I have decided to keep a running tab of books I recommend reading, grouped by genre, in no particular order. Those I have reviewed or discussed in blog posts are linked to below.
History/Biography
- Twelve Days, Victor Sebestyen
- The Afrikaners, Hermann Giliomee
- Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder
- Peter the Great, Robert K. Massie
- Truman, David McCullough
- John Adams, David McCullough
- Black Boy, Richard Wright
- Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris
- Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin
- Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, Nicholas Phillipson
- 1776, David McCullough
- History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter
- Osman’s Dream, Caroline Finkel
- Maus, Art Spiegelman
- Fatelessness, Imre Kertész
- Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
- The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker
- The Orientalist, Tom Reiss
- Young Stalin, Simon Sebag Montefiore
Fiction
- 1984, George Orwell
- Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
- Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee
- Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
- The Trial, Franz Kafka
- Native Son, Richard Wright
- Animal Farm, George Orwell
- Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
- Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
- Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
- Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
- The Awakening, Kate Chopin
- Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
- A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
- Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
- The Chosen, Chaim Potok
- All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain
- The Good Earth, Pearl Buck
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Plays
- A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen
- The Tempest, Shakespeare
- A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
- Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
- The Crucible, Arthur Miller
- Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry
- Travesties, Tom Stoppard
- Mother Courage and Her Children, Bertolt Brecht
- The Zoo Story, Edward Albee
- Antigone, Sophocles
- Julius Caesar, Shakespeare
General Nonfiction
- Dignity, Chris Arnade
- The Question, Henri Alleg
- When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, Peter Godwin
- Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens
- Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt
- The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Alex Epstein
- The Better Angels of our Nature, Steven Pinker
- Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
- The Like Switch, Jack Schafer
- Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker
- Political Tribes, Amy Chua
- The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt
- Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss
Economics and Business
- Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman
- The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek
- Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo
- Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
- Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt
- Das Kapital, Karl Marx
- Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell
- Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Power, Jeffrey Pfeffer
- Business Adventures, John Brooks
- The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz
Philosophy and Law
- The Republic, Plato
- The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault
- On Revolution, Hannah Arendt
- The Bill of Rights, Akhil Reed Amar
- The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
- The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
- The Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt
- State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben
- Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom
- 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson
- The War of Art, Steven Pressfield
Science
- The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin
- The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
- A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
- The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
- The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker
Short Stories
- The Story of an Hour, Kate Chopin
- Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut
- The Vulture, Franz Kafka
- Metamorphoses, Franz Kafka
- The Slaughterer, Isaac Bashevis Singer
Essays
- The Law, Frederic Bastiat
- The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
- God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens
- Politics and the English Language, George Orwell
- On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
- The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, Milton Friedman
- Second Treatise on Government, John Locke
For Fun
- The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
- The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
- Foundation, Isaac Asimov
- 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
- Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie
- Shōgun, James Clavell