Bookshelf
I built an entire site about book recommendations, so it's no surprise I love them.
Here are all the books on my shelf (along with a few that impacted me).
Impacted me
| Title | Author | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Softwar | Matthew Symonds | Nonfiction | It is no secret that Larry Ellison is my main influence |
| The Lords of Strategy | Walter Kiechel | Nonfiction | |
| Code | Charles Petzold | Nonfiction | |
| The 4-Hour Chef | Tim Ferriss | Nonfiction | |
| Lone Survivor | Marcus Luttrell | Nonfiction | |
| A Little History of the World | E.H. Gombrich | Nonfiction | |
| The Beginning of Infinity | David Deutsch | Nonfiction | Top 3 |
| Money: Master the Game | Tony Robbins | Nonfiction | |
| Reed Hastings | Matthew Burgess | Nonfiction | |
| Direct from Dell | Michael Dell | Nonfiction | |
| The Emperors of Chocolate | Joel Glenn Brenner | Nonfiction | |
| Jonathan Livingston Seagull | Richard Bach | Fiction | |
| Invent and Wander | Walter Isaacson & Jeff Bezos | Nonfiction | |
| Applied Minds | Guru Madhavan | Nonfiction | |
| The Diamond Age | Neal Stephenson | Fiction | |
| Hard Landing | Thomas Petzinger Jr. | Nonfiction | |
| The Narrow Road | Felix Dennis | Nonfiction | |
| Inside Facebook | Karel M. Baloun | Nonfiction | |
| The Fish That Ate the Whale | Rich Cohen | Nonfiction | |
| Hard Drive | James Wallace & Jim Erickson | Nonfiction | The last founder I'd want to compete against |
| Born of this Land | Chung Ju-yung | Nonfiction | |
| Creativity Inc. | Ed Catmull & Amy Wallace | Nonfiction | |
| The Power Law | Sebastian Mallaby | Nonfiction | |
| Founders at Work | Jessica Livingston | Nonfiction | |
| The 4-Hour Workweek | Tim Ferriss | Nonfiction | |
| The Man Who Solved the Market | Gregory Zuckerman | Nonfiction | |
| Tribe | Sebastian Junger | Nonfiction | Haven't lived alone since reading it |
| How Would You Move Mount Fuji? | William Poundstone | Nonfiction | |
| The Alchemy of Air | Thomas Hager | Nonfiction | |
| The Maverick and his Machine | Kevin Maney | Nonfiction | |
| Bloomberg by Bloomberg | Michael Bloomberg | Nonfiction | |
| Overdrive | James Wallace | Nonfiction | |
| The Accidental Billionaires | Ben Mezrich | Nonfiction | |
| Napoleon | Vincent Cronin | Nonfiction | |
| The Distracted Mind | Adam Gazzaley & Larry D. Rosen | Nonfiction | Improved my focus |
| In the Company of Giants | Rama Dev Jager & Rafael Ortiz | Nonfiction | |
| Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance | Robert M. Pirsig | Nonfiction | |
| What Is Zen | Norman Fischer | Nonfiction | |
| The Man Behind the Microchip | Leslie Berlin | Nonfiction | |
| Zero to One | Peter Thiel & Blake Masters | Nonfiction | Will make 2x2 matrices your go-to argument |
| Accessory to War | Neil deGrasse Tyson & Avis Lang | Nonfiction | See my 'TWW' tab |
| Setting the Table | Danny Meyer | Nonfiction | |
| Salt Sugar Fat | Michael Moss | Nonfiction | |
| The Science of Can and Can't | Chiara Marletto | Nonfiction | |
| The Making of the Atomic Bomb | Richard Rhodes | Nonfiction | |
| On Writing | Stephen King | Nonfiction | |
| Dark Genius of Wall Street | Edward Renehan | Nonfiction | |
| Proibir está proibido | Janice D'Souza | Nonfiction | My mom's experience in Angola's civil war |
| Genentech | Sally Smith Hughes | Nonfiction | |
| Hackers | Steven Levy | Nonfiction | |
| Return to the Little Kingdom | Michael Moritz | Nonfiction | |
| The Boron Letters | Gary C. Halbert | Nonfiction | Surprisingly captivating writing style |
| Algorithms to Live By | Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths | Nonfiction | |
| Behave | Robert M. Sapolsky | Nonfiction | |
| Hackers and Painters | Paul Graham | Nonfiction | I've read every essay by the author |
| The $12 Million Stuffed Shark | Donald N. Thompson | Nonfiction | |
| The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up | Marie Kondo | Nonfiction | You should see my apartment now |
| How Music Got Free | Stephen Richard Witt | Nonfiction | |
| Copy This! | Paul Orfalea | Nonfiction | |
| Illusions | Richard Bach | Fiction | |
| The Most Dangerous Man in America | Mark Perry | Nonfiction | |
| The Obstacle Is the Way | Ryan Holiday | Nonfiction | A great mantra, with 1000 stories to drive it home |
| The Dao of Capital | Mark Spitznagel | Nonfiction | |
| The House of Morgan | Ron Chernow | Nonfiction | |
| Napoleon: A Life | Andrew Roberts | Nonfiction | Shows the maximum one can accomplish in a lifetime |
| Clean Code | Robert C. Martin | Nonfiction | |
| The Robber Barons | Matthew Josephson | Nonfiction | Pair with 'The Men Who Built America' documentary |
| Delivering Happiness | Tony Hsieh | Nonfiction | Taught me what true customer obsession looks like |
| Working Backwards | Colin Bryar & Bill Carr | Nonfiction | |
| Facebook: The Inside Story | Steven Levy | Nonfiction | |
| Nothing Like It In the World | Stephen E. Ambrose | Nonfiction | |
| Understanding the Digital World | Brian Kernighan | Nonfiction | |
| Masters of Scale | Reid Hoffman | Nonfiction | |
| Gates of Fire | Steven Pressfield | Fiction | War, not peace, provides virtue |
| Arcadia | Tom Stoppard | Fiction | |
| The Pragmatic Programmer | Andrew Hunt & David Thomas | Nonfiction | |
| A Tale for the Time Being | Ruth Ozeki | Fiction | |
| Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand | Fiction | Teaches how to think from first principles |
| 12 Rules for Life | Jordan B. Peterson | Nonfiction | |
| Thinking Statistically | Uri Bram | Nonfiction | |
| Barbarians at the Gate | Bryan Burrough & John Helyar | Nonfiction | |
| All Marketers Tell Stories | Seth Godin | Nonfiction | |
| On War | Carl von Clausewitz | Nonfiction | |
| Deep Work | Cal Newport | Nonfiction | I think about it more than I thought I would |
| The Airbnb Story | Leigh Gallagher | Nonfiction | |
| Alibaba | Duncan Clark | Nonfiction | |
| The Infinite Machine | Camila Russo | Nonfiction | |
| Feynman Lectures on Physics [Vol 1] | Richard P. Feynman | Nonfiction | Always puts my mind in 'clear thinking mode' |
| Feynman Lectures on Physics [Vol 2] | Richard P. Feynman | Nonfiction | |
| Feynman Lectures on Physics [Vol 3] | Richard P. Feynman | Nonfiction | |
| The Alchemist | Paulo Coelho | Fiction | |
| Lying | Sam Harris | Nonfiction | |
| Easy Riders, Raging Bulls | Peter Biskind | Nonfiction | |
| The Puzzler | A.J. Jacobs | Nonfiction | |
| Secrets of Mental Math | Arthur Benjamin & Michael Shermer | Nonfiction | |
| Eating the Big Fish | Adam Morgan | Nonfiction | |
| Fate is the Hunter | Ernest K. Gann | Nonfiction | |
| The Tycoons | Charles R. Morris | Nonfiction | |
| Steve Jobs | Walter Isaacson | Nonfiction | Made me move to Silicon Valley |
| Driven from Within | Michael Jordan | Nonfiction | |
| Hooked | Nir Eyal | Nonfiction | |
| Hardcore Software | Steven Sinofsky | Nonfiction | |
| Blitzscaling | Reid Hoffman & Chris Yeh | Nonfiction | |
| The Attention Merchants | Tim Wu | Nonfiction | |
| Coco Chanel | Justine Picardie | Nonfiction | |
| Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! | Richard P. Feynman | Nonfiction | Not as impactful as his lectures, but still great |
| Insanely Simple | Ken Segall | Nonfiction | Arguably, the most useful business skill |
| No Filter | Sarah Frier | Nonfiction | |
| Powerhouse | James Andrew Miller | Nonfiction | |
| The Prince | Niccolò Machiavelli | Nonfiction | |
| The Contrarian | Max Chafkin | Nonfiction | |
| The Million-Dollar One-Person Business | Elaine Pofeldt | Nonfiction | |
| The Upstarts | Brad Stone | Nonfiction | |
| Creative Selection | Ken Kocienda | Nonfiction | |
| Principles | Ray Dalio | Nonfiction | Top 3 |
| Junkyard Planet | Adam Minter | Nonfiction | |
| Amazon Unbound | Brad Stone | Nonfiction | |
| How to Avoid a Climate Disaster | Bill Gates | Nonfiction | |
| The Age of Napoleon | Will & Ariel Durant | Nonfiction | |
| The Fabric of Reality | David Deutsch | Nonfiction | |
| Masters of Doom | David Kushner | Nonfiction | |
| Angels & Demons | Dan Brown | Fiction | |
| Napoleon: A Concise Biography | David A. Bell | Nonfiction | |
| Art of Doing Science and Engineering | Richard W. Hamming | Nonfiction | How to think like an engineer |
| The Founders | Jimmy Soni | Nonfiction | |
| A Mind at Play | Jimmy Soni & Rob Goodman | Nonfiction | |
| The Innovators | Walter Isaacson | Nonfiction | Lovely history of the industry I love so much |
| Measure What Matters | John Doerr | Nonfiction | |
| The Fountainhead | Ayn Rand | Fiction | Less impactful than Atlas Shrugged, but c'mon |
| Hitch-22 | Christopher Hitchens | Nonfiction | |
| The Facebook Effect | David Kirkpatrick | Nonfiction | |
| On Having No Head | Douglas E. Harding | Nonfiction | |
| 10% Happier | Dan Harris | Nonfiction | Best intro to meditation |
| The Perfectionists | Simon Winchester | Nonfiction | |
| The Jordan Rules | Sam Smith | Nonfiction | |
| Traction | Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares | Nonfiction | |
| Million Dollar Weekend | Noah Kagan | Nonfiction | |
| Making Sense | Sam Harris | Nonfiction | |
| The Billionaire and the Mechanic | Julian Guthrie | Nonfiction | It is no secret that Larry Ellison is my main influence |
| A Man for All Markets | Edward O. Thorp | Nonfiction | |
| Iacocca | Lee Iacocca | Nonfiction | |
| Strategy | Lawrence Freedman | Nonfiction | The strategy book I wish I had written |
| How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars | Billy Gallagher | Nonfiction | |
| Vagabond (manga) | Takehiko Inoue | Fiction | Couldn't put it down (this rarely happens) |
| The Education of a Bodybuilder | Arnold Schwarzenegger | Nonfiction | |
| The Maniac | Benjamin Labatut | Nonfiction | |
| Siddhartha | Hermann Hesse | Fiction | |
| Titan | Ron Chernow | Nonfiction | |
| The Prize | Daniel Yergin | Nonfiction | |
| Estee: A Success Story | Estee Lauder | Nonfiction | |
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams | Fiction | |
| Solve for Happy | Mo Gawdat | Nonfiction | |
| The Goal | Eliyahu M. Goldratt | Nonfiction | |
| Cable Cowboy | Mark Robichaux | Nonfiction | |
| The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison | Mike Wilson | Nonfiction | It is no secret that Larry Ellison is my main influence |
| How to Get Rich | Felix Dennis | Nonfiction | |
| The Founding Father of the Rockefellers | David Freeman Hawke | Nonfiction | |
| The Upside of Stress | Kelly McGonigal | Nonfiction | |
| Amp It Up | Frank Slootman | Nonfiction | |
| The Warrior Diet | Ori Hofmekler | Nonfiction | |
| The Splendid and the Vile | Erik Larson | Nonfiction | |
| The Willpower Instinct | Kelly McGonigal | Nonfiction | |
| A Billion Wicked Thoughts | Ogi Ogas & Sai Gaddam | Nonfiction | Using science to understand sexual desire, ha |
| The Three Pillars of Zen | Philip Kapleau | Nonfiction | |
| The Geography of Genius | Eric Weiner | Nonfiction | |
| The Big Payback | Dan Charnas | Nonfiction | |
| The Elements of Power | David S. Abraham | Nonfiction | |
| Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World | Jack Weatherford | Nonfiction | |
| The Da Vinci Code | Dan Brown | Fiction | |
| Proof of Stake | Vitalik Buterin | Nonfiction | |
| Against the Odds | James Dyson | Nonfiction | |
| Game Changer | Matthew Sadler & Natasha Regan | Nonfiction | A chess book, but inspired me to dive into AI |
| Snow Crash | Neal Stephenson | Fiction | |
| How to Read a Book | Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren | Nonfiction | |
| The ONE Thing | Gary Keller & Jay Papasan | Nonfiction | Top 3 |
| The Three-Body Problem [Three-Body Problem 1] | Liu Cixin | Fiction | |
| The Dark Forest [Three-Body Problem 2] | Liu Cixin | Fiction | |
| Death's End [Three-Body Problem 3] | Liu Cixin | Fiction | |
| How Engineers Think | Guru Madhavan | Nonfiction | |
| The Hard Thing About Hard Things | Ben Horowitz | Nonfiction | |
| Alexander of Macedon | Peter Green | Nonfiction | Teenage Richard's favorite book |
| The Reckoning | David Halberstam | Nonfiction | |
| How to Prevent the Next Pandemic | Bill Gates | Nonfiction | |
| The Boy Kings | Katherine Losse | Nonfiction | |
| Olympias Mother of Alexander the Great | Elizabeth Carney | Nonfiction | No Olympias, no Alexander (can't say the same for Philip) |
| Michael Jordan: The Life | Roland Lazenby | Nonfiction | |
| Wild Ride | Adam Lashinsky | Nonfiction | |
| Fast Food Nation | Eric Schlosser | Nonfiction | |
| The Master Switch | Tim Wu | Nonfiction | |
| The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect | Roger Williams | Fiction | |
| The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing | Al Ries & Jack Trout | Nonfiction | |
| The Everything Store | Brad Stone | Nonfiction | Helped me tremendously while growing MRB |
| Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind | Shunryu Suzuki | Nonfiction | |
| Durov's Code | N. V. Kononov | Nonfiction | |
| Becoming Facebook | Mike Hoefflinger | Nonfiction | |
| Genius Makers | Cade Metz | Nonfiction | Perhaps the only non-technical AI book I've enjoyed |
| Coders | Clive Thompson | Nonfiction | |
| The Man from the Future | Ananyo Bhattacharya | Nonfiction | |
| Driven | Larry Miller & L.E. Baird | Nonfiction | A cautionary tale, but it had the opposite effect on me |
| Tape Sucks | Frank Slootman | Nonfiction | |
| The World for Sale | Javier Blas & Jack Farchy | Nonfiction | |
| The Richest Man in Babylon | George S. Clason | Nonfiction | |
| Dethroning the King | Julie MacIntosh | Nonfiction | |
| Grokking Algorithms | Aditya Bhargava | Nonfiction | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Walter Isaacson | Nonfiction | |
| Revolution in The Valley | Andy Hertzfeld | Nonfiction | |
| Kingdom (manga) | Yasuhisa Hara | Fiction | Like watching 300IQ grandmasters duel |
| Empires of Light | Jill Jonnes | Nonfiction | |
| Mamba Mentality | Kobe Bryant | Nonfiction | |
| Stumbling on Happiness | Daniel Gilbert | Nonfiction | |
| Asi es Armancio Ortega | Covadonga O'Shea | Nonfiction | |
| The Power Broker | Robert A. Caro | Nonfiction | |
| Why Buddhism Is True | Robert Wright | Nonfiction | |
| Business Adventures | John Brooks | Nonfiction | |
| More Money Than God | Sebastian Mallaby | Nonfiction | |
| Blue Ocean Strategy | W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne | Nonfiction | |
| Elon Musk | Walter Isaacson | Nonfiction | Makes you view life as one big Polytopia game |
| Liar's Poker | Michael Lewis | Nonfiction | |
| The Structure of Scientific Revolutions | Thomas S. Kuhn | Nonfiction | |
| Generals | Thomas E. Ricks | Nonfiction | |
| Neuromancer [Sprawl 1] | William Gibson | Fiction | |
| Count Zero [Sprawl 2] | William Gibson | Fiction | |
| Mona Lisa Overdrive [Sprawl 3] | William Gibson | Fiction | |
| How I Lost 170 Million Dollars | Noah Kagan | Nonfiction | |
| West by West | Jerry West | Nonfiction | |
| Not Fade Away | Peter Barton | Nonfiction | Sad, beautiful, and life-changing |
| Economics in One Lesson | Henry Hazlitt | Nonfiction | |
| Tiny Habits | BJ Fogg | Nonfiction | |
| The Churchill Factor | Boris Johnson | Nonfiction | |
| Can't Hurt Me | David Goggins | Nonfiction | |
| The Checklist Manifesto | Atul Gawande | Nonfiction | Simple way to optimize your brain's CPU |
| Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs | Nonfiction | |
| Elon Musk | Ashlee Vance | Nonfiction | |
| Digital Gold | Nathaniel Popper | Nonfiction | |
| Cryptonomicon | Neal Stephenson | Fiction | |
| Journey to the West | Wu Cheng'en | Fiction | Perhaps my favorite fiction book |
| The Power of Habit | Charles Duhigg | Nonfiction | |
| Foundation [Foundation 1] | Isaac Asimov | Fiction | |
| Foundation and Empire [Foundation 2] | Isaac Asimov | Fiction | |
| Second Foundation [Foundation 3] | Isaac Asimov | Fiction | |
| Foundation's Edge [Foundation 4] | Isaac Asimov | Fiction | |
| Foundation and Earth [Foundation 5] | Isaac Asimov | Fiction | |
| Prelude to Foundation [Foundation 6] | Isaac Asimov | Fiction | |
| Forward the Foundation [Foundation 7] | Isaac Asimov | Fiction | |
| The Code Breaker | Walter Isaacson | Nonfiction | |
| The Autobiography of Estee Lauder | Estee Lauder | Nonfiction | |
| Liftoff | Eric Berger | Nonfiction | |
| Influence | Robert B. Cialdini | Nonfiction | |
| Moneyball | Michael Lewis | Nonfiction | |
| Super Pumped | Mike Isaac | Nonfiction | |
| Tools of Titans | Tim Ferriss | Nonfiction | So much great advice for many areas of life |
| Becoming Steve Jobs | Brent Schlender & Rick Tetzeli | Nonfiction | Best book on the most 'magical' founder |
| Pre-Suasion | Robert B. Cialdini | Nonfiction | |
| Waking Up | Sam Harris | Nonfiction | Most sober book on meditation |
| Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill | Gretchen Rubin | Nonfiction | |
| God's Debris | Scott Adams | Fiction | |
| Relentless | Tim S. Grover | Nonfiction | |
| Tiger Woods | Jeff Benedict & Armen Keteyian | Nonfiction | |
| Kochland | Christopher Leonard | Nonfiction | |
| The World in a Grain | Vince Beiser | Nonfiction | |
| The Box | Marc Levinson | Nonfiction | |
| Total Recall | Arnold Schwarzenegger | Nonfiction | |
| Impossible to Ignore | Carmen Simon | Nonfiction | |
| Zen: The Authentic Gate | Koun Yamada | Nonfiction | I lived 4mo in a Zen center, and this was my compass |
| Made in America | Sam Walton | Nonfiction | So much wisdom from such a character |
| The Scientists | John Gribbin | Nonfiction | |
| Fire in the Valley | Michael Swaine & Paul Freiberger | Nonfiction | |
| The Intel Trinity | Michael S. Malone | Nonfiction | |
| The Space Barons | Christian Davenport | Nonfiction | |
| No Rules Rules | Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer | Nonfiction | |
| Bad Pharma | Ben Goldacre | Nonfiction | |
| Shoe Dog | Phil Knight | Nonfiction | |
| Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin | Benjamin Franklin | Nonfiction | |
| The First Tycoon | T.J. Stiles | Nonfiction | |
| Law 101 | Jay M. Feinman | Nonfiction | |
| Free Will | Sam Harris | Nonfiction | Left me in a funk for 2 weeks, but I survived |
| Conspiracy | Ryan Holiday | Nonfiction | |
| Be Useful | Arnold Schwarzenegger | Nonfiction | |
| The Art of War | Sun Tzu | Nonfiction | |
| The Last Lion | William Manchester | Nonfiction | |
| Play Nice But Win | Michael Dell | Nonfiction | |
| The 4-Hour Body | Tim Ferriss | Nonfiction | My gateway into the Ferriss rabbit hole |
| Powerful | Patty McCord | Nonfiction | |
| Autobiography of a Yogi | Paramahansa Yogananda | Nonfiction | Needed a zen retreat to read this, but glad I did |
| Dune [Dune 1] | Frank Herbert | Fiction | |
| Dune Messiah [Dune 2] | Frank Herbert | Fiction | |
| Children of Dune [Dune 3] | Frank Herbert | Fiction | |
| God Emperor of Dune [Dune 4] | Frank Herbert | Fiction | |
| Heretics of Dune [Dune 5] | Frank Herbert | Fiction | |
| Chapterhouse: Dune [Dune 6] | Frank Herbert | Fiction |