I enjoy browsing others’ lists of favorite books and their bookshelves, so I decided to build my own here. To the extent I can recommend books in the abstract, I flagged below the ones that were exceptional in bold. This list is evergrowing and not intended to be exhaustive.
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley (2010)
King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist by Mark Stevens (1993)
Slices and lumps by Lee Ann Fennel (2019)
How the World Really Works: How Science Can Set Us Straight on Our Past, Present and Future by Vaclav Smil (2022)
Lying by Sam Harris (2013)
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford (2009)
The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff (2018)
Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World by Vaclav Smil (2020)
What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami (2007)
Lost & Found: A Memoir by Kathryn Schulz (2022)
Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly (2023)
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2010)
The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich (2020
Norwegian wood by Haruki Murakami (1987)
Men, machines, and modern times by Elting E. Morison (1966)
How to read a book by Charles Van Doren, Mortimer J. Adler (1972)
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2016)
The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks (2019)
The Gervais Principle by Venkatesh Rao (2013)
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012)
The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew Crawford (2016)
The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (1978)
Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (2012)
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (1997)
Book by Jared Diamond
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by René Girard (1978)
12 rules for life by Jordan Peterson (2018)
Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger (2005)
The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin (2019)
The art of war by Sun Tzu (5th century BC)
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (1946)
The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name by Brian C. Muraresku (2020)
Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Scott Aaronson (2013)
Of Anger by Seneca (AD c. 45)