Bookshelf

Several group houses I’ve lived in have had massive libraries. These have included contributions from past and current house members. While this results in a pretty impressive display, I often find myself at a loss when someone brings up the inevitable “Which books do you recommend?“. Alas, I often find myself struggling to put together an immediate response. With that in mind, I’ve assembled a list of books that I’ve read. It’s worth noting that just because a book appears on my list, does not necessarily mean I endorse its content. Where possible, I’ve tried to include a few sentences on my thoughts on the books. Hopefully I will someday have enough time to write mini-reviews for a more-than-negligible fraction of these books.

Since the books I’ve read lack any overarching order to them, so does this list (I apologize in advance). To make up for that, I am designating the various books with symbols to indicate my review:

Tier 1 🧭: “Life-Changing (Top 25)”
Tier 2 💡: “Recommended”
Tier 3 🌟: “5-stars”
Tier 4 📚: “Average (i.e., 4-Stars on Netflix or Amazon)”
Tier 5 🤷🏻‍♂️: “There’s better books out there…”
Tier 6 💩: “What the Hell did I just read?”
Tier i 🤔: “Haven’t read yet; want to”

At some point I will add links to my notes where said notes on the books exist:

Tier 1 🧭: “Life-Changing (Top 25)”

These are the paradigm-shifting books that have had major influences on shaping me as a person.

🧭Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl - This proved incredibly valuable during a particularly dark time in my life. The titles in this section are in no particular order, except for this one, which definitely deserves the #1 spot.
🧭The Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect by Roger Williams - A fantastic hard sci-fi book.
🧭Blindsight by Peter Watts - The story is mostly secondary to the author’s musings on the nature of consciousness, transhumanism, the Fermi paradox, and the role of sentience from the perspective of natural selection. Still, as a first contact story written by a former marine biologist, this is probably one of the best sci-fi horror stories since Ridley Scott’s Alien. You can read many of the author’s short stories on his website (and if you read this, I highly recommend checking out this fan traler for Blindsight that was made with input from the author).
🧭Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber - Gave me a new perspective on the nature of money, and made me question some common-held assumptions about economics.
🧭Lost Connections by Johann Hari
🧭Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters - I’ve had much more lived experience with startups since I read this, and I increasinly disagree with a few points in the book, but this definitely opened my eyes at a crucial stage in my life.
🧭The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga - Great introduction to Adlerian psychology.
🧭The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
🧭Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
🧭Walden: Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau
🧭Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study by George E. Vaillant
🧭10% Happier by Dan Harris
🧭Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg PhD
🧭Superforecasting by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner
🧭Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
🧭Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark
🧭Meditations of Marcus Aurelius by Marcus Aurelius
🧭Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
🧭The Unthinkable: When Disaster Strikes by Amanda Ripley - Inspired a lot of my current disaster-prep hobby, which turned out to be oddly prescient when COVID-19 hit.
🧭Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager - This helped me realize that most successful traders have two things in common: 1) They started trading an asset early before regulation kicked in or information was more publicly known, and 2) they have the same rules for avoiding losing money before all else.
🧭So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport - Informed a lot of the study habits that got me through school AND helped me make a rapid and successul career change to a new and cognitively-demanding field.
🧭I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter (it’s like the author’s previous book Gödel, Escher, Bach except more informative, more self-aware, and less cringe in general)
🧭The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (book was fantastic, but it’s even better if you listen to the original BBC Radio play version)
🧭Foundation by Isaac Asimov
🧭Neuromancer by William Gibson

Tier 2 💡: “Recommended”

You should definitely add these to your reading list or audiobook queue as soon as you read this list.

💡The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri
💡Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness
💡The Innovators by Walter Isaacson
💡Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris , Jeffrey Warren, et al.
💡The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
💡Soonish by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
💡Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Ph.D. and Nightingale-Conant
💡The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
💡How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
💡10% Happier by Dan Harris
💡She Comes First by Ian Kerner
💡High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil
💡Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
💡Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett
💡Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans , et al.
💡Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill
💡Kissinger: A Biography by Walter Isaacson
💡On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
💡Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
💡Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe by Roger Penrose
💡Pyongyang by Guy Delisle
💡From Third World to First: The Singapore Story - 1965-2000 by Lee Kuan Yew
💡The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman
💡The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
💡Permutation City by Greg Egan

Tier 3 🌟: “5-stars”

While not in the “life-changing” tier, these are still great books. “5-star” reviews may be more common than you would expect if book quality really does follow a Normal distribution, but that’s because I intentionally seek out books that I think I’d like.

Tier 4 📚: “Average (i.e., 4-Stars on Netflix or Amazon)”

Exactly what it says, in the title: Average (or what you would assign a 4-star review on Amazon or Netflix). There may be fewer books in this and the next sections based on what you would expect from a Normal Distribution, but that’s because I intentionally seek out books that I think I would like. This and the next sections are failures of those efforts.

Tier 5 🤷🏻‍♂️: “There’s better books out there…”

At this point, we’re beyond recommendations, and more just a list of books that I’ve read.

🤷🏻‍♂️Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach
🤷🏻‍♂️The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
🤷🏻‍♂️Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
🤷🏻‍♂️How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu
🤷🏻‍♂️The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance by Rom Brady
🤷🏻‍♂️The Daily Show (the AudioBook): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests by Jon Stewart and Chris Smith
🤷🏻‍♂️The Addiction Formula: A Holistic Approach to Writing Captivating, Memorable Hit Songs. With 317 Proven Commercial Techniques & 331 Examples by Friedemann Findeisen
🤷🏻‍♂️Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
🤷🏻‍♂️So, Anyway… by John Cleese
🤷🏻‍♂️Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters
🤷🏻‍♂️Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance
🤷🏻‍♂️Do the Work by Steven Pressfield and Seth Godin
🤷🏻‍♂️Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier
🤷🏻‍♂️Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) by Christian Rudder
🤷🏻‍♂️Yes Please by Amy Poehler
🤷🏻‍♂️The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
🤷🏻‍♂️The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason
🤷🏻‍♂️Free Will by Sam Harris
🤷🏻‍♂️Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
🤷🏻‍♂️Astrophysics for People in A Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
🤷🏻‍♂️The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles
🤷🏻‍♂️The Dao of Capital by Mark Spitznagel and Ron Paul
🤷🏻‍♂️Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
🤷🏻‍♂️Models: Attract Women Through Honesty by Mark Manson
🤷🏻‍♂️Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
🤷🏻‍♂️The Coming Storm by Michael Lewis
🤷🏻‍♂️Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling
🤷🏻‍♂️Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg
🤷🏻‍♂️The Ethical Slut by Janet W. Hardy
🤷🏻‍♂️Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
🤷🏻‍♂️Unshakeable by Tony Robbins and Peter Mallouk
🤷🏻‍♂️The Bulletproof Diet by Dave Asprey and J. J. Virgin
🤷🏻‍♂️The Subtle art of Not Giving a F-ck by Mark Manson
🤷🏻‍♂️Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society by Delgado M.D., Jose M. R.
🤷🏻‍♂️Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright
🤷🏻‍♂️Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn
🤷🏻‍♂️The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
🤷🏻‍♂️Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
🤷🏻‍♂️Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-laszlo Barabasi and Jennifer Frangos
🤷🏻‍♂️Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
🤷🏻‍♂️Zadig by Voltaire
🤷🏻‍♂️Scrappy Little Nobody by Anna Kendrick
🤷🏻‍♂️How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough
🤷🏻‍♂️Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler
🤷🏻‍♂️Exponential Organizations: New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (and What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail , Michael S. Malone , et al.
🤷🏻‍♂️Accelerando by Charles Stross
🤷🏻‍♂️Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T Kiyosaki
🤷🏻‍♂️Way of the Wolf: Straight Line Selling: Master the Art of Persuasion, Influence, and Success by Jordan Belfort
🤷🏻‍♂️Crux: Nexus, Book 2 by Ramez Naam
🤷🏻‍♂️Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris
🤷🏻‍♂️Wild Seed by by Octavia E. Butler
🤷🏻‍♂️I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
🤷🏻‍♂️The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh
🤷🏻‍♂️A Numerate Life: A Mathematician Explores the Vagaries of Life, His Own and Probably Yours by John Allen Paulos and Gildan Media, LLC
🤷🏻‍♂️Humpty Dumpty in Oakland by Philip K. Dick
🤷🏻‍♂️Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter by Peter Singer
🤷🏻‍♂️Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence by Hans Moravec
🤷🏻‍♂️Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It’s Necessary, How It Works by Jonathan Gruber and Nathan Schreiber
🤷🏻‍♂️Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
🤷🏻‍♂️The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
🤷🏻‍♂️The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks
🤷🏻‍♂️Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Garcia Martinez, Antonio
🤷🏻‍♂️How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
🤷🏻‍♂️Normal People by Sally Rooney
🤷🏻‍♂️Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks by Ben Goldacre
🤷🏻‍♂️Choose Yourself! by James Altucher
🤷🏻‍♂️Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky
🤷🏻‍♂️Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach
🤷🏻‍♂️Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh
🤷🏻‍♂️The Secrets of Power Negotiating: You Can Get Anything You Want by Roger Dawson and Nightingale-Conant
🤷🏻‍♂️American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson
🤷🏻‍♂️The End of Faith by Sam Harris
🤷🏻‍♂️The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss
🤷🏻‍♂️Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

Tier 6 💩: “What the Hell did I just read?”

If anything I list these here because I’d like to spare you from reading them. In contrast with the last section, these were actively painful to read. In come cases I may have read them because they were next in line after a previous book that was much more enjoyable. In other cases I read them because they had an extremely vocal fanbase and I wanted to understand what all the fuss was about. In still a few other cases I consumed the work more or less against my will (such as with the cross-country road trip where a Dan Brown audiobook was played just because it would keep my friend awake while he drove).

For obvious reasons, I’m not including Amazon links for these books. That way, if you actually end up paying money for any of these dumpster fires, that’s entirely your own damn fault. I am completely blameless if you’re actually masochistic enough to spend part of your finite life subjecting yourself to these works.

💩Dune: House Atreides by Brian Herbert (I had high hopes for the son of the original Dune author, Frank Herbert. That was a huge mistake.)
💩Dune: The Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbert (Brian…please…just stop)
💩Inquisitor by Ian Watson (I don’t understand how Steven Spielberg could have looked at this sewer goblin’s prior work and thought “hey, I’ll get this guy to write a screenplay for my next movie”. I am unfortunately not joking about that in the slightest. This weirdo actually wrote the screen story for Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.”. After “Inquisitor”, I suspect Ian Watson was a big reason why “A.I.” became such a waste of otherwise great potential.)
💩Armada by Ernest Cline (“Ready Player One” wasn’t perfect, but this took all the worst aspects of that book (and JUST the worst aspects), and turned them into some kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a novel.)
💩The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (Among the other problems with this book, if you’re trying to make an individualist manifesto, making your main character an architect just seems like an incredibly dumb choice.)
💩Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (It almost seems like this is sacrificing any possible steelman arguments for objectivism simply for the sake of being more polarizing and attention-getting. Even if you agree with objectivism, there are so many ways of presenting it better than it was here, so what was even the point of this book? I’m starting to think that for most adult fans of Ayn Rand, their literary sensibilities haven’t changed much since the 5th grade.)
💩The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis S. Collins (I had low expectations from just the title. Turns out, not low enough.)
💩The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (Classmate in high school had this on tape during a long drive. That classmate was later roped up into a pyramid scheme, to the surprise of absolutely nobody.)
💩Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James (I don’t think the Glibert Gottfried reading takes away from the tone at all. This is some “Inquisitor”-level (see #3) ANTI-aphrodisiac here)
💩Dianetics by L Ron Hubbard (Well, at least reading this removed any motivation to have anything to do with the Scientiology cult. That’s at least one bullet dodged.)
💩Battlefield Earth by L Ron Hubbard (I don’t know why I thought the book was going to be better than the movie)
💩Xenocide by Orson Scott Card (The 2nd book wasn’t exactly a masterpiece, but did Orson have a stroke or something between the 2nd and 3rd?)
💩Rama II by Gentry Lee & Arthur C. Clarke (There was such a dramatic drop in quality between the 1st and 2nd books that I was worried)
💩The Garden of Rama by Gentry Lee & Arthur C. Clarke (God…dammit…God fucking dammit, Arthur.)
💩The Number of the Beast by Robert Heinlein (I powered through this book hoping that there was going to be some kind of worthwhile ending. There are so many ways my limited time in this life could have been better spent.)
💩Fire with Fire by Charles Gannon (Were the 2014 Nebula Awards judges bribed?)
💩Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler (Knowing the summary of this book vs. actually reading it is like the difference between seeing a picture of a landfill and being there to experience the rancid smell because HOLY SHIT! 🤮 Not only is the author trying to present sociopathic self-serving opportunism as a political ethos, but now I think some of those Nazi book burnings were so he could hide the fact that he plaigarized some of the more coherent parts. Most of the rest is a rambling mess. I found myself saying out loud mid-reading, “Will you just shut the fuck up already, Hitler?“. I didn’t think it was possible, but I somehow have even more contempt for neo-nazis than before.)
💩Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (I tried to be open-minded and look at some “christian” fiction. It turns out this was one of the worst possibe starting points. This is the kind of Kirk-Cameron-death-to-all-not-part-of-my-subdenomination christianity that turns people into atheists.)
💩Timeline by Michael Chrichton (I used to think Deepak Chopra was bad with the whole “Quantum = Magic” schtick. It turns out he could have done so much worse.)
💩Forever Free by Joe Haldeman (Why do such amazing science fiction books keep getting such aggressively horrible sequels?)
💩Anthem by Ayn Rand (I thought revisitng Ayn Rand decades later, I’d finally be able to undertand what all the fuss is about. Nope.)
💩The Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker (What the hell happened to Bran Stoker between this and “Dracula”?)
💩The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (I feel like the fast pace is designed to keep you attention long enoug to stop you from scratching your head at what you just read.)
💩The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis (Actually read this at a party (one where a LOT of alcohol was involved). This “The Room” of books. Even H.P. Lovecraft would look at this book and say “This author’s just going too overboard with the flowery descriptions”)
💩Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (This is all our fault. We really shouldn’t have encouraged Dan Brown with the popularity of The Da Vinci Code.)

Tier i 🤔: “Haven’t read yet; want to”

Not giving this tier a place among the previous ones, because I literally have no idea how good these works are. I want to know, though.

🤔Modern Engineering for Design of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines by Dieter K Huzel
🤔Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter by Terrence Deacon

If you have any recommendations, don’t hesitate to contact me at [contact at matthewmcateer dot me] and I will be very happy to add them to the queue! Alternatily, you can follow me on Twitter and reach out to me there.

Matthew McAteer