Books

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Presented in no particular order, here’s a collection of books I’ve read over the last few years.

  • How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard
  • An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk, Allison Schrager
  • Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate, Rose George
  • 1984, George Orwell
  • How the Post Office Created America: A History, Winifred Gallagher
  • The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, Mariana Mazzucato
  • Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, Brad Feld
  • On the Shortness of Life, Seneca
  • How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region, Joe Studwell
  • Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You, Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul Choudary
  • AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, Kai-Fu Lee
  • How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
  • Alibaba’s World: How a Remarkable Chinese Company is Changing the Face of Global Business, Porter Erisman
  • We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, Jeff Chang
  • The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
  • The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
  • Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts, Annie Duke
  • Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, bell hooks
  • Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
  • Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done, Laura Vanderkam
  • The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, Marie Kondō
  • Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff
  • The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, Pico Iyer
  • The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store, Cait Flanders
  • Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
  • Managing Oneself, Peter F. Drucker
  • Write Every Day: How to Write Faster, and Write More, Cathy Yardley
  • Bound, Claire Schwartz
  • Communicating Effectively with the Chinese, Ge Gao and Stella Ting-Toome
  • Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach, Suzanne Wong Scollon and Rodney H. Jones
  • The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich, Timothy Ferriss
  • The One Hour China Book: Two Peking University Professors Explain All of China Business in Six Short Stories, Jeffrey Towson and Jonathan Woetzel
  • The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
  • Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer, Wendell Berry
  • Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
  • America at War with Itself, Henry A. Giroux
  • Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, Saul D. Alinsky
  • The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you, Rob Fitzpatrick
  • Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King Jr.
  • The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy, Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko
  • The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, Reid Hoffman
  • From Ramen To Riches: Building Wealth In Your 20s, Or Spending, Saving, Investing And Managing Your Money To Get Rich Slowly, But Surely, James G. Wood
  • Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000, Jason Calacanis
  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, Ben Horowitz
  • Intercom On Starting Up, Des Traynor and team
  • Four Loves, C.S. Lewis
  • The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream, Tyler Cowen
  • Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, Ernst F. Schumacher
  • The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson
  • The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander
  • Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Drown, Junot Díaz
  • Modern Romance, Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg
  • Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie       
  • The Souls of Black Folks, W.E.B. Du Bois
  • The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter – And How to Make the Most of Them Now, Meg Jay
  • The Economy of Regions, Jane Jacobs
  • When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures, Richard D. Lewis
  • Direct Action & Sabotage: Three Classic IWW Pamphlets from the 1910s, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Walker C. Smith
  • Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
  • New York, Pier Paolo Pasolini               
  • The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
  • Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, Ethan Zuckerman