Bookshelf

I’ve found bookshelves shared by others to be useful (see Meltem’s sci fi list, Patrick’s bookshelf or Minqi’s library).

At risk of presumption, I hope it is of use to the occasional lost internet traveller who finds themselves on this page. I’m always keen to hear recommendations (@samuelalbanie on X and bluesky, email: samuel.albanie.academic@gmail.com).

Biographies

The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (Robert Caro, 1982)

Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson II (Robert Caro, 1990)

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow, 1998)

Losing My Virginity (Richard Branson, 1998)

Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III (Robert Caro, 2002)

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (Walter Isaacson, 2003)

Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer (Tim Jeal, 2008)

The Man without a face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (Masha Gessen, 2013)

Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future (Ashlee Vance, 2015)

Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson, 2015)

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (Phil Knight, 2016)

Hit Refresh (Satya Nadella, 2017)

The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons in Creative Leadership from the CEO of the Walt Disney Company (Robert Iger, 2019)

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (Walter Isaacson, 2021)

The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann (Ananyo Bhattacharya, 2021)

Elon Musk (Walter Isaacson, 2023)

Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality (Dani Edmonds, 2023)

Science, technology and engineering

Science The Endless Frontier (Vannevar Bush, 1945)

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn, 1962)

Inventing The Future (Dennis Gabor, 1967)

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (James Watson, 1968)

The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins, 1976)

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Richard Hamming, 1997)

Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age (Michael Hiltzik, 2000)

In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (David Post, 2008)

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Walter Isaacson, 2014)

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Max Tegmark, 2017)

Lifespan: Why We Age - and Why We Don't Have To (David Sinclair, 2019)

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (Jeff Hawkins, 2021)

Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology (Chris Miller, 2022)

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma (Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar, 2023)

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI (Ray Kurzweil, 2024)

Bigger picture

Meditations (Marcus Aurelius, 161)

The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Michel de Montaigne, 1580)

A History of Western Philosophy (Bertrand Russell, 1945)

The Open Society and Its Enemies (Karl Popper, 1945)

The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age (James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, 1997)

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (Jared Diamond, 1997)

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Steven Pinker, 2002)

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Steven Pinker, 2011)

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, 2012)

Judgment

Fooled by Randomeness (Nassim Taleb, 2001)

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Nassim Taleb, 2007)

Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman, 2011)

The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World (about Tversky and Kahneman) (Michael Lewis, 2016)

The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding (Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier, 2017)

Skin in the game (Nasim Taleb, 2018)

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement (Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein, 2021)

Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger (Charlie Munger, 2023)

Risk

The strategy of conflict (Thomas Schelling, 1960)

Sustainable Energy – without the hot air (David MacKay, 2008)

The Totalitarian Threat (Bryan Caplan, 2008) (a book chapter, rather than a book)

Superintelligence (Nick Bostrom, 2014)

Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control (Stuart Russell, 2019)

The Precipice (Toby Ord, 2020)

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values (Brian Christian, 2020)

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (Bill Gates, 2021)

Money/Economics

The Richest Man in Babylon (George S. Clason, 1926)

Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy (Thomas Sowell, 2000)

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Bryan Caplan, 2007)

Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Thomas Piketty, 2013)

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Bryan Caplan, 2018)

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking (Saifedean Ammous, 2018)

The Fiat Standard (Saifedean Ammous, 2021)

How to Invest: Masters on the Craft (David M. Rubenstein, 2022)

Misc

The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews (Martin Amis, 1971-2000)

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard Feynman, 1982)

What Do You Care What Other People Think? (Richard Feynman, 1988)

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (Michael Lewis, 1999)

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Amy Chua, 2011)

Zero to One (Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, 2014)

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (Ben Horowitz, 2014)

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley (Antonio Garcia Martinez, 2016)

Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams (Matthew Walker, 2017). Note, this book appears to have some egregious errors (see here), so although it makes for interesting reading, it should be treated with caution.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, 2018)

Why We Get The Wrong Politicians (Isabel Hardman, 2018)

Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration (Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith, 2019)

An Inconvenient Minority: The Harvard Admissions Case and the Attack on Asian American Excellence (Kenny Xu, 2021)

Essays - (an internet collection, rather than a book) (Paul Graham, 1990s-present)

Going Infinite (Michael Lewis, 2023)

Marketing

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (Al Ries and Jack Trout, 1993)

Contagiousness: Why Things Catch On (Jonah Berger, 2016)

This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See (Seth Godin, 2018)

Heuristics/principles/strategies

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Carol Dweck, 2006)

So Good They Can't Ignore You (Cal Newport, 2012)

Mastery (Robert Greene, 2012)

The One Thing (Gary Keller, 2014)

Relentless (Tim Grover, 2014)

The obstacle is the way (Ryan Holiday, 2014)

DeepWork (Cal Newport, 2016)

Ego is the enemy (Ryan Holiday, 2016)

Principles (Ray Dalio, 2017)

Rich Dad Poor Dad (Robert T. Kiyosaki, 2017)

Atomic Habbits (James Clear, 2018)

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Jordan Peterson, 2018)

The Almanac of Raval Navikant (Eric Jorgenson, 2020)

Courage is calling (Ryan Holiday, 2021)

Discipline is destiny (Ryan Holiday, 2022)

Stories

Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866)

War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, 1869)

Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1878)

Before the Law (Franz Kafka, 1915)

Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck, 1937)

The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943)

Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945)

Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949)

Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov, 1955)

Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958)

To Kill a Mockingbird, (Harper Lee, 1960)

The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967)

The Lorax (Dr Seuss, 1971)

Lungfish (David Brin, 1986)

Oh, the Places You'll Go! (Dr Seuss, 1990)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams, 1979)

Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984)

Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson, 1992)

The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Neal Stephenson, 1995)

Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson, 1999)

Pattern Recognition (William Gibson, 2003)

Three Body Problem (Liu Cixin, 2008)

Ready Player One (Ernest Cline, 2011)

Ready Player Two (Ernest Cline, 2020)

Klara and the sun (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021)

Great programming/research essays

Computers can be understood (Nelson Elhage, 2020)

Research as a Stochastic Decision Process (Jacob Steinhardt, date unknown)

Technical textbooks

The books below represent (in my opinion) excellent examples of technical exposition:

Numerical optimization (Jorge Nocedal and Stephen Wright, 2006)

Deep Learning (Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville, 2016)

Introduction to Algorithms "CLRS" 4th ed. (Thomas Cormen et al., 2022)

Note: It's perhaps useful to state explicitly that my primary criterion for inclusion was: "Was this book thought-provoking in some way?" rather than "Do I agree with the author's views?"