A doorknob

Favorite Books

Below are all the books I’ve read since middle school, roughly in order. Those highlighted in blue were those I particularly enjoyed :)

2026 (Age 23)#

The Anatomy of Fascism - Robert O. Paxton

2025 (Age 22)#

Willpower - Roy F. Baumeister & John Tierney

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China - Ezra F. Vogel

The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

Super Pumped - Mike Isaac

The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder

The World For Sale - Javier Blas & Jack Farchy

The Innovator's Dilemma - Clayton M. Christensen

All Systems Red - Martha Wells

No Rules Rules - Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer

The Nvidia Way - Tae Kim

2024 (Age 21)#

Poor Charlie's Almanack - Peter D. Kaufman

Nexus - Yuval Noah Harari

An Introduction to Linear Algebra - Gilbert Strang

When Einstein Walked with Gödel - Jim Holt

The C Programming Language - Brian W. Kernighan & Dennis M. Ritchie

Competitive Programmer's Handbook - Antti Laaksonen

Going Infinite - Michael Lewis

Seeing Like A State - James C. Scott

The Innovators - Walter Isaacson

Industrial Society And Its Future - Ted Kaczynski

The Founders - Jimmy Soni

The Cathedral & The Bazaar - Eric S. Raymond

The Man Who Solved The Market - John Steele Gordon

An Empire of Wealth - John Steele Gordon

Writing a Compiler In Go - Thorsten Ball

Killers of the Flower Moon - David Grann

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach - John L. Hennessy & David A. Patterson

Alexander Hamilton - Ron Chernow

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller - Ron Chernow

2023 (Age 20)#

Napoleon - Andrew Roberts

A Tour of C++ - Bjarne Stroustrup

Efficient Go - Bartiomiej Plotka

Writing an Interpreter In Go - Thorsten Ball

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power - Max Chafkin

Elon Musk - Walter Isaacson

The House of Morgan - Ron Chernow

The Rust Programming Language - Steve Klabnik & Carol Nichols

The Odyssey - Translated by Emily Wilson

Physics for Engineers and Scientists, Vol. 1 - Hans C. Ohanian & John T. Markert

Six Easy Pieces - Richard P. Feynman

Rome: An Empire's Story - Greg Woolf

The Man From The Future - Ananyo Bhattacharya

American Prometheus - Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

Einstein - Walter Isaacson

Algorithms to Live By - Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths

Gödel's Proof - Ernest Nagel & James R. Newman

The Joy of X - Steven Strogatz

The Creature from Jekyll Island - G. Edward Griffin

How Google Works - Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg

A Mind at Play - Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni

The Poincaré Conjecture - Donal O'Shea

The Everthing Store - Brad Stone

All the Math You Missed - Thomas A. Garrity

Cracking The Coding Interview - Gayle Laakmann Mcdowell

Chip War - Chris Miller

Empire of Pain - Patrick Radden Keefe

No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai

The Roman Empire - Gregory S. Aldrete

The Rise of Rome - Gregory S. Aldrete

The Smartest Guys In The Room - Bethany McLean

The Firm - Duff McDonald

The United States and the Middle East - Salim Yaqub

2022 (Age 19)#

A Beautiful Mind - Sylvia Nasar

How Markets Fail - John Cassidy

The Lost Bank - Kristen Grind

Masters of DOOM - David Kushner

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich - Norman Ohler

Flash Boys - Michael Lewis

The Machiavellians - James Burnham

Human Nature - Robert Greene

The Lessons Of History - Will & Ariel Durant

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

The Road To Serfdom - F. A. Hayek

Zero To One - Peter Thiel

The Fountain Head - Ayn Rand

The New Right - Michael Malice

A People's History Of The United States - Howard Zinn

2021 (Age 18)#

The Sovereign Individual - James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg

The Origin Of Virtue - Matt Ridley

The Infinite Machine - Camila Russo

The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous

Beyond Order - Jordan B. Peterson

Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris

21 Lessons For The 21st Century - Yuval Noah Harari

Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari

Life 3.0 - Max Tegmark

The Nuremberg Trials - Paul Roland

Give Me Tomorrow - Patrick K. O'Donnel

In The Shadows Of The American Century - Alfred W. McCoy

How The Internet Happened - Brian McCullough

Up From Slavery - Booker T. Washington

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee - Dee Brown

Super Intelligence - Nick Bostrom

About Face - David H. Hackworth

All Quiet On The Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari

American Ulysses - Ronald C. White

Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris

Haroun And The Sea Of Stories - Salman Rushdie

The Power Broker - Robert Caro

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage - Alfred Lansing

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman - Richard Feynman

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Rise Of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris

Atomic Habits - James Clear

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich - William L. Shirer

2020 (Age 17)#

Memories, Dreams, Reflections - Carl Jung

Ecce Homo - Fridrich Nietsche

Benjamin Franklin - Walter Isaacson

The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brian

Notes From The Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

A Short History Of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson

The Compound Effect - Darren Hardy

Beowulf - Ancient Tale

Animal Farm - George Orwell

The Coddling Of The American Mind - Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt

The Boys In The Boat - Daniel James Brown

Bad Blood - John Carreyrou

The 50th Law - Robert Greene & 50 Cent

AI Superpowers - Kai-Fu Lee

The Autobiography Of Ben Franklin - Ben Franklin

Can't Hurt Me - David Goggins

The Denial Of Death - Ernest Becker

2019 (Age 16)#

The Tipping Point - Malcom Gladwell

Talking To Strangers - Malcom Gladwell

Elon Musk - Ashlee Vance

Man's Search For Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl

The River Of Doubt - Candice Millard

Rich Dad Poor Dad - Robert Kiyosaki

Be Obsessed Or Be Average - Grant Cardone

The Art Of War - Sun Tzu

Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson

The Snowball - Alice Schroeder

The Art Of Seduction - Robert Greene

E-Myth Revisited - Michael Gerber

Andrew Carnegie - David Nasaw

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

Alexander Hamilton's Guide To Life - Jeff Wilser

Managing One's Self - Peter Drucker

The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night - Mark Haddon

Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros

Explosive Growth - Cliff Lerner

Smarter, Faster, Better - Charles Duhigg

12 Rules For Life - Jordan B. Peterson

2018 (Age 15)#

The Richest Man In Babylon - George S. Clason

How To Win Friends And Influence People - Dale Carnegie

Blink - Malcom Gladwell

Drop Out And Get Schooled - Patrick Bet-David

Exactly What To Say - Phil M. Jones

Unlimited Memory - Kevin Horsley

The 1 Page Marketing Plan - Allan Dib

Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes

Sell Or Be Sold - Grant Cardone

The Power Of Habit - Charles Duhigg

2017 (Age 14)#

To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand

1984 - George Orwell

Mastery - Robert Greene

Excellent Sheep - William Deresiewicz

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

The Giver - Lois Lowry

2016 (Age 13)#

The 48 Laws Of Power - Robert Greene