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Books

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