Bookshelf

A list of books I'm currently reading:

• The Lessons of History

  Will and Ariel Durant (2010)

• The Network State

  How To Start a New Country

  Balaji Srinivasan (2022)

• The Dawn of Everything

  A New History of Humanity

  David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021)

• Dune (Dune Chronicles, Book 1)

  Frank Herbert (1965)

• Against the Grain

  A Deep History of the Earliest States

  James C. Scott (2017)

• The Odyssey

  Homer (translated by Emily Wilson) (2018)

Books I've read

This is an incomplete list of books I've read (and reread) since 2009 in reverse chronological order. My favorite books are underlined.

2022

• Bloodlands

  Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

  Timothy Snyder (2010)

• The Minimalist Entrepreneur

  How Great Founders Do More with Less

  Sahil Lavingia (2021)

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

  Thomas S. Kuhn (1962)

• Deaf Republic

  Ilya Kaminsky (2019)

• Building a Second Brain

  A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

  Tiago Forte (2022)

• Bitcoin is Venice

  Essays on the Past and Future of Capitalism

  Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers (2022)

• My Struggle (Book 5)

  Karl Ove Knausgaard (2010)

• The Seaworthy Offshore Sailboat

  A Guide to Essential Features, Gear, and Handling

  John Vigor (1999)

• The Mandibles

  A Family, 2029-2047

  Lionel Shriver (2016)

• Your Music and People

  Derek Sivers (2020)

• The Book of Satoshi

  The Collected Writings of Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto

  Phil Champagne (2014)

• Viral

  The Search for the Origin of COVID-19

  Alina Chan and Matt Ridley (2021)

2021

• Beowulf

  Unknown (translated by Seamus Heaney)

• History Has Begun

  The Birth of a New America

  Bruno Maçães (2020)

• The Bullish Case for Bitcoin

  Vijay Boyapati (2021)

• Foundation (Foundation Series #3)

  Isaac Asimov (1951)

• Out of the Ether

  The Amazing Story of Ethereum and the $55 Million Heist that Almost Destroyed It All

  Matthew Leising (2020)

• The Physics of Climate Change

  Lawrence M. Krauss (2021)

• The Psychology of Money

  Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

  Morgan Housel (2020)

• How to Live

  Derek Sivers (2021)

• The Blocksize War

  The Battle Over Who Controls Bitcoin’s Protocol Rules

  Jonathan Bier (2021)

• Gentle Regrets

  Thoughts from a Life

  Roger Scruton (2005)

• When Money Dies

  The Nightmare of Deficit Spending, Devaluation, and Hyperinflation in Weimar Germany

  Adam Fergusson (1975)

• The Plague

  Albert Camus (1947)

• Heart of Darkness

  Joseph Conrad (1899)

2020

• The Handmaid's Tale

  Margaret Atwood (1985)

• Debt

  The First 5000 Years

  David Graeber (2011)

• On Bullshit

  Harry G. Frankfurt (2005)

• Dominion

  The Making of the Western Mind

  Tom Holland

• The Cultural Revolution

  A People's History, 1962-1976

  Frank Dikötter

• Augustus

  John Williams (1972)

• Hell Yeah or No

  What's Worth Doing

  Derek Sivers (2020)

• The Sovereign Individual

  Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

  James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg (1997)

• Grokking Bitcoin

  Kalle Rosenbaum (2019)

• Hunger

  Knut Hamsun (1890)

• The Black Swan

  The Impact of the Highly Improbable

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2017)

• Facebook

  The Inside Story

  Steven Levy

• Blindness

  José Saramago (1995)

• Whole Earth Discipline

  Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, Radical Science, and Geoengineering are Necessary

  Stewart Brand (2009)

• The Master and Margarita

  Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)

• Briefe an einen jungen Dichter

  Rainer Maria Rilke (1929)

2019

• The Ice Age

  A Very Short Introduction

  Jamie Woodward

• Seeing Like a State

  How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

  James C. Scott

• Life 3.0

  Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

  Max Tegmark

• The Man Who Solved The Market

  How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution

  Gregory Zuckerman

• The Bed of Procrustes

  Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• The Elementary Particles

  Michel Houellebecq

• Das Zettelkasten-Prinzip

  Sönke Ahrens

• Cryptonomicon

  Neal Stephenson

• Permanent Record

  Edward Snowden

• Barbarian Days

  A Surfing Life

  William Finnegan

• What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars

  Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan

• Inventing Bitcoin

  The Technology Behind The First Truly Scarce and Decentralized Money Explained

  Yan Pritzker

• Il barone rampante

  Italo Calvino

• Scotland

  A Very Short Introduction

  Rab Houston

• Bitcoin Billionaires

  A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption

  Ben Mezrich

• Exhalation

  Stories

  Ted Chiang

• The Box

  How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

  Marc Levinson

• The Iron Kingdom

  The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947

  Christopher Clark

• My Struggle (Book 4)

  Karl Ove Knausgaard

• My Struggle (Book 3)

  Karl Ove Knausgaard

• Mao's Great Famine

  The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62

  Frank Dikötter

• Bad Blood

  Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

  John Carreyrou

• Kokoro

  Natsume Sōseki

• Atomic Habits

  James Clear

• Factfulness

  Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

  Hans Rosling

• Company of One

  Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business

  Paul Jarvis

• The Mastermind

  The Hunt for the World's Most Prolific Criminal

  Evan Ratliff

• 12 Rules for Life

  An Antidote to Chaos

  Jordan B. Peterson

2018

• Fahrenheit 451

  Ray Bradbury

• Americanah

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• Norse Mythology

  Neil Gaiman

• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

  David Mitchell

• Why Nations Fail

  The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

  Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

• The Bitcoin Standard

  The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

  Saifedean Ammous

• Il Gattopardo

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

• The Norman Conquest

  A Very Short Introduction

  George Garnett

• Portnoy's Complaint

  Philip Roth

• Conspiracy

  Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

  Ryan Holiday

• Liar's Poker

  Michael Lewis

• Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

  Haruki Murakami

• On the Move

  A Life

  Oliver Sacks

• Skin in the Game

  Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Butcher's Crossing

  John Williams

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

  An Inquiry into Values

  Robert M. Pirsig

• Lacci

  Domenico Starnone

• Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

  Richard Yates

• Travels in Siberia

  Ian Frazier

2017

• Narziß und Goldmund

  Hermann Hesse

• Pachinko

  Min Jin Lee

• Le città invisibili

  Italo Calvino

• Inadequate Equilibria

  Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Conquest

  Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico

  Hugh Thomas

• The Remains of the Day

  Kazuo Ishiguro

• ZeroZeroZero

  Roberto Saviano (2013)

• Matterhorn

  A Novel of the Vietnam War

  Karl Marlantes (2009)

• The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth's Past, Book 1)

  Cixin Liu (2008)

• A Mind at Play

  How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

  Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman

• The Underground Railroad

  Colson Whitehead (2016)

• Peter Camenzind

  Hermann Hesse

• My Struggle (Book 2)

  Karl Ove Knausgaard

• My Struggle (Book 1)

  Karl Ove Knausgaard

• Demian

  Hermann Hesse

• American Pastoral

  Philip Roth

• Homo Deus

  Yuval Noah Harari

• No Country for Old Men

  Cormac McCarthy

• Blood Meridian

  Cormac McCarthy

• Vagabonding

  Rolf Potts

• Stories of your Life and Others

  Ted Chiang

• Snow Country

  Yasunari Kawabata

• Stoner

  John Williams

• The Penguin History of New Zealand

  Michael King

• Siddharta

  Hermann Hesse

• Zero to One

  Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

  Peter Thiel

• Tools of Titans

  Tim Ferriss

• The Singapore Story

  Lee Kuan Yew

• Sapiens

  A Brief History of Humankind

  Yuval Noah Harari

• American Psycho

  Bret Easton Ellis

• Alan Turing

  The Enigma

  Andrew Hodges

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

  Junot Díaz

• The Road

  Cormac McCarthy

2016

• Das Versprechen

  Friedrich Dürrenmatt

• Stiller

  Max Frisch

• Deep Work

  Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

  Calvin Newport

• The Catcher in the Rye

  JD Salinger

• Digital Gold

  Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

  Nathaniel Popper

• So Good They Can't Ignore You

  Calvin Newport

• To Kill a Mockingbird

  Harper Lee

• Das Glasperlenspiel

  Hermann Hesse

2015

• Reise an den Rand des Universums

  Urs Widmer

• Flash Boys

  Michael Lewis

• East of Eden

  John Steinbeck

• Cannery Row

  John Steinbeck

• The Manipulated Man

  Esther Vilar

• The Opposing Shore

  Julien Gracq

• Herzog

  Saul Bellow

2014

• Of Mice and Men

  John Steinbeck

• Revolutionary Road

  Richard Yates

• Stoner

  John Williams

• Man’s Search for Meaning

  Viktor Frankl

• Snow Crash

  Neal Stephenson

• Antifragile

  Things That Gain from Disorder

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Im Westen nichts Neues

  Erich Maria Remarque

• Cryptonomicon

  Neal Stephenson

• A Farewell to Arms

  Ernest Hemingway

• Women

  Charles Bukowsky

2013

• Cypherpunks

  Freedom and the Future of the Internet

  Julian Assange

• Understanding Power

  Noam Chomsky

• Il deserto dei tartari

  Dino Buzzati

• Midnight's Children

  Salman Rushdie

• Lolita

  Vladimir Nabokov

• Slaughterhouse-Five

  Kurt Vonnegut

• Norwegian Wood

  Haruki Murakami

• Grapes of Wrath

  John Steinbeck

• Siddharta

  Hermann Hesse

• Ghetto at the Center of the World

  Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong

  Gordon Mathews

• Der Steppenwolf

  Hermann Hesse

2012

• Korea

  The Impossible Country

  Daniel Tudor

• Drachenläufer

  Khaled Hosseini

• Il cimitero di Praga

  Umberto Eco

• Quiet

  Susan Cain

• The 4-Hour Workweek

  Tim Ferriss

• The $100 Startup

  Chris Guillebeau

• The Great Gatsby

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

• 1Q84 Book 3

  Haruki Murakami

• 1Q84 Book 2

  Haruki Murakami

• 1Q84 Book 1

  Haruki Murakami

• No Country for Old Men

  Cormac McCarthy

• L’étranger

  Albert Camus

• Ich bin dann mal weg

  Meine Reise auf dem Jakobsweg

  Hape Kerkeling

• Die Geschichte der Schweiz

  Volker Reinhardt

• O Banqueiro Anarquista

  Fernando Pessoa

• Program or Be Programmed

  Ten Commands for a Digital Age

  Douglas Rushkoff

• On The Road

  Jack Kerouac

2011

• The Hobbit

  J.R.R. Tolkien

• Into The Wild

  Jon Krakauer

• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

  Philip K. Dick

• Frankenstein

  Mary Shelley

• Stay Small

  A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup

  Rob Walling

• The Intelligent Investor

  The Definitive Book on Value Investing

  Benjamin Graham

• A Mathematician's Apology

  G. H. Hardy

• Civil Disobedience

  Henry David Thoreau

• Capitalism

  The Unknown Ideal

  Ayn Rand

• I am a Strange Loop

  Douglas R. Hofstadter

• Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius

  Marcus Aurelius

• Notes from the Underground

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts

  Joseph von Eichendorff

• The Law

  Frédéric Bastiat

• Animal Farm

  George Orwell

• Alles Leben ist Problemlösen

  Karl R. Popper

• From the Earth to the Moon

  Jules Verne

• Poker

  Phil Gordon

• Fooled by Randomness

  The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• The Master Switch

  The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

  Tim Wu

• Daode Jing

  Sunzi

• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

  Jules Verne

• From Dictatorship to Democracy

  Gene Sharp

• Shop Class as Soulcraft

  Matthew B. Crawford

• Outliers

  Malcolm Gladwell

• Soros on Soros

  George Soros

2010

• Hackers

  Heroes of the Computer Revolution

  Steven Levy

• Getting Real

  The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application

  Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

• Rework

  Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

• A Mathematician Plays The Stock Market

  John Allen Paulos

• Andorra

  Max Frisch

• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

  Edwin Lefèvre

• Flatland

  Edwin Abbott Abbott

• Unterm Rad

  Hermann Hesse

• Utilitarianism

  John Stuart Mill

• Fortune's Formula

  The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

  William Poundstone

• Brave New World

  Aldous Huxley

• La giara

  Luigi Pirandello

• A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics

  David A. Moss

• The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

  William Shakespeare

• The Prince

  Niccolò Machiavelli

• Creative Capital

  Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital

  Spencer E. Ante

• Othello

  William Shakespeare

• Lords of Finance

  The Bankers Who Broke the World

  Liaquat Ahamed

• The Cuckoo's Egg

  Cliff Stoll

• Rework

  Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

• Liar's Poker

  Michael Lewis

• Our Posthuman Future

  Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution

  Francis Fukuyama

• The Art of War

  Sun Tzu

• Triumph of the Optimists

  101 Years of Global Investment Returns

  Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton

• Discourse on the Method

  René Descartes

• Pride and Prejudice

  Jane Austen

• The Battle for Investment Survival

  Gerald M. Loeb

• Betrachtung

  Franz Kafka

• The Art of Contrary Thinking

  Humphrey B. Neill

• Ecce homo

  Wie man wird, was man ist

  Friedrich Nietzsche

• Underground

  Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier

  Suelette Dreyfus

• Essays on Political Economy

  Frédéric Bastiat

• The Greatest Trade Ever

  The Behind-the-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History

  Gregory Zuckerman

• The Big Short

  Inside the Doomsday Machine

  Michael Lewis

• Homo Faber

  Max Frisch

• Der Richter und sein Henker

  Friedrich Dürrenmatt

• A Splendid Exchange

  William J. Bernstein

• The Law

  Frédéric Bastiat

• The Heretics of Finance

  Andrew W. Lo and Jasmina Hasanhodzic

• The Black Swan

  The Impact of the Highly Improbable

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• You Are Not a Gadget

  Jaron Lanier

• Lord of the Flies

  William Golding

• Too Big to Fail

  The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System and Themselves

  Andrew Ross Sorkin

• Founders at Work

  Stories of Startups' Early Days

  Jessica Livingston

2009

• The Communist Manifesto

  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

• Status Anxiety

  Alain De Botton

• The Gambler

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Nerds on Wall Street

  David J. Leinweber

• Psychologie der Massen

  Gustave Le Bon

• Marcovaldo

  Italo Calvino

• Makers

  Cory Doctorow

• The Cash Nexus

  Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000

  Niall Ferguson

• Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson

  Thomas Jefferson

• The Art of Learning

  Josh Waitzkin

• Hegemony or Survival

  America's Quest for Global Dominance

  Noam Chomsky

• Dantons Tod

  Georg Büchner

• Der Tod in Venedig

  Thomas Mann (1912)

• The Education of a Speculator

  Victor Niederhoffer

• Shop Class as Soulcraft

  Matthew B. Crawford

• Das Abenteuer der Erkenntnis

  Eine kleine Geschichte des Wissens

  Jürgen A. Alt (2002)

• Der Prozeß

  Franz Kafka

• Die Verwandlung

  Franz Kafka

• Nineteen Eighty Four

  George Orwell (1949)

• The Bonfire of the Vanities

  Tom Wolfe (1987)

• Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

  John Perkins (2004)

• Kleider machen Leute

  Gottfried Keller (1874)

• Herr und Knecht

  Leo Tolstoi (1895)

• The Mind of the Mathematician

  Michael Fitzgerald and Ioan James

• Atlas Shrugged

  Ayn Rand (1957)

• Practical Speculation

  Victor Niederhoffer and Laurel Kenner

• The Fountainhead

  Ayn Rand (1943)

• The Snowball

  Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

  Alice Schroeder

• Fortune's Formula

  The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

  William Poundstone

• The Art of War

  Sun Tzu

• A Demon of Our Own Design

  Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation

  Richard Bookstaber (2007)

• The Misbehavior of Markets

  A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence

  Benôit Mandelbrot (2004)

• Outliers

  The Story of Success

  Malcolm Gladwell (2008)

• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

  Edwin Lefèvre (1923)

• My Life as a Quant

  Reflections on Physics and Finance

  Emanuel Derman (2004)