bookshelf

I wanted to be a reader since I was a kid, but the only books I managed to read through were the imaginative Harry Potter series. I was so bad at reading that—up until chapter seven of "Veinte mil lenguas* de viaje submarino"—I couldn't understand why Jules Verne had not started covering the multitude of languages spoken under water. So I put it back on the shelf, and only months later did I realize my embarrasing mistake in reading the book's title...

Audiobooks changed my life

Well into my twenties, I was lucky to discover that I'm a listener, not a reader. I had been using Youtube without ads and consuming hours of content every day for years—mostly historical documentaries, interviews and podcasts—but somehow I didn't realize at the time that what caught my attention was the audio, not the video. Only when I gave Audible a second try in 2016 did this become obvious, and I started binge-listening everything I had been wanting to read.

Here's a list of what I've read/listened to ever since, what I'm currently reading and what I'd like to read next.

All Time Favorites

• On Trails: An Exploration (Robert Moor) [2020]
• Index, A History of the (Dennis Duncan) [2022]
• The Timeless Way of Building (Christopher Alexander) [2021]
• The Creative Act: A Way of Being (Rick Rubin) [2023]

• Debt: The first 5000 Years (David Graeber) [2017]
• The Art of Language Invention (David Peterson) [2018]
• Algorithms to Live By (Brian Christian) [2019]

• Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (William Finnegan)
• Coders at Work (Peter Seibel)

Started / In Progress

• Autobiography of a Yogi (Paramahansa Yogananda)
• The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (Louise Perry)
• The Song of the Cell (Siddhartha Mukherjee)
• The Organized Mind (Daniel Levitin)
• The Gutenberg Parenthesis (Jeff Jarvis)

• Money and Promises (Paolo Zannoni)
• The End of Alchemy (Mervyn King)
• Virtuous Bankers (Anne L. Murphy)

• An Elegant Puzzle (Will Larson)
• Turing's Cathedral (George Dyson)
• Tools for Thought (Howard Rheingold)

• The Sense of Style (Steven Pinker)
• Writing Tools (Roy Peter Clark)
• On Writing Well (William Zinsser)

• Material World (Ed Conway)
• Two Wheels Good (Jody Rosen)

• Pachinko (Min Jin Lee)

• Maps of Meaning (Jordan Peterson)

Next in Line

• Feminism Against Progress (Mary Harrington)
• How the Pill Changes Everything (Sarah E. Hill)
• The Canceling of the American Mind (Greg Lukianoff, Rikki Schlott)

• The Pathless Path (Paul Millerd)
• The Myth of Normal (Gabor Maté, Daniel Maté)
• How to Do the Work (Dr Nicole LePera)

• Bitcoin is Venice (Allen Farrington, Sacha Meyers)
• Number Go Up (Zeke Faux)

• Ancient Writing and the History of the Alphabet (John McWhorter)
• Writing Down the Bones ()
• The Frontiers of Knowledge (A. C. Grayling)

• Data-Oriented Programming (Yehonathan Sharvit)

Antilibrary

• The Story of Proof (John Stillwell)
• The Joy of Abstraction (Eugenia Cheng)
• The Secret Lives of Numbers (Kate Kitagawa, Timothy Revell)
• Is Maths Real? (Eugenia Cheng)
• The Art of Logic (Eugenia Cheng)
• Infinite Powers (Steven Strogatz)
• The Joy of X (Steven Strogatz)
• Once Upon a Prime (Sarah Hart)
• The Evolution of Knowledge (Jürgen Renn)
• The Gene: An Intimate History (Siddhartha Mukherjee)

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Sussman, Abelson)
• On Lisp (Paul Graham)
• Let Over Lambda: 50 Years of Lisp (Doug Hoyte)
• The Joy of Clojure (Chris Houser and Michael Fogus)
• The Little Schemer (Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen)
• The Seasoned Schemer (Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen)
• The Reasoned Schemer (D.P. Friedman, W.E. Byrd, O. Kiselyov, J. Hemann)
• The Little Learner (Daniel P. Friedman, Anurag Mendhekar)

• Metaprogramming Elixir (Chris McCord)
• Testing Elixir (Andrea Leopardi, Jeffrey Matthias)
• Exploring Graphs with Elixir (Tony Hammond)
• Graph Algorithms (Mark Needham, Amy E. Hodler)
• Mastering the Lightning Network (Antonopoulos, Osuntokun, Pickhardt)
• Programming Bitcoin (Jimmy Song)

• Pieces of the Action (Vannevar Bush)
• From Memex To Hypertext (James M. Nyce, Paul Kahn)
• Memory Machines (Belinda Barnet)
• Search User Interfaces (Marti A. Hearst)

• Money and Empire (Perry Mehrling)
• History of the London Discount Market (W.T.C. King)
• The Money Machine (Philip Coggan)

• Come non scrivere (Claudio Giunta)
• La Grande Invenzione (Silvia Ferrara)
• L'Italia dei secoli bui (Indro Montanelli)
• Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (Joaquim Machado de Assis)

• A History of Reading (Steven Roger Fischer)
• Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff, Mark Johnson)

Want to Read

• El infinito en un junco (Irene Vallejo)
• The Polymath (Peter Burke)
• Thinking in Numbers (Daniel Tammet)
• The Dictionary People (Sarah Ogilvie)
• Burning the Books (Richard Ovenden)
• Portable Magic (Emma Smith)
• Hidden Hands (Mary Wellesley)
• Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (Christopher De Hamel)
• Paper: Paging Through History (Mark Kurlansky)
• More Money than God (Sebastian Mallaby)
• Before Your Memory Fades (Toshikazu Kawaguchi)
• Only the Paranoid Survive (Andrew Grove)
• Woke Racism (John McWhorter)
• How Life Works (Philip Ball)
• Blue Machine (Helen Czerski)
• Entangled Life (Merlin Sheldrake)
• How They Broke Britain (James O'Brien)
• Politics on the Edge (Rory Stewart)
• Material Girls (Kathleen Stock)
• Time to Think (Hannah Barnes)
• Bad Therapy (Abigail Shrier)
• Holding the Note (David Remnick)
• The Jazz Standards (Ted Gioia)

• Stein On Writing (Sol Stein)
• The Language Instinct (Steven Pinker)
• The Revolt of the Masses (José Ortega y Gasset)
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (David Hume)
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (John Locke)
• The Art of Writing and the Gifts of Writers (C. S. Lewis)
• Glucose Revolution (Jessie Inchauspe)
• You're Teaching My Child What? (Miriam Grossman M.D.)
• A Small Matter of Programming (Bonnie A. Nardi)
• Essays on Free Knowledge (Larry Sanger)
• Endless Frontier (G. Pascal Zachary)

Want to Buy

• Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went (John Kenneth Galbraith)
• Minsky (Daniel H. Neilson)
• Invention: A Life of Learning through Failure (James Dyson)
• A History of Writing (Steven Roger Fischer)
• A History of Language (Steven Roger Fischer)
• A Short History of London (Simon Jenkins)
• Effective Haskell (Rebecca Skinner)
• The New Turing Omnibus (A. K. Dewdney)

Sporadically Reading

• 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene)

• Bach and the High Baroque (Robert Greenberg)
• How to Listen and Understand Great Music (Robert Greenberg)

• The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche (Dave Jilk, Brad Feld)
• A Pattern Language (Christopher Alexander)

• 与运气竞争 [Competing Against Luck] (Clay Christensen)
• 穷查理宝典 [Poor Charlie's Almanack] (Peter D. Kaufman)

• Pandora's Star (Peter F. Hamilton)

Finished

2024

• The Myth of Artificial Intelligence (Erik J. Larson)
• Broken Money (Lyn Alden)
• The Trading Game (Gary Stevenson)
• Busting the Bankers' Club (Gerald Epstein)
• Humanly Possible (Sarah Bakewell)
• Four Thousand Weeks (Oliver Burkeman)
• Party of One (Chun Han Wong)
• Red Memory (Tania Branigan)
• Forgive (Timothy Keller)
• Encounters with Jesus (Timothy Keller)
• A New Earth (Eckhart Tolle)
• Range (David Epstein)
• Banking on It (Anne Boden)
• Barbarians at the Gate (Bryan Burrough, John Helyar)
• Burn Book (Kara Swisher)
• Korea (Victor Cha, Ramon Pacheco Pardo)
• Human Compatible (Stuart Russell)
• The Lost Bookshop (Evie woods, Nick Biadon)
• On Writers and Writing (Margaret Atwood)
• DallerGut Dream Department Store
• Write for Life (Julia Cameron)
• Technofeudalism (Yanis Varoufakis)
• Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (Amelia Horgan)
• What You Are Looking for Is in the Library (Michiko Aoyama)
• Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (Satoshi Yagisawa)
• Quiet (Susan Cain)
• Poor Charlie's Almanack (Charles T. Munger)
• Written (Chris Smith, Bec Evans)
• Always Take Notes (Simon Akam, Rachel Lloyd)
• Working (Robert A. Caro)

2023

• Elixir in Action (Saša Jurić)
• Grokking Simplicity (Eric Normand)
• Principles of Economics (Saifedean Ammous)
• Inglesi (Beppe Severgnini)
• Fathoms: the world in the whale (Rebecca Giggs)
• Greenlights (Matthew McConaughey)
• Music: A Subversive History (Ted Gioia)
• Horizons (James Poskett)
• Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop (Hwang Bo-reum)
• An Immense World (Ed Yong)
• Incredible Journeys (David Barrie)
• Wanderlust (Rebecca Solnit)
• Guns, Germs and Steel (Jared Diamond)
• The Repo Market (Scott ED Skrym)
• Makers and Takers (Rana Foroohar)
• Other People's Money (John Kay)
• Dark and Magical Places (Christopher Kemp)
• Knowing What We Know (Simon Winchester)
• Willpower (Roy F. Baumeister, John Tierney)
• Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir)
• The Everything Blueprint
• Prayer (A. W. Tozer)
• Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance (Perry Mehrling)
• The New Lombard Street (Perry Mehrling)
• The Madness of Crowds (Douglas Murray)
• Lost in Trans Nation (Miriam Grossman MD)
• Irreversible Damage (Abigail Shrier)
• The Coddling of the American Mind (G. Lukianoff, J. Haidt)
• Company of One (Paul Jarvis)
• Femina (Janina Ramirez)
• SuperHubs (Sandra Navidi)
• Permanent Distorsion (Nomi Prins)
• Yellowface (Rebecca F. Kuang)
• The Library (Andrew Pettegree, Arthur Der Weduwen)
• The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Martin Wolf)
• Conscious Uncoupling (Katherine Woodward Thomas)
• Chip War (Chris Miller)
• Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises (Ray Dalio)
• All the Knowledge in the World (Simon Garfield)
• Scaling People (Claire Hughes Johnson)
• The Power Law (Sebastian Mallaby)
• Homo Ludens (Johan Huizinga)
• Deep Work (Cal Newport)
• Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (Helen Joyce)
• Bagehot (James Grant)
• Write It All Down (Cathy Rentzenbrink)
• Several Short Sentences about Writing (Verlyn Klinkenborg)
• Artificial Intelligence (Melanie Mitchell)
• The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle)
• Discipline is Destiny (Ryan Holiday)
• The Creative Act: A Way of Being (Rick Rubin)
• How to Listen o Jazz (Ted Gioia)
• The Art of Writing and the Gifts of Writers (C.S. Lewis)
• The Fourth Turning (Strauss, Howe)
• The Psychology of Money (Morgan Housel)
• El Olvido que Seremos (Héctor Abad Faciolince)

2022

• The Clean Coder (Robert C. Martin)
• A Place for Everything (Judith Flanders)
• Kingdom of Characters (Jing Tsu)
• La Testa degli Italiani (Beppe Severgnini)
• Manufacturing Consent (E. Herman, N. Chomsky)
• Whole Earth [Stewart Brand] (John Markoff)
• La Imitación de Cristo (Tomás de Kempis)
• Start With No (Jim Camp)
• Building Great Sentences (Brooks Landon)
• The Man Who Made Lists (Joshua Kendall)
• The Price of Time (Edward Chancellor)
• Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott)
• Becoming a Great Essayist (Jennifer Cognard-Black)
• The Wikipedia Revolution (Andrew Lih)
• The Revolt of the Public (Martin Gurri)
• Modern Man (Anthony Flint)
• The Man from the Future (Ananyo Bhattacharya)
• Beyond Measure (James Vincent)
• The Search (John Battelle)
• A Praying Life (Paul Miller)
• The Embedded Entrepreneur (Arvid Kahl)
• The History of Jazz (Ted Gioia)
• Index, A History of the (Dennis Duncan)
• The Dark Forest (刘慈欣 Cixin Liu)
• Every Good Endeavor (Tim Keller)
• The Founders (Jimmy Soni)
• Reflections on the Psalms (C. S. Lewis)
• The Alignment Problem (Brian Christian)
• Machines of Loving Grace (John Markoff)
• The Future of Money (Eswar S. Prasad)
• Learn ClojureScript (Andrew Meredith)
• Getting Clojure (Russ Olsen)
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard P. Feynman)
• How the Internet Happened (Brian McCullough)
• The Big Score (Michael S. Malone)

2021

• Heart of Buddha's Teaching (Thich Nhat Hanh)
• God's Wisdom for Navigating Life (Tim Keller)
• A Guide to the Good Life (William Irvine)
• The Great CEO Within (Matt Mochary et al.)
• Disciplined Entrepreneurship (Bill Autlet)
• No Rules Rules (Reid Hasting, Erin Meyer)
• Never Split the Difference (Chris Voss)
• Teachings of the Buddha (Kornfield, Fronsdal)
• Elements of Clojure (Zachary Tellman)
• High Growth Handbook (Elad Gil)
• Order Without Design (Alain Bertaud)
• VC: An American History (Tom Nicholas)
• Walking with God through Pain and Suffering
• Working Backwards (Colin Bryar, Bill Carr)
• Layered Money (Nik Bhatia)
• Introduction to Graph Theory (Trudeau)
• How to Take Smart Notes (Sönke Arens)
• Billion Dollar Loser (Reeves Wiedeman)
• The Meaning of Marriage (Tim Keller)
• Prayer (Philip Yancey)
• The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
• Super Pumped (Mike Isaac)
• Super Founders (Ali Tamaseb)
• Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
• Coders at Work (Peter Seibel)
• Clean Architecture (Robert C. Martin)
• Leonardo da Vinci (Walter Isaacson)
• The Daily Stoic (Ryan Holiday, S. Hansem)
• Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)
• Beyond Order (Jordan Peterson)
• Atomic Habits (James Clear)
• Creativity Inc. (Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace)
• Mao's Great Famine (Frank Dikötter)
• Marco Polo (Laurence Bergreen)
• Founders at Work (Jessica Livingston)
• Mere Christianity (C. S. Lewis)
• Praying with Paul (D. A. Carson)
• The Search for God (C. S. Lewis)
• The Screwtape Letters (C .S. Lewis)
• The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)
• The Code Breaker (Walter Isaacson)
• Scientific Freedom (Donald W. Braber)
• The Obstacle is the Way (Ryan Holiday)
• Lives of the Stoics (Ryan Holiday)
• The Timeless Way of Building (C. Alexander)
• Un Italiano in America (Beppe Severgnini)

2020

• Scandal of Money (George Gilder)
• Valley of Genius (Adam Fisher)
• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Steven Levy)
• Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)
• The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
• Trillion Dollar Coach (Rosenberg, Eagle, Schmidt)
• Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Ries, Kupor)
• Permanent Record (Edward Snowden)
• Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
• 1984 (George Orwell)
• The Sovereign Individual (William Rees-Mogg)
• Language Families of the World (John McWhorter)
• The Three-Body Problem (刘慈欣 Cixin Liu)
• The Manager's Path (Camille Fournier)
• How Asia Works (Joe Studwell)
• Hatching Twitter (Nick Bilton)
• High Output Management (Andy Grove)
• Creative Schools (Ken Robinson)
• Mastering the Market Cycle (Howard Marks)
• The Dream Machine (M. Mitchell Waldrop)
• Blood, Sweat and Pixels (Jason Schreier)
• Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (David Harvey)
• An Intro to Information Theory (John Pierce)
• The Idea Factory (John Gertner)
• Scale (Geoffrey West)
• I Contain Multitudes (Ed Young)
• The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Robert Gordon)
• Grain Brain (David Perlmutter)
• Wheat Belly (William Davis)
• The Four (Scott Galloway)
• How Google Works (Schmidt, Rosenberg)
• That Will Never Work (Marc Randolph)
• Start-up Nation (Saul Singer, Dan Senor)
• The Launch Pad (Randall Stross)
• The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
• Weapons of Math Destruction (Cathy O'Neil)
• The Startup Owner's Manual (Blank, Dorf)
• How to Read a Book (Mortimer Adler)
• On Trails: An Exploration (Robert Moor)
• The Map of Knowledge (Violet Moller)
• The Great Age of Discovery (Paul Herrmann)
• The Pragmatic Programmer (Thomas, Hunt)
• Working in Public (Nadia Eghbal)
• Because Internet (Gretchen McCulloch)
• Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (William Finnegan)
• The Dollar Trap (Eswar S. Prasad)
• Ready Player Two (Ernest Cline)
• Navalmanack (Eric Jorgenson)
• The Reason for God (Timothy Keller)
• Prayer (Timothy Keller)
• Dinero, Crédito Bancario y Ciclos Económicos (Huerta de Soto)
• ANSI Common Lisp (Paul Graham)

2019

• Significant Figures (Ian Stewart)
• When Einstein Walked with Gödel (Jim Holt)
• Rework (Jason Fried, Heinemeier)
• One World School House (Salman Khan)
• Disrupting Class (Clay Christensen)
• Why We Sleep (Matthew Walker)
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind (Harari)
• What Has Government Done to our Money? (Rothbard)
• 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism (Ha-Joon Chang)
• Conspiracy (Ryan Holiday)
• The E-Myth Revisited (Michael Gerber)
• On Language (Noam Chomsky)
• The Path: Chinese Philosophy (Michael Puett)
• The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman)
• Vagabonding (Rolf Potts)
• 12 Rules for Life (Jordan Peterson)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)
• The Learning Brain (Thad Polk)
• Monetary Central Planning (Richard Ebeling)
• The Information (James Gleick)
• The Inner Game of Tennis (Timothy Gallwey)
• The Story of Human Language (John McWhorter)
• Make It Stick (Peter Brown)
• The Art of Learning (Josh Waitzkin)
• Writing and Civilization (Marc Zender)
• Man's Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl)
• Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn)
• Young China (Zak Dychtwald)
• Labor of Love (Moira Weigel)
• Double Entry (Jane Gleeson-White)
• Cataloging the World (Alex Wright)
• Weaving the Web (Tim Berners-Lee)
• Change by Design (Tim Brown)
• Story (Robert McKee)
• Beggar Thy Neighbor (Charles Geisst)
• The Bullet Journal Method (Ryder Carroll)
• Algorithms to Live By (Brian Christian)
• Measure What Matters (John Doerr)
• Wild Ride (Adam Lashinsky)
• Blitzscaling (Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh)
• What You Do Is Who You Are (Ben Horowitz)
• Without Their Permission (Alexis Ohanian)

2018

• Onward (Howard Schultz)
• The Virgin Way (Richard Branson)
• Principles (Ray Dalio)
• Influence (Robert Cialdini)
• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (Edwin Lefevre)
• Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
• Walt Disney (Neal Gabler)
• Reality is Broken (Jane McGonigal)
• Game-Based Marketing (Gabe Zichermann)
• Actionable Gamification (Yu-kai Chou)
• Cien Años de Soledad (Gabo)
• The Power of Habit (Charles Duhigg)
• [The Snapchat Story] (Billy Gallagher)
• The Airbnb Story (Leigh Gallagher)
• The Upstarts (Brad Stone)
• The Ascent of Money (Niall Ferguson)
• Building a StoryBrand (Donald Miller)
• Hooked: Habit-forming Products (Nir Eyal)
• The Sharing Economy (Arun Sundararajan)
• What's Mine is Yours (Rachel Botsman)
• Who Gets What, and Why (Alvin Roth)
• Capitalism and Freedom (Milton Friedman)
• Free to Choose (Milton Friedman)
• Replay: The History of Video Games
• The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous)
• Economics in One Lesson (Henry Hazlitt)
• The Road to Serfdom (Friedrich Hayek)
• The Innovators (Walter Isaacson)
• For a New Liberty (Murray Rothbard)
• The Art of Language Invention (David Peterson)
• A Mind at Play (Jimmy Soni, Rob Goodman)
• The Man Who Knew Infinity (Robert Kanigel)
• Competing Against Luck (Clayton Christensen)
• The Lessons of History (Will, Ariel Durant)
• A Most Elegant Equation (David Stipp)
• Lean in (Sheryl Sandberg, Nell Scovell)
• El Alquimista (El Alquimista)
• Momo (Michael Ende)

2017

• Debt: The first 5000 Years (David Graeber)
• Money: The Unauthorized Biography (Felix Martin)
• The Death of Money (James Rickards)
• When China Rules the World (Martin Jacques)
• Unshakeable (Tony Robbins)
• Getting Things Done (David Allen)
• The Effective Executive (Peter Drucker)
• Elon Musk (Ashlee Vance)
• Zero to One (Peter Thiel)
• The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen)
• Shoe Dog (Phil Knight)
• Alibaba (Duncan Clark)
• The Everything Store (Brad Stone)
• The Facebook Effect (David Kirkpatrick)
• Currency Wars (James Rickards)
• The Undercover Economist (Tim Harford)
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz)
• The 21st Century Case for Gold (George Gilder)
• Troublemakers (Leslie Berlin)
• Lombard Street (Walter Bagehot)
• Knowledge and Power (George Gilder)
• Start with Why (Simon Sinek)
• Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
• Ready Player One (Ernest Cline)

2016

• The Road to Ruin (James Rickards)