My Reading List

Below is a list of books I’ve read. They are listed in sequential order except for the first bolded titles each year (beginning in 2019), which were my favorites of the year (in no particular order)

2023

American Ulysses, Ronald White

For Profit, William Magnuson

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, Martin Wolf

It was all a Dream, Justin Tinsley

Chip War, Chris Miller

Beyond Measure, James Vincent

Poverty, by America, Matt Desmond

Outlive, Peter Attia

Attention Span, Gloria Mark

Rough Sleepers, Tracy Kidder

Saving Time, Jenny Odell

Grit, Angela Duckworth

The Quiet Zone, Stephen Kurczy

The Good Jobs Strategy, Zeynep Ton

The Grownup, Gillian Flynn

Either/Or, Elif Batuman

The Man who Broke Capitalism, David Gelles

When McKinsey Comes to Town, Walt Bogdanich

The Bullet that Missed, Richard Osman

Novelist as a Vocation, Haruki Murakami

Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy

2022

G-Man, Beverly Gage

Stay True, Hua Hsu

Legacy of Violence, Caroline Elkins

Donut Economics, Kate Raworth

Purpose and Profit, George Serafeim

The Netanyahus, Joshua Cohen

The Idiot, Elif Batuman

An Immense World, Ed Yong

My Struggle, Vol. 3, Karl One Knausgaard

Watergate, Garrett Graff

Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner

Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr

Bewilderment, Richard Powers

Personal History, Katharine Graham

The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan

The Urge, Carl Erik Fisher

Desert Star, Michael Connelly

Superhuman, Rowan Hooper

How to Invest, David Rubenstein

A Shot to Save the World, Gregory Zucherman

Why Didn’t You Tell Me?, Carmen Rita Wong

Alright, Alright, Alright, Melissa Maerz

A Brief History of Equality, Thomas Piketty

The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan

Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim

Retail Gangster, Gary Weiss

Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman

Constructing a Nervous System, Margo Jefferson

All In, Billie Jean King

Two Wheels Good, Jody Rosen

Rogues, Patrick Radden Keefe

Nixonland, Rick Perlstein

How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil

The Zen of Therapy, Mark Epstein

Debt, David Graeber

Being You, Anil Seth

Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris

Move the Body, Heal the Mind, Jennifer Heisz

The Premonitions Bureau, Sam Knight

Ways and Means, Roger Lowenstein

Nuclear Folly, Serhil Plokhy

Stolen Focus, Johann Hari

The Candy House, Jennifer Egan

City on Fire, Don Winslow

Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel

Sweat, Bill Hayes

Index, a History of the, Dennis Duncan

Putin’s People, Catherine Belton

My Struggle, Vol. 2, Karl One Knausgaard

Mercy Street, Jennifer Haigh

Flying Blind, Peter Robison

The Lords of Easy Money, Christopher Leonard

The Founders, Jimmy Soni

The Copenhagen Trilogy, Tove Ditlevsen

Fight Night, Miriam Toews

Lost in the Valley of Death, Harley Rustad

Blood in the Garden, Chris Herring

Saga Vol. 1 and 2, Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio, Andrew Lo and Stephen Foerster

How to Change, Katy Milkman

Powder Days, Heather Hansman

2021

Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead

There is Nothing for You Here, Fiona Hill

Our Country Friends, Gary Shteyngart

Animal, Lisa Taddeo

Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas

Black Buck, Mateo Askaripour

Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro

Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe

The Empathy Diaries, Sherry Turkle

The Code Breaker, Walter Isaacson

Eat the Buddha, Barbara Demick

Exercised, Daniel Lieberman

All that She Carried, Tiya Miles

Fight Night, Miriam Toews

On Animals, Susan Orlean

The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow

Invisible Child, Andrea Elliot

The Dark Hours, Michael Connelly

Noise, Daniel Kahneman

Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain

Whereabouts, Jhumpa Lahiri

First Person Singular, Haruki Murakami

On Freedom, Maggie Nelson

Philip Roth, Blake Bailey

The Inevitable, Katie Engelhart

The Afghanistan Papers, Craig Whitlock

On Grand Strategy, John Lewis Gaddis

Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard

Calypso, David Sedaris

Nomadland, Jessica Bruder

Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, David Sedaris

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates

Death in Her Hands, Ottessa Moshfegh

We Ride Upon Sticks, Quan Barry

The Bully Pulpit, Doris Kearns Goodwin

The Plague Year, Lawrence Wright

The Premonition, Michael Lewis

The Sun is a Compass, Caroline Van Hemert

High Drama, John Burgman

Fulfillment, Alec MacGillis

Yearbook, Seth Rogen

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt

Between Two Kingdoms, Suleika Jaouad

The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris

Beginners, Tom Vanderbilt

This is How They Tell Me the World Ends, Nicole Perlroth

The Story of the Human Body, Daniel Lieberman

Extraterrestrial, Avi Loeb

Unworthy Republic, Claudio Saunt

Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Joan Didion

A Burning, Megha Majumdar

The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester

Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert

The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Heather Morris

We Keep the Dead Close, Becky Cooper

The Fragile Earth, ed. David Remnick

Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport

Annapurna, Arlene Blum

Capitalism Without Capital, Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake

The Law of Innocence, Michael Connelly

Serving the Servant, Danny Goldberg

The Man who Ran Washington, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser

The Warmth of other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson

Eve out of her Ruins, Ananda Devi

2020

A Promised Land, Barack Obama

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh

Three Women, Lisa Taddeo

Caste, Isabel Wilkerson

Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald

Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, Steve Martin

My Dark Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell

Negroland: A Memoir, Margo Jefferson

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin

Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Book 3, Robert Caro

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, Ronen Bergman

The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener

Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellman

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong

Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey

Is this Anything?, Jerry Seinfeld

Culture Warlords, Talia Lavin

Malice, Keigo Higashino

The Best of Me, David Sedaris

JFK, Fredrik Longevall

The Motion of the Body Through Space, Lionel Shriver

The Answer Is…, Alex Trebek

If Then, Jill Lepore

Flash Crash, Liam Vaughan

The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson

Before the Storm, Rick Perlestein

Means of Ascent, Robert Caro

Nothing is Wrong and Here is Why, Alexandra Petri

When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron

Accountable, Michael O’Leary and Warren Valdmanis

Heat and Light, Jennifer Haigh

Disappearing Earth, Julia Phillips

The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Passage of Power, Robert Caro

The Biggest Bluff, Maria Konnikova

Hidden Valley Road, Robert Kolker

Clean Hands, Patrick Hoffman

Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff

Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, David Sedaris

Lights Out: Pride, Delusion and the Fall of General Electric, Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann

The Adventurer’s Son, Roman Dial

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, Zachary D. Carter

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back, Mark O’Connell

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, James Nestor

Open: An Autobiography, Ande Agassi

Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets, and Outright Lies from a Lifetime of Writing for the Simpsons: Mike Reiss

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, Phil Knight

The Braindead Megaphone: Essays, George Saunders

Broken, Don Winslow

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink

Recursion, Blake Crouch

Janesville: An American Story, Amy Goldstein

The End of October, Lawrence Wright

Transit, Rachel Cusk

Cleanness, Garth Greenwell

The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death, Colson Whitehead

Narrative Economics, Robert Shiller

Weather, Jenny Offill

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, Hanif Abdurraqib

Calypso, David Sedaris

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, Adam Higginbotham

A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions can Revive the American Dream, Yuval Levin

Inside the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado

The Yellow House, Sarah Broom

In the Darkroom, Susan Faludi

This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff

Good Husbandry, Kristin Kimball

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution, Gregory Zuckerman

Just Kids, Patti Smith

When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi

The Beautiful Ones, Prince

2019

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won their Civil Rights, Adam Winkler

Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, David W. Blight

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971, Heather Ann Thompson

The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead

The Overstory, Richard Powers

Ali: A Life, Jonathan Eig

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, Jia Tolentino

Women Talking, Miriam Toews

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, Rebecca Henderson

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, David Treuer

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, Ed Yong

80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster by Training Slower, Matt Fitzgerald

Make it Scream, Make it Burn, Leslie Jamison

Horror Stories, Liz Phair

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, David Grann

Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream, Aaron Glantz

The Night Fire, Michael Connelly

Exit West, Mohsin Hamid

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, George Packer

Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, Pekka Hamalainen

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, Ronan Farrow

Wave, Sonali Deraniygala

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, Mike Isaac

My Squirrel Days, Ellie Kemper

Telex from Cuba, Rachel Kushner

Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, Andrew Marantz

Dryer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, Benjamin Dreyer

Permanent Record, Edward Snowden

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari

The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us, Richard Prum

American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment, Shane Bauer

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, Branko Milanovic

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, Michelle McNamara

Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood

The Border, Don Winslow

Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Didn’t Know You Have, Tatiana Schlossberg

The Economists’ Hour: How False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society, Binyamin Appelbaum

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America, Christopher Leonard

Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, George Packer

I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution, Emily Nussbaum

Washington Black, Esi Edugyan

The Cartel, Don Winslow

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, Casey Cep

How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind, Raghuram Rajan

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari

Small Fry, Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, Robert Caro

Power of the Dog, Don Winslow

These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore

The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life, Mark Synnott

Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery, Christie Aschwanden

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, James Forman, Jr.

Sabrina, Nick Drnaso

Autumn, Ali Smith

The Art of Raising a Puppy, the Monks of New Skete

The Library Book, Susan Orlean

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays, Alexander Chee

The Beastie Boys Book, Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz

I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche, Sue Prideaux

2018

Dark Sacred Night, Michael Connelly

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, Michael Pollan

Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon

Educated: A Memoir, Tara Westover

War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence, Ronan Farrow

North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail, Scott Jurek

The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1), Robert Caro

Cherry, Nico Walker

The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis

There There, Tommy Orange

Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan

Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business, Josh Noel

God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State, Lawrence Wright

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, John Carrayrou

The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner

The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, Masha Gessen

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories, Denis Johnson

The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison

Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, Barbara Ehrenreich

Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, Alex Hutchinson

Feel Free, Zadie Smith

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality, Jaron Lanier

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History, Diana Henriques

Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward

Two Kinds of Truth, Michael Connelly

2017

Lords of Finance: The Bankers who Broke the World, Liaquat Ahamed

We were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates

Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, John McPhee

The Late Show, Michael Connelly

The Force, Don Winslow

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return, Mihir Desai

South and West, Joan Didion

The Association of Small Bombs, Karan Mahajan

The CEO Pay Machine: How it Trashes America and How to Stop it, Steven Clifford

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon, Rosa Brooks 

The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson

The Nix, Nathan Hill

The Case Against Sugar, Gary Taubes

The Spy who came in from the Cold, John Le Carre

Moonglow, Michael Chabon

The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed our Minds, Michael Lewis

We are all Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler

2016

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg

A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James

Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal, Eugene Soltes

The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Vegetarian, Han Kang

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Olivia Laing

Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty

Work Rules!, Laszlo Block

Human Capital, Gary Becker

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Sellout, Paul Beatty

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, Andrea Wulf

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert

Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, Joby Warrick

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, Asne Seierstad

Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David, Lawrence Wright