Wai Keen Vong
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
- How Life Works by Philip Ball
- Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It by Richard V. Reeves
- Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie
- Better without AI: How to avert a moderate apocalypse… and create a future we would like by David Chapman
- Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us by Russ Roberts
- Dune Messiah (Dune Chronicles, #2) by Frank Herbert
- Dune (Dune, #1) by Frank Herbert
- Learning to Imagine: The Science of Discovering New Possibilities by Andrew Shtulman
- Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress by Hasok Chang
- Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang
- The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change by Paul Thagard
- The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science by Erik Hoel
- Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami
- Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda
- An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson
- Natural General Intelligence: How understanding the brain can help us build AI by Christopher Summerfield
- The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
- 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
- The Revelations by Erik Hoel
- What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill
- Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World by Morten H. Christiansen
- The Scout Mindset: The Perils of Defensive Thinking and How to Be Right More Often by Julia Galef
- A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine by Gregory Zuckerman
- Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights by Gary Klein
- When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
- Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles
- Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall
- Transit by Rachel Cusk
- Explaining the Evidence: How the Mind Investigates the World by David A Lagnado
- Clearing the Air: The Beginning and the End of Air Pollution by Tim Smedley
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
- There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
- Outline by Rachel Cusk
- What Makes Us Smart: The Computational Logic of Human Cognition by Samuel Gershman
- The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord
- The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens
- In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
- Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain by Grace Lindsay
- The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis
- Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie
- Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami by David Karashima
- The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
- Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal
- One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
- The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian
- Learning to See Creatively: Design, Color, and Composition in Photography by Bryan Peterson
- Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization by Donald W. Braben
- Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith
- The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier
- Blind Spot by Teju Cole
- How Fiction Works by James Wood
- Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs by Henry Carroll
- How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens
- Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
- Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck by Eliezer Yudkowsky
- The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
- Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner
- 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