Posted: April 20, 2020

Updated: March 29, 2021

I’ve been blessed with an aggressive thirst for knowledge since childhood. Despite this, I avoided books for the longest time.

No longer. I read a couple of amazing books in 2019 which left me wanting so much more.

This semi-updated list chronicles the books I’ve read so far. I’m sure there’s a lot of books from the past that I will never remember, and that’s okay.

I hope this list inspires you to make your own list and to drink from the fountainhead of knowledge.

Favorites are marked with an asterisk.

2021

• Walden
• Enchiridion
• Brain Lock
• Driven to Distraction

2020

• Never Split the Difference
• The Way of Men
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
• Industrial Society and Its Future*
• Anti Tech Revolution Why and How*
• Chanakya Niti*
• The Republic*
• 12 Rules for Life*
• Meditations*
• The Power of Now*
• The Mythical Man-Month
• The End of Your World
• Man’s Search for Meaning*
• The Now Habit
• Buddha’s Brain, the practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and wisdom
• The Pragmatic Programmer, from journeyman to master*
• Personal Development for Smart People
• No One Understands You and What to Do About It
• Cracking the Coding Interview
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams*
• The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness
• The No Asshole Rule

2019

• The Personal MBA*
• Developer Hegemony*
• Twilight of the Idols
• The Antichrist
• A Hole in the World
• Feeling Good
• I Will Teach You To Be Rich*
• The Art of the Start
• The Will to Power*
• Writing Down the Bones*
• Anything You Want*
• How Not to Die*

From times past

• Don’t Make Me Think, a common sense approach to web usability*
• The Passionate Programmer*
• Picture This*
• The Selfish Gene*
• The Alchemist
• Brave New World
• Code Complete*
• Clean Code
• Nausea*
• The Stranger
• Tao Te Ching
• The Tao of Pooh
• The Phantom Tollbooth
• The Hobbit
• LOTR series

For the future

• The 48 Laws of Power
• Code
• Eloquent Ruby
• So Good They Can’t Ignore You
• Deep Work
• Software Estimation, Demystifying the Black Art
• On Writing Well
• Programming Pearls
• Hell Yeah or No
• Your Music and People
• Start Small, Stay Small
• The Gay Science
• Beyond Good and Evil
• Discourses of Epictetus
• The Technological Society
• The Plague
• Short Fiction by H.P. Lovecraft
• The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
• Songs of a Dead Dreamer
• Thinking, Fast and Slow
• Crucial Conversations
• The Hidden Life of Trees
• Walden
• The Human Zoo
• The Prince

Temporarily shelved (partially read)

• Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter
• And Then I Thought I Was a Fish
• The E-Myth Revisited
• Revolution in the Valley
• The Manager’s Path
• Hacking, the Art of Exploitation
• Think and Grow Rich
• Refactoring
• Breath, the new science of a lost art
• The Most Important Thing