Reading

I've read around 350 books. These days I read 12 at once in the bath each morning - a few pages of each, hopping across worlds. Reading has become less about finishing books and more about thinking.

Favorites

The books that changed how I see things.

• Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
• Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
• Finite and Infinite Games - James P. Carse
• Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
• Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
• Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
• The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan
• The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
• Joy of Man's Desiring - Jean Giono
• Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts
• The Aleph and Other Stories - Jorge Luis Borges
• The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
• Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
• Hunger - Knut Hamsun
• The Quiet American - Graham Greene
• Sexus - Henry Miller

Influences

Writers I keep returning to: Borges, Henry Miller, Hesse, Hemingway, Murakami, David Mitchell, Carl Sagan, Oliver Sacks, Alan Watts, Neal Stephenson. A mix of literary fiction, science writing, and contemplative traditions.

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The Full List

Everything I've read, roughly alphabetical by author.

• My Midsummer Morning - Alastair Humpreys
• You Are Not a Gadget - Jaron Lanier
• Ghostwritten - David Mitchell
• Race Against The Machine - Erik Brynjolfsson
• The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
• The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
• Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell
• Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
• Pan - Knut Hamsun
• Perfume - Patrick Suskind
• Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine
• On the Road - Jack Kerouac
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
• Mao: The Unknown Story - Jung Chang
• Underworld - Don DeLillo
• Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
• The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury
• The Rational Optimist - Matt Ridley
• The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
• Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
• Titan - Ron Chernow
• The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard
• Paddle to the Amazon - Don Starkell
• Dust On My Shoes - Peter Pinney
• The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell
• Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Rosy Crucifixion - Henry Miller
• The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
• Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
• The Places in Between - Rory Stewart
• K2 - Ed Viesturs
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
• The Age of Spiritual Machines - Ray Kurzweil
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks
• The First and Last Freedom - Jiddu Krishnamurti
• The Essential Rumi - Rumi
• The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle
• Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
• What Technology Wants - Kevin Kelly
• Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
• The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi
• The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
• The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
• Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
• Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
• A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
• In a Sunburned Country - Bill Bryson
• The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
• Dracula - Bram Stoker
• The Call of the Wild - Jack London
• Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges
• The Stranger - Albert Camus
• The Plague - Albert Camus
• Narcissus and Goldmund - Hermann Hesse
• The Glass Bead Game - Hermann Hesse
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
• American Gods - Neil Gaiman
• Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• The Road - Cormac McCarthy
• Lord of the Flies - William Golding
• Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
• Neuromancer - William Gibson
• Pattern Recognition - William Gibson
• Post Office - Charles Bukowski
• Les Fleurs du Mal - Charles Baudelaire
• Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
• Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
• Dune - Frank Herbert
• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
• The Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley
• Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
• Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
• Candide - Voltaire
• Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Arabian Nights - Anonymous
• Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
• Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
• Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
• I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
• Foundation - Isaac Asimov
• Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke
• Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
• Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
• Anathem - Neal Stephenson
• Seveneves - Neal Stephenson
• The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu
• Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
• The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
• Dark Star Safari - Paul Theroux
• In Patagonia - Bruce Chatwin
• Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey
• The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiessen
• Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows
• The Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky
• Cosmos - Carl Sagan
• Contact - Carl Sagan
• Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan
• Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind - Shunryu Suzuki
• The Book of Why - Judea Pearl
• Other Minds - Peter Godfrey-Smith
• Range - David Epstein
• The Information - James Gleick
• Chaos - James Gleick
• The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
• A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
• The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac
• Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer
• Waking Up - Sam Harris
• Free Will - Sam Harris
• How Buildings Learn - Stewart Brand
• Whole Earth Discipline - Stewart Brand
• 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
• The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - David Mitchell
• Zero to One - Peter Thiel
• The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
• Gratitude - Oliver Sacks
• An Anthropologist on Mars - Oliver Sacks
• The Better Angels of Our Nature - Steven Pinker
• Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker
• From Bacteria to Bach and Back - Daniel Dennett
• The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose
• The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
• The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran
• Beowulf - Anonymous
• Moon Palace - Paul Auster
• The Colossus of Maroussi - Henry Miller
• Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch - Henry Miller
• Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
• Tropic of Capricorn - Henry Miller
• Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed - Paul Cronin
• The Player of Games - Iain M. Banks
• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - Robert Heinlein
• Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
• A Path with Heart - Jack Kornfield
• The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching - Thich Nhat Hanh
• Why Buddhism is True - Robert Wright
• I Am That - Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Autobiography of a Yogi - Paramahansa Yogananda
• The Science of Enlightenment - Shinzen Young
• Falling Into Grace - Adyashanti
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
• Hillbilly Elegy - J.D. Vance
• Chaos Monkeys - Antonio Garcia Martinez
• World Order - Henry Kissinger
• Mother American Night - John Perry Barlow
• We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen
• Sea of Poppies - Amitav Ghosh
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers - Katherine Boo
• A History of the World in 100 Objects - Neil MacGregor
• The Wayfinders - Wade Davis
• Boy on Ice - John Branch