zackchase / reading-list

Tracking books that I {have, currently, or plan to} read

reading-list

reading-list's Issues

Book Suggestions

Thanks for the great list @zackchase !! I shall queue up some of these on my reading list.

Here are some book recommendations, roughly split by category, with publication date in parentheses. (I'm excluding books I haven't read, since I can't judge them yet.)

Business/Tech

• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (1991)
• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (2011)
• The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014)
• How Google Works (2014)
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There are No Easy Answers (2014)
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (2014)
• Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies is Changing the World (2016)
• Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (2016)
• The Industries of the Future (2016)
• Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You (2016)
• Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future (2017)
• Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data (2018)

AI, Science, Biology (Loosely)

• Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (2011)
• Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World (2011)
• The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive (2011)
• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)
• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014)
• Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (2015)
• Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy (2015)
• Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (2016)
• Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe (2016)
• Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence (2017)
• Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence and Where It’s Taking Us Next (2017)
• Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017)
• AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (2018)
• Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (2018)

History + Current Affairs

• From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989)
• The End of History and the Last Man (1992)
• The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2007)
• The Post-American World (2009)
• How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region (2013)
• The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (2010)
• Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (2014)
• The Billion-Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (2015)
• The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (2016)
• Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era (2016)
• Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (2016)
• Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018), and all of Pinker's other books which I'm still plowing through...
• American Dialogue: The Founders and Us (2018)
• LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (2018)
• Identity: the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018)

Biographies

• Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983)
• My Beloved World (2013)
• Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (2013)
• Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace (2014)
• Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (2015)
• My Journey at the Nuclear Brink (2015)
• Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World (2015)
• Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016)
• Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built (2016)
• Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom (2017)

Psychology + Random (Loosely Speaking)

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (1989)
• The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011)
• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t (2012)
• Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (2013)
• The Road to Character (2015)
• Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (2016)
• Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (2016)
• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (2016)
• Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (2016)
• Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are (2017)
• Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More (2018)

Other Comments

Of the books in your 2019 queue, I highly recommend:

• Thinking Fast and Slow
• The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
• All of Atul Gawande's books (I assume you've read "The Checklist Manifesto")

PS: When do you normally read books? I find I never have enough time and can only allocate mostly Saturdays for reading, along with plane rides (when it's impossible to get real work done in coach class).