Here’s a list of books I have read since starting university. Books that I particularly enjoyed are highlighted in bold. Got any recommendations on what I should read next? E-mail me! waikeenvong@gmail.com

  • Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior by Jonathan Weiner
  • Ra by Sam Hughes
  • Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell
  • The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich
  • Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar
  • The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science by Gary Marcus
  • Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World by Andrew Leigh
  • Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
  • Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson
  • Working by Robert Caro
  • Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang
  • Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking by Cecilia Heyes
  • The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis
  • The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch
  • AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee
  • The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain by Nick Chater
  • Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
  • Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
  • Intelligence: All That Matters by Stuart Ritchie
  • The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie
  • Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
  • Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
  • Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu
  • The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood
  • The Hard Thing about Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
  • The Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand [Highlights]
  • Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue
  • Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper [Highlights]
  • But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman [Highlights]
  • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Synder
  • Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville
  • Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang [Highlights]
  • Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
  • Maker of Patters by Freeman Dyson [Highlights]
  • Ties by Domenico Starnone
  • China Airborne by James Fallows [Highlights]
  • Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl [Highlights]
  • How Asia Works by Joe Studwell [Highlights]
  • The Second World Wars by Victor Davis Hanson [Highlights]
  • Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
  • The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson [Highlights]
  • The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann [Highlights]
  • Deep Learning with Python by Francois Chollet
  • Open City by Teju Cole
  • The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
  • Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee
  • The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides by Arnold Kling
  • Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo [Highlights]
  • Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
  • The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop [Highlights]
  • Swing Time by Zadie Smith
  • Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis
  • Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler
  • Words Without Music: A Memoir by Philip Glass
  • The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge
  • River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler
  • A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman
  • The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner [Highlights]
  • The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson
  • The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy by Tyler Cowen
  • Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler
  • The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do and How to Change by Charles Duhigg
  • Productivity and Reuse in Language: A Theory of Linguistic Computation and Storage by Timothy J O’Donnell
  • Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
  • Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole
  • Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu
  • Crux by Ramez Naam
  • Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
  • The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century by Ryan Avent
  • Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Tyler Cowen
  • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker [Highlights]
  • Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam M. Grant
  • The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen
  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  • The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei
  • Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa by Haruki Murakami
  • Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford
  • Butterick’s Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick
  • Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
  • Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil
  • Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian [Highlights]
  • The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
  • Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
  • The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante
  • The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
  • White Noise by Don DeLillo
  • My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
  • On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman
  • The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein
  • Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own by Garett Jones
  • Neural Networks and Deep Learning by Michael Nielsen
  • The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright
  • The Gated City by Ryan Avent
  • Family Life by Akhil Sharma
  • The Secret History by Donna Tartt
  • The Sports Gene: What Makes the Perfect Athlete by David Epstein
  • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch
  • Modern Romance: An Investigation by Aziz Ansari
  • Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock
  • David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell
  • No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes by Anand Gopal
  • Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
  • Wind/Pinball: Two Novels by Haruki Murakami
  • The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin
  • Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference by William MacAskill
  • The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
  • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
  • The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically by Peter Singer
  • Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos
  • Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
  • The Martian by Andy Weir
  • Holes by Louis Sachar
  • Life of Pi by Yann Martel
  • Apex by Ramez Naam
  • Nexus by Ramez Naam
  • Data Scientists at Work by Sebastian Gutierrez
  • The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion
  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  • The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
  • Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
  • The Less Wrong Sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky
  • Worm by Wildbow
  • The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
  • The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami
  • Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There by Cheryl Strayed
  • Escape From Camp 14 by Blaine Harden
  • So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport
  • Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential by Carol S. Dweck
  • Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole
  • The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
  • Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
  • How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson
  • Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel
  • The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
  • Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
  • Uncharted: Big Data and an Emerging Science of Human History by Erez Aiden
  • The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
  • Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
  • The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don’t by Nate Silver
  • Decoded by Mai Jia
  • Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami
  • On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee
  • The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr
  • The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
  • Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
  • The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better by Tyler Cowen
  • What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
  • Launching The Innovation Renaissance: A New Path to Bring Smart Ideas to Market Fast by Alex Tabarrok
  • Startups Open Sourced by Jared Tame
  • Animal Farm by George Orwell
  • Thinking Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman
  • Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa
  • The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin
  • Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson
  • Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
  • The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
  • Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston
  • Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin
  • Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
  • A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
  • The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  • The Art Of War by Sun Tzu
  • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming by Peter Seibel
  • Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
  • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Todd Gilbert
  • The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte
  • Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin
  • The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of the Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson
  • The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
  • Gödel’s Proof by Ernest Nagel
  • Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics by P.J. O’Rourke
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
  • Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation: Prisoner’s Dilemma and Newcomb’s Problem by Lanning Sowden
  • My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley by Ben Casnocha
  • Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
  • Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande
  • Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
  • Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson
  • Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making by Reid Hastie
  • Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
  • Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
  • Macbeth by William Shakespeare
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
  • The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
  • God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment by Scott Adams
  • The Religion War by Scott Adams
  • Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson
  • QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman
  • Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures by Tyler Cowen
  • The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan Caplan
  • Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen
  • House of Cards: Psychology and psychotherapy built on myth by Robyn M. Dawes
  • The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
  • Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig
  • Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
  • South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
  • Fly Away Peter by David Malouf
  • Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
  • Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
  • Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami
  • Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
  • Men of Mathematics by Eric Temple Bell
  • Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language by Robin I.M. Dunbar
  • The Strategy of Conflict: With a New Preface by the Author by Thomas C. Schelling
  • Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer
  • The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker
  • Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
  • Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig
  • Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman
  • Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham
  • The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Foundation by Isaac Asimov
  • Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
  • Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov
  • An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen
  • Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are by Sebastian Seung
  • Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
  • Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
  • Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom by Daniel T. Willingham
  • Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  • Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases by Daniel Kahneman
  • Creativity in Science: Chance, Logic, Genius, and Zeitgeist by Dean Keith Simonton
  • Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
  • Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate by Steven Johnson
  • Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern by Douglas R. Hofstadter
  • 1984 by George Orwell
  • Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
  • Anthem by Ayn Rand
  • The Godfather (Mario Puzo’s Mafia) by Mario Puzo
  • Redwall by Brian Jacques
  • Neuromancer by William Gibson
  • The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
  • Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
  • The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
  • The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
  • What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynman
  • Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
  • Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman
  • The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain by Terrence W. Deacon
  • How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
  • Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
  • The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh
  • Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
  • The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
  • A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
  • Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology by K. Eric Drexler
  • The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford
  • The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
  • Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
  • Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
  • A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments by David Foster Wallace
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
  • The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
  • The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  • The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
  • The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  • Naked by David Sedaris
  • Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris
  • Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
  • Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
  • Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett
  • Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
  • Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
  • Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
  • When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
  • Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande
  • How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen
  • Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
  • The Pianist by Władysław Szpilman
  • The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman
  • Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
  • Digital Fortress by Dan Brown
  • A History of π by Petr Beckmann
  • The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
  • 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
  • The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert A. Simon
  • After Dark by Haruki Murakami
  • How Children Learn the Meanings of Words by Paul Bloom
  • What Is Thought? by Eric B. Baum
  • Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, and Artificial Intelligence by John Haugeland
  • An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Language by Lila R. Gleitman
  • Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code by Fred Rieke
  • Cosmic Bullets: High Energy Particles In Astrophysics by Roger Clay
  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
  • John Von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing by William Aspray
  • Robot Futures by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh
  • Language in Thought and Action by S.I. Hayakawa
  • The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
  • The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics by Roger Penrose
  • The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics by Stanislas Dehaene
  • The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil
  • NW by Zadie Smith
  • Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
  • The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
  • The Crucible by Arthur Miller
  • On Beauty by Zadie Smith
  • Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
  • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley
  • Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
  • Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  • The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker
  • Quarantine by Greg Egan
  • Permutation City by Greg Egan
  • Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt
  • Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
  • The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss
  • The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
  • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
  • The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien