Bookshelf: Book Summaries and Reviews
I owe my life to books. Knowledge, like any long-term investment, compounds at a rate that bores you at first, then astounds you in a few years.
Our ancestors have toiled through the muddled fog of ignorance, painstakingly recording each spark of truth so that its glow may not be extinguished, using this accumulated wisdom to illuminate humanity’s climb to prosperity.
Locked in this bookshelf are myriad superpowers, including the ability to eliminate suffering, strengthen moral character, achieve economic success, nurture fulfilling relationships, and actualize your true potential. I read because I wish to inherit this endowment.
Books I wrote
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Books I read: Summaries and Reviews
This is a collection of my personal notes, summaries, reviews, and selected quotes from each book. I created this page because I often get asked for book recommendations, and I can direct people here for more details. I hope it also helps you discover other books you may be interested in that you may not have heard of before.
Books are listed in random order. Recommendations are not endorsements, I do not necessarily agree with books I recommend.
FAQ
- Q: Why don’t you rate books?
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A: It’s difficult to rate all books on a single scale out of 5 stars or 10 points. Rating books presumes the book can be reduced to a one-dimensional metric that makes it globally comparable to all other books, which doesn’t really make sense.
How do you compare a book that is 10/10 in writing style but 5/10 in real-world usefulness to a book that is 5/10 in writing style but 10/10 in real-world usefulness? They would both presumably get an overall 7/10 rating, but that doesn’t mean they are of similar quality.
If you care more about reading pleasure then the first book is better, but if you care more about utility then the second book is better. This nuance can’t be captured in a one-dimensional rating scale.
- Q: Why are the books ordered randomly?
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A: I couldn’t think of an obvious one-dimensional scale that reflects the natural order of the books (see my answer to the previous question).
Alphabetical is not a natural ordering because titles (or authors’ names) starting with A don’t necessarily deserve more attention than those starting with Z. Further, titles (or names) that are proximate in the alphabet aren’t necessarily proximate in subject matter. Date (read or published) has the same problems, just substitute recent for A and old for Z or vice-versa.
Dewey Decimal is also not a natural ordering because it presumes a book can be shoehorned into a single subtopic when it may in fact cover a vast landscape of topics.
Therefore, lacking an obvious ordering, a random order is at least honest about its constituents being non-proximate and fair in distributing attention.
- Q: Why did you read/recommend X?
A: Reading or recommending a book is not an endorsement of that book. I do not necessarily agree with the books I read or recommend.
Click on the title of a book to read my review. If the title is not blue, it means I am still working on uploading my notes for that book. Get notified of new reviews.
- Fuck Feelings by Michael Bennett and Sarah Bennett
- Dark Lord’s Answer by Eliezer Yudkowsky
- Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Principles by Ray Dalio
- Originals by Adam Grant
- Brain Trust by Garth Sundem
- Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son by George Horace Lorimer
- The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman
- Future Babble by Dan Gardner
- The Hacking of the American Mind by Robert Lustig
- The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond
- The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt
- How Children Learn by John Holt
- The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
- The Day The Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers
- Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
- A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
- How to Fly a Horse by Kevin Ashton
- The ABCs of Student Leadership by Sunjay Nath
- The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson
- The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson
- 50 Things Every Guy Should Know How to Do by Daniel Kline and Jason Tomaszewski
- Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller
- Daring Greatly by Brené Brown
- The Complacent Class by Tyler Cowen
- Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
- Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
- The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson
- How to Instantly Connect with Anyone by Leil Lowndes
- Do You Talk Funny by David Nihill
- Priceless by William Poundstone
- The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley
- Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
- Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg
- The Mind-Gut Connection by Emeran Mayer
- Mindwise by Nicholas Epley
- Farsighted by Steven Johnson
- Emotional Design by Don Norman
- The 4-Hour Chef by Tim Ferriss
- Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance
- This Will Make You Smarter by John Brockman
- The Sports Gene by David Epstein
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
- Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
- Quiet by Susan Cain
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister
- Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
- Atomic Habits by James Clear
- Click by Ori Brafman and Ron Brafman
- Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps by Allan and Barbara Pease
- The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Models by Mark Manson
- Voice Lessons for Parents by Wendy Mogel
- How to Write a Good Advertisement by Victor O. Schwab
- Secret Ingredients by Stuart Laidlaw
- A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Shlomo Angel
- The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday
- The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller
- The Body by Bill Bryson
- Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
- The Honest Truth about Dishonesty by Dan Ariely
- Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom
- 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick
- Average is Over by Tyler Cowen
- Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
- The Mythical Man Month by Fred P. Brooks
- Fahrenheight 451 by Ray Bradbury
- The 2-Hour Cocktail Party by Nick Gray
- The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
- The Secret of Selling Anything by Harry Browne
- Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler
- The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman
- Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne
- Story by Robert McKee
- The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene
- Die Empty by Todd Henry
- Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
- Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams
- Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
- The One Sentence Persuasion Course by Blair Warren
- The Art of Lifting by Greg Nuckols and Omar Isuf
- Cesar’s Way by Cesar Millan and Melissa Jo Peltier
- The Myth of the Garage by Chip and Dan Heath
- The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely
- How To Write Letters That Sell by Christopher Godefrey
- We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Translated by Natasha Randall
- Purple Cow by Seth Godin
- Everything is Fucked by Mark Manson
- What to Talk About by Chris Colin, Rob Baedeker, and Tony Millionaire
- Get Together by Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh, and Kai Elmer Sotto
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
- Captivate by Vanessa Van Edwards
- The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman
- The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Critical Mass by Philip Ball
- Stop Stealing Dreams by Seth Godin
- Successful Aging by Daniel J. Levitin
- You Are What You Speak by Robert Lane Greene
- Give and Take by Adam Grant
- Choke by Sian Beilock
- The Six-Figure Second Income by David Lindahl and Jonathan Rozek
- How To Love by Thích Nhất Hạnh
- Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
- The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
- As a Man Thinketh by James Allen
- Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
- Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
- Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday
- Cracking the Tech Career by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
- The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane
- The Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
- Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
- Trying Not to Try by Edward Slingerland
- Food Rules by Michael Pollan
- Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki
- Back Mechanic by Stuart McGill
- Impossible to Ignore by Carmen Simon
- How to Not Die Alone by Logan Ury
- Deep Work by Cal Newport
- Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray
- The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
- The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
- The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
- Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein
- How to Do Things by David Cain
- Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday
- Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
- The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin
- The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
- Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
- Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- 40 Alternatives to College by James Altucher
- When Anger Hurts by Matthew McKay and Peter Rogers
- What Women Want by Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller
- The Power Of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath
- How To Read A Book by Mortimer J. Adler
- The War on Normal People by Andrew Yang
- Unthinkable by Helen Thomson
- The Passion Economy by Adam Davidson
- How to Be Miserable by Randy J. Paterson
- The Age of the Infovore by Tyler Cowen
- What The Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
- Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
- Good to Great by Jim Collins
- The Straussian Moment by Peter Thiel
- Whatcha Gonna Do with That Duck? by Seth Godin
- The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
- Advanced Linear Algebra: Foundations to Frontiers by Robert A. van de Geijn and Margaret E. Myers
- Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
- Lecturing Birds on Flying by Pablo Triana
- Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert
- Future Crimes by Marc Goodman
- On Truth by Harry G. Frankfurt
- Why Are The Prices So Damn High? by Eric Helland and Alex Tabarrok
- How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
- Fuck Love by Michael Bennett and Sarah Bennett
- Opening Up by Tristan Taormino
- How Children Succeed by Paul Tough
- You’ll See It When You Believe It by Wayne Dyer
- The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
- I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout
- So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
- Ready to Run by Kelly Starrett and T.J. Murphy
- Faster, Higher, Stronger by Mark McClusky
- How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff and Irving Geis
- The World Is Curved by David Smick
- Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
- Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky
- You’re Invited by John Levy
- Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz
- Free Will by Sam Harris
- Contagious by Jonah Berger
- The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan
- Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
- Drunk Tank Pink by Adam Alter
- Choose Yourself! by James Altucher
- Snoop by Sam Gosling
- Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
- Anything You Want by Derek Sivers
- Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
- How To Speak How To Listen by Mortimer J. Adler
- The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau
- Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday
- The Tower by Chris Guillebeau
- When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
- The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn
- Win Bigly by Scott Adams
- In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
- Nuclear War: What’s in it For You? by Ground Zero and Roger Molander
- Annoying by Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman
- Range by David Epstein
- Switch by Chip and Dan Heath
- Grit by Angela Duckworth
- How To Make Maximum Money in Minimum Time by Gary Halbert
- Fluent in 3 Months by Benny Lewis
- Snakes in Suits by Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare
- 10% Happier by Dan Harris
- The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
- Pricing on Purpose by Ronald Baker
- The Habitual Hustler by Corey Breier
- Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
- Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
- Small Giants by Bo Burlingham
- The Flinch by Julien Smith
- Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath
- 80,000 Hours by Benjamin Todd
- This Explains Everything by John Brockman
- How to Win at College by Cal Newport
- Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau
- The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene
- The Science of Lifting by Greg Nuckols and Omar Isuf
- Linear Algebra: Foundations to Frontiers by Margaret E. Myers and Robert A. van de Geijn
- How to Be a High School Superstar by Cal Newport
- Start with Why by Simon Sinek
- Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
- Reinforcement Learning by Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto
- The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau
- Snowball by Warren Buffet
- And Mark an Era by Melvin T. Copeland
- Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It by Kamal Ravikant
- Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini
- What Is Your Dangerous Idea? by John Brockman
- Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Hit Makers by Derek Thompson
- It’s Not All About “Me” by Robin K. Dreeke
- I Got There by JT McCormick
- The Age of Em by Robin Hanson
- Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden
- America Against America by 王沪宁 (Wáng Hùníng)
- Big History by David Christian
- Crucial Conversations by Patterson, Switzler, McMillan, and Grenny
- The Art of War by 孫子 (Sūnzǐ), Translated by Lionel Giles
- Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
- All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin
- Financial Accounting by Paul Kimmel and Jerry Weygandt
- The Language Hacking Guide by Benny Lewis
- A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel
- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
- The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
- Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki
- The Boron Letters by Gary Halbert Letter
- The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
- Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton
- What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles
- Spent by Geoffrey Miller
- Skin In The Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- Mastery by Robert Greene
- The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
- Investment Banking by Rosenbaum and Pearl
- Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam
- Algorithms To Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
- Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
- How to Solve It by George Pólya
- Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin
- Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston
- The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman and Nan Silver
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- Understanding Machine Learning by Shai Shalev-Shwartz and Shai Ben-David
- Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
- The Road To Character by David Brooks
- What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson
- Games People Play by Eric Berne
- The Real Thirteenth Step by Tina Tessina
- The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease
- The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton
- How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
- Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
- Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
- Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
- The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle
- Deskbound by Kelly Starrett
- Quirkology by Richard Wiseman
- The Way of Men by Jack Donovan
- The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
- The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
- Ego Is The Enemy by Ryan Holiday
- The 50th Law by Robert Greene
- Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen
- Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras
- Nudge by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
- The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles
- The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
- The Defining Decade by Meg Jay
- Talking The Winner’s Way by Leil Lowndes
- The Effective Manager by Mark Horstman
- The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
- Practical Programming for Strength Training by Mark Rippetoe and Andy Baker
- The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
- Influence by Robert Cialdini
- No More Mr. Nice Guy by Robert A. Glover
- Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday
- Hardboiled Web Design by Andy Clarke
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- Age of Propaganda by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson
- Trump: The Art of The Deal by Tony Schwartz
- Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove
- The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
- Don’t Call It That by Eli Altman
- Play It Away by Charlie Hoehn
- Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith
- Crucial Accountability by Patterson, Switzler, McMillan, and Grenny
- The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson
- Ultramarathon Man by Dean Karnazes
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- Yes! by Robert Cialdini and Noah Goldstien
- The Book on Rental Property Investing by Brandon Turner
- Outlive by Peter Attia
- Catch Me If You Can by Frank W. Abagnale and Stan Redding
- The Book In A Box Method by Tucker Max and Zach Obront
- Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
- Money Master The Game by Tony Robbins
- Brag Better by Meredith Fineman
- A Guide to the Good Life by William Braxton Irvine
- Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe and Jason Kelly
- Night by Elie Wiesel and Marion Wiesel
- Becoming a Supple Leopard by Kelly Starrett and Glen Cordoza
- Lying by Sam Harris
- It’s The Way You Say It by Carol A. Fleming
- Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez
- David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell
- Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charles T. Munger, Peter D. Kaufman, Ed Wexler, and Warren E. Buffett
- Vampire Plagues by Sebastian Rook
- Talent by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross
- The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
- Risk by Dan Gardner
- What Every BODY is Saying by Joe Navarro and Marvin Karlins
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Advertising Secrets of the Written Word by Joseph Sugarman
- The Consulting Economy by Jonathan Dison
- Bare Minimum Parenting by James Breakwell
- Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
- The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman
- Seeking Wisdom by Peter Bevelin
- The Art of Deception by Kevin D. Mitnick and William L. Simon
- Win Your Case by Gerry Spence
- On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
- Linchpin by Seth Godin
- The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing by Taylor Larimore, Michael LeBoeuf, and Mel Lindauer
- Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
- 12 Rules For Life by Jordan B. Peterson
- It’s the Way You Say It by Carol Fleming
- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
- How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less by Nicholas Boothman
- American Kingpin by Nick Bilton
- At Home by Bill Bryson
- Wanting by Luke Burgis
- The Power of Persuasion by Robert Levine
- Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
- Breath by James Nestor
- Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit by Steven Pressfield
- Class by Paul Fussell
- She Has Her Mother’s Laugh by Carl Zimmer
- Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
- You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney
- The Dip by Seth Godin
- Smartcuts by Shane Snow
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann
- Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
- Tribes by Seth Godin
- Power and Love by Adam Kahane
- The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan
- How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
- Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and Ben Holden-Crowther
- The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
- Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
- The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef
- Great by Choice by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen
- The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ by Jay Haley
- What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter
- Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
- The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss
- Tribe by Sebastian Junger
- Buyology by Martin Lindstrom
- Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg
- Mightier Than the Sword by Kathleen Adams
- Build & Launch by Justin Jackson
- On Writing Well by William Zinsser
- The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
- Sway by Ori Brafman and Ron Brafman
- The Robert Collier Letter Book by Robert Collier
- This Book Will Teach You How To Write Better by Neville Medhora
- The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
- SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham
- The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
- Free by Chris Anderson
- Modern Money Mechanics by Federal Reserve Bank Of Chicago
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson
- Rationality from AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky
- How to Become a Straight-A Student by Cal Newport
- Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer
- Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
- Brief by Joseph McCormack
- Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin
Prior Art
This bookshelf was inspired by: