The 100 books nearest to my heart

01 May, 2022

My top 100 books

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
2. Middlemarch, George Eliot
3. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
4. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
5. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
7. My Ántonia, Willa Cather
8. My Struggle, Book VI, Karl Ove Knausgaard
9. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. The Breaks of the Game, David Halberstam
11. Getting Things Done, David Allen
12. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
13. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
14. The Dog, Joseph O’Neill
15. Baseball By the Rules, Waggoner et al.
16. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
17. Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Michael Feathers
18. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
19. My Struggle, Book I, Karl Ove Knausgaard
20. Expecting Better, Emily Oster
21. The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy
22. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
23. Refactoring, Martin Fowler
24. Walden, Henry David Thoreau
25. Friday Night Lights, Buzz Bissinger
26. Oh, Crap!, Jamie Glowacki
27. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
28. The Essence of Software, Daniel Jackson
29. The Baseball 100, Joe Posnanski
30. My Struggle, Book II, Karl Ove Knausgaard
31. The Biggest Game in Town, Al Alvarez
32. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
33. No Bad Kids, Janet Lansbury
34. Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion
35. The Magician's Nephew, C.S. Lewis
36. I Was Right On Time, Buck O’Neil
37. The Cider House Rules, John Irving
38. Effective Debugging, Diomidis Spinellis
39. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders
40. Suttree, Cormac McCarthy
41. Ace on the River, Barry Greenstein
42. Average is Over, Tyler Cowen
43. Abe, David S. Reynolds
44. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
45. Hold’Em Poker For Advanced Players
46. Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Martin Kleppmann
47. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
48. Battle Cry of Freedom
49. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
50. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
51. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
52. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
53. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
54. Bringing Up Bébé, Pamela Druckerman
55. The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
56. My Struggle, Book III, Karl Ove Knausgaard
57. My Losing Season, Pat Conroy
58. Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen
59. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
60. We Are In a Book, Mo Willems
61. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
62. The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzard
63. But What If We’re Wrong?, Chuck Klosterman
64. Adam’s Task, Vicki Hearne
65. The World According to Garp, John Irving
66. Seven-Card Stud for Advanced Players, David Sklansky et al.
67. The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen
68. The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
69. Cribsheet, Emily Oster
70. The Art of Learning, Joshua Waitzkin
71. The Fifties, David Halberstam
72. The Discovery of Things, Wolfgang Mann
73. The Pale King, David Foster Wallace
74. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
75. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis
76. Stoner, John Williams
77. The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis
78. The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
79. The Complacent Class, Tyler Cowen
80. Bottom of the 33rd, Dan Barry
81. Straight Man, Richard Russo
82. The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie
83. Precious Little Sleep, Alexis Dubief
84. 1984, George Orwell
85. Programming Pearls, Jon Bentley
86. Danny, the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl
87. The Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Gallwey
88. The Upside-Down World, Benjamin Moser
89. White Noise, Don DeLillo
90. Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick
91. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
92. Talent, Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross
93. High-Low Split Poker for Advanced Players, Ray Zee
94. Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes
95. On Writing Well, William Zinsser
96. Architecture Patterns with Python, Harry Percival and Bob Gregory
97. The Last Days of Roger Federer, Geoff Dyer
98. Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
99. From Front Porch to Back Seat, Beth L. Bailey
100. Elements of Poker, Tommy Angelo

Honorable mention (formerly on the list):

• Super/System 2, Doyle Brunson et al.
• How Music Works, David Byrne
• The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron
• Bad Blood, John Carreyrou
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
• Summer of ‘49, David Halberstam
• A Widow For One Year, John Irving
• What I Talk About when I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
• The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
• The Family Firm, Emily Oster
• Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell
• Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck

Honorable mention (never quite completed):

1. Fluent Python, Luciano Ramalho
2. Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
3. The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, Bill James