flash Boys – Michael Lewis
- Drift – Rachel Maddow
2013
- Free Will – Sam Harris
- The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins
- Death by Black Hole – Neil deGrasse Tyson
- The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
- God Is Not Great – Christopher Hitchens
- The Stuff of Thought – Steven Pinker
- Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
- When Genius Failed – Roger Lowenstein (see Thinking, Fast and Slow)
- Moonwalking With Einstein – Joshua Foer (see Thinking, Fast and Slow)
- Against the Gods – Peter L. Berstein (see Thinking, Fast and Slow)
- Coolidge – Amity Shlaes (see Thinking, Fast and Slow)
- The End of Faith – Sam Harris
- The Moral Landscape – Sam Harris
- The Signal and the Noise – Nate Silver
- Breaking the Spell – Daniel Dennett (see The Signal and the Noise)
- CEO Material – D. A. Benton (see The Signal and the Noise)
- The Blind Watchmaker – Richard Dawkins (see The Signal and the Noise)
- Mortality – Christopher Hitchens (see The Signal and the Noise)
- The Portable Atheist – Christopher Hitchens
2012
- Talent is Overrated – Geoffrey Colvin
2011
- A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
- 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
- Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
- Walden – Henry David Thoreau
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
2010
- The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
- Perfect Rigor – Masha Gessen
- The Elements of Style – William Strunk and E.B. White
- Viva la Repartee – Mardy Grothe
- Oxymoronica – Mardy Grothe
- Candide – Voltaire
- The Pirate Hunter – Richard Zacks
- The Pursuit of WOW! – Tom Peters
- Innumeracy – John Allen Paulos
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
- Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
- Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll
- I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like – Mardy Grothe
- Ifferisms – Mardy Grothe
- Introduction to Graph Theory – Richard J. Trudeau
- Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar – Tom Cathcart and Dan Klein
- On Writing Well – William Zinsser
- Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
- The Great Gatsby – F.S. Fitzgerald
- Gödel, Escher, Bach – Douglas Hofstadter
- Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
- Ender’s Shadow – Orson Scott Card
- 1984 – George Orwell
- The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
- The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
- Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
- Screenplay – Syd Field
- Writing With Style – John R. Trimble
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Phillip K. Dick
- Neuromancer – William Gibson
2009
- The Most Dangerous Enemy – Stephen Bungay
- QED – Richard Feynman
A most interesting list. I have read many if not most of the titles in the list. I like in particular items 2015: 4 and 14; 2014: 5 and 9; 2013: 2, 4, 5, and 19; 2011: 1 and 3; 2010: 3, 9,and 20; and 2009: 2. You have an extraordinarily wide and deep range of interests. As suggestions, I would recommend “Genius” by James Glieik, a biography of Feynman, and “The Prize”, by Daniel Yergin, a history of the world oil economy from the 1910s in Pennsylvania up to the first Gulf War in 1993, and “The Quest”, a continuation of “The Prize” continuing to about 2010. If you want to read the 4 most influential books of the last 500 years, read Galileo’s “Dialog Concerning The Two Chief World Systems”, Newton’s “Philospohae Naturalis Principia Mathematica”, Darwin’s “Origin Of Species”, and Einstein’s “The General Theory Of Relativity” or a good overview general relativity. Collectively, these have most profoundly changed mankind’s understanding of the universe and his place in it.
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Thank you! I appreciate the shared interests and suggestions.
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