My Recommended Reading List [Updated: May 2025]

Recently, I decided to re-read some of my all time favourite books. I read a lot, and even though I start every year with a reading list, I sometimes end up reading other books that are not on that list. It becomes harder to revisit them if I don't have any record of ever reading them.

This list is just as much for me, as it is for anyone who stumbles upon it, to keep track of all the books that I think are worth (re)reading.

General

• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
  • A book that challenges our assumptions about success. A must read for those willing to go beyond our society’s “smart/gifted” vs “dumb/unskilled” dichotomy. Maybe there’s more to success than just intelligence.
• The Almanac of Naval Ravikant by Adam Jorgensen
  • The only book on this list that I haven't actually finished. I'm about halfway done, and I've been working my way through it on-and-off for the better part of a year, now. That's mostly because of how thought-provoking it is, and, at times, I just feel like I'm better off putting it down and really allowing the ideas to sink in.
• God’s Debris by Scott Adams
• If This is a Man by Primo Levi
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harrari
• Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment by Francis Fukuyama
  • We live in an age where the concept of identity has been, to some extent, villified with the increase in Globalization and the push towards cosmopolitannism. This book argues that this "fading away" of the concept of identity is the source of many of the socio-political crises we are seeing around the world.
• The Swerve: How the World Became Modern By Stephen Greenblatt
  • In this Pulitzer Prize Winner, Greenblatt argues that the discovery of a single lost manuscript, On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura) by Lucretius, inspired many great thinkers with its "dangerous" ideas and contributed to the realisation of modernity as we live it, today.
• Anansi's Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World by Yopeka Yeebo
  • This one is interesting because it's a book about greed. Specifically, how one man pioneered the "advance-fee" scam and why it still works up to today, even though we've almost all heard about it.

Life

• Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan
  • One of the few authors appearing in multiple sections, here. Carl Sagan is, to me, the gold standard for science (or, generally, technical) educators. His ability to communicate complex concepts in a way that is both entertaining and comprehensible is unmatched. While you’re at it, go pick up Contact, or watch/read Cosmos.
  • Special mention: The Demon-Haunted World
• Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
  • A book about the Holocaust. Not for the faint-hearted.
• On The Heights of Despair by Emil Cioran

Spirituality

• The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Messgae for an Age of Anxiety by Alan Watts
  • Most people may know Alan Watts from the vast collection of YouTube talks, but he communicates just as lucidly in writing, too.
• Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
• What The Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula
• When the body says no by Dr. Gabor Mate

Science & Technology

• Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

• The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking

• The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

• Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by John Cassidy

  • As someone who's lived through basically a second tech bubble, reading about and seeing tha parallels between this and the last one was important for me and how I think about tech companies, especially as someone deeply invested in the industry.

• What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley by Adrian Daub

  • I think the title explains itself.

Philosophy

As Goethe said, "he who cannot draw on 3000 years is living hand to mouth."

• The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain De Boton

  • This book is #1 on this list not because it's the best of the bunch, but because it presents a pretty compelling justification of why we need to study philosophy. It's not just "thinking about thinking".

• The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone De Beauvoir

  • Basically, anything she wrote. She's one of my favourite philosophical writers.

• The Stranger by Albert Camus

  • It wasn't The Myth of Sisyphus or The Plague that introduced me to Camus, but The Stranger. It's pretty accessible to most readers, and is, in my opinion, his most clear exploration of the absurd.

• Ethics in the Real World by Peter Singer

  • I don't quite agree with everything he has to say, and I don't identify as a utilitarian, but Singer's writings are quite thought-provoking, and have been useful for me in establishing a way of thinking about doing good beyond basic do's and do not's.

• Amusing ourselves to death by Marshall McLuhan

• Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

  • This book introduced me to philosophy and, as a result, holds a special place on this list.

Fiction

I'm a big fan of sci-fi, especially space operas and cyberpunk fiction. Most of what I enjoy is dystopian in nature, so do bear in mind that most of these will not be optimistic.

• Foundation by Isaac Asimov (SERIES)
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • It’s basically a toss up between this and Crime and Punishment. Both are literary masterpieces, both grapple with dense philosophical ideas that will have your head spinning but ultimately leave you better off than you were before you read them.
• The Hyperion Cantos
  • I could go on and on about the Cantos, but the Shrike is one of the most intriguing and terrifying creatures in all of fiction.
• Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Mirakumi
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe by Douglas Adams
• The Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
  • Committing to reading this means consenting to spending a not insignificant amount of your life being transported to various destinations at the height of the Second World War. But, it will be worth it. Also, I chose this as my favourite, but honestly I could replace it with just about anything else by Stephenson.
  • Special mention also goes to Snow Crash
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Neuromancer by William Gibson
  • Cyberpunk is my favourite genre of fiction, so it only makes sense to include the book that kind of started it all.
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. le Guin
  • Equal parts beautiful and harsh critique of nationalism. It makes it onto this list because of a single quote:
    • "What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession" (full_quote)
• Children of Time (SERIES) by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • Giant, sentient spiders on an alien world - what could go wrong?

To keep this reasonable, each section will have a maximum of 10 books. I have cheated a bit in the Fiction section because some of these are series, but I can't just recommend, for example, Foundation and Empire without including what came before and what comes after.

I'm also always open to recommendations so, if you've read something and think I'd like it, my Mastodon is always open.