Reading

I have been asked more than once what my reading recommendations are. Slowly compiling them into a list form here. By no means exhaustive. I’ve also tried categorizing, but find that some books fit into multiple categories. Anyways, here’s my best shot, alphabetized by category. If you’re a student, Young Adult Recommendations are at the bottom.

Audiobooks (only those narrated by the author)

• Will, by Will Smith
• Greenlights, by Matthew McConaughey
• Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah

Biography + Autobiography

• Steve Jobs, by Walter Issacson
• The Snowball, by Alice Schroeder
• Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
• Mornings on Horseback, by David McCullough
• Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance
• Titan, by Ron Chernow
• Will, by Will Smith
• Hit Refresh, by Satya Nadella
• A Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
• What It Takes, by Stephen A. Schwarzman
• A Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
• The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis
• Bossypants, by Tina Fey
• The Assassination of Fred Hampton, by Jeffrey Haas
• Twelve Against the Gods, by William Bolitho
• A Truck Full of Money, by Tracey Kidder
• Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
• The Radical King, by Cornel West
• A Promised Land, by Barack Obama

Business

• The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt
• Moneyball, by Michael Lewis
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack, by Charlie Munger
• Superforecasting, by Philip Tetlock
• The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb

Business How-Tos

• Growing Pains, by Eric Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle
• Venture Deals, by Brad Feld
• Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt
• The Automatic Customer, by John Warrillow
• The Startup Checklist, by David Rose
• The Messy Middle, by Scott Belsky

Business Bios

• Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight
• The Everything Store, by Brad Stone
• Bad Blood, by John Carreyou
• Onward & Pour Your Heart Into It, by Howard Schultz
• Ride of a Lifetime, by Bob Iger
• Let My People Go Surfing, by Yvon Chouinard
• Alibaba, by Duncan Clark
• Hard Drive, by James Wallace and Jim Erickson
• Business Adventures, by John Brooks

China

• Dream of the Red Chamber - Chinese Classic, by Cao Xueqin
• The Last Kings of Shanghai, by Jonathan Kaufmann
• How Asia Works, by Joe Studwell
• Factory Girls, by Leslie Chang
• The Corpse Walker, by Liao Yiwu
• The Mao’s Famine Trilogy, by Frank Dikkoter
• On China, by Henry Kissinger
• Age of Ambition, by Evan Osnos
• Wild Swans, by June Chang
• Out of Mao’s Shadow, by Philip Pan
• When China Rules the World, by Martin Jacques
• Country Driving, by Peter Hessler
• Oracle Bones, by Peter Hessler
• One Billion Customers, James McGregor
• Little Soldiers, by Lenora Chu
• Tombstone, by Yang Jisheng
• Red Star Over China, by Edgar Snow
• Diary of a Madman, Lu Xun

Classics

• Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
• Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
• The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli
• The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
• The Lord of The Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Five Dialogues, by Plato
• Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle
• The Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
• Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Company Culture

• Amp It Up, by Frank Slootman
• Radical Candor, by Kim Scott
• Good People, by Anthony Tjan
• Setting the Table, by Danny Meyer
• Reinventing Organizations, by Frederic Laloux
• Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hsieh
• The Alliance, by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh

Education

• Excellent Sheep, by William Deresiewicz
• Class Clowns, by Johnathan Knee
• Educated, by Tara Westover
• Democracy and Education, by John Dewey
• How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough
• Mindset, by Carol Dweck
• The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Kuianoff
• The Future of Professions, by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind
• Education and the Commercial Mindset, by Samuel Abrams

Fiction/Novels

• The Illiad, by Homer
• Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
• The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien
• Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
• Lamb, by Christopher Moore
• Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
• The Godfather, by Mario Puzo
• The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
• Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
• The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
• The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Trial, by Franz Kafka
• Half a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
• Diary of a Madman, by Lu Xun
• Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
• In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
• Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome
• The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand

Finance

• Valuation, by McKinsey & Company
• Accounting and Finance for Managers, by Matt Bamber & Simon Parry
• The Partnership - A History of Goldman Sachs
• Venture Deals, by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson

Government

• Democracy in America, by Alexis De Tocqueville

History + Non-Fiction

• Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown
• Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwinne
• The Gray Lady Winked, by Ashley Rindsberg
• The Great Game, by Peter Hopkirk
• Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, by Peter Hopkirk
• Everything by Vaclav Smil
• Red Notice, by Bill Browder
• The Fourth Turning, by Neil How and William Strauss
• Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond
• The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch
• Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, by V.M. Zubok

Just for Fun

• Everything by Michael Lewis
• Bringing Down the House, by Ben Mezrich
• A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson

Leadership

• Leadership and Self-Deception, by the Arbinger Institute
• Turn the Ship Around, by L. David Marquet
• The Great CEO Within, by Matt Mochary
• What You Do is Who You Are, by Ben Horowitz
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz
• Start With Why, by Simon Sinek
• Leadership, by Doris Kearns Godwin
• The Leader Within Us, by Warren Rustand
• Awareness, by Anthony De Mello
• Reinventing Organizations, by Frederic Laloux
• Dare to Lead, by Brene Brown

Management

• High Output Management, by Andy Grove
• Anything by Patrick Lencioni
• Excellence Wins, by Horst Schulze
• Anything by Ichak Kalderon Adizes
• The Game-Changer, by A.G. Lafley & Ram Charan
• Managing Oneself, by Peter Drucker
• Simply Effective, by Ron Ashkenas
• Turn the Ship Around, by L. David Marquet

Marketing + Sales

• Epic Content Marketing, by Joe Pulizzi
• Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, by Gary Vaynerchuk
• Ogilvy on Advertising, by David Ogilvy
• Hyper Sales Growth, by Jack Daly
• Loved, by Martina Lauchengco
• Anything by Chip and Dan Heath

Plays/Stage

• Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
• Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller
• Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard
• Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
• Hedda Gabler, by Henrik Ibsen
• Angels in America, by Tony Kushner
• Glengarry Glen Ross, by David Mamet
• The Odd Couple, by Neil Simon
• Doubt, by John Patrick Shanley
• Topdog/Underdog, by Suzan-Lori Parks
• The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde
• Scams of Scapin, by Moliere
• And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
• Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles

Philosophy and Religion

• Zen and the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel
• Analects, by Confucius (Slingerland translation)
• Dao De Ching, by Laozi
• The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
• Anything by C.S. Lewis

Popular Science/Psychology

• How to Change Your Mind, by Michael Pollan
• The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg
• Hooked, by Nir Eyal
• The Gene, by Siddhartha Mukherjee
• Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
• A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking
• Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, by Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Drive, by Daniel Pink

Sci-Fi

• Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
• The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
• The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
• Dune, by Herbert

Self-Help

• Never Split the Difference, By Chris Voss
• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, by Eric Jorgenson
• The Great Work of Your Life, by Stephen Cope
• How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
• The Road to Character, by David Brooks
• The Daily Stoic, by Ryan Holiday
• Principles, by Ray Dalio
• Good Arguments, by Bo Seo
• Building a Second Brain, by Tiago Forte

Shorts/Essays/Speeches

• Caffeine, by Michael Pollan
• Lying, by Sam Harris
• Most essays by Paul Graham
• Anything by David Foster Wallace
• Anything by Christopher Hitchens
• The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus
• Anything by James Baldwin
• Anything by David Sedaris
• A Collection of Essays, by George Orwell
• Letter from Birmingham Jail, by Martin Luther King Jr.
• Ballot or Bullet, by Malcolm X

Women/Women’s Studies

• Half The Sky, by Nicholas Kristof + Sheryl WuDunn
• Men Explain Things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit
• Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado Perez

Young Adult

• Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis
• The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
• Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie
• The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Night, by Elie Wisel