The 100 books nearest to my heart
Not the 100 books I recommend the most, but the ones that changed my life the most or spark the most joy in me.
The very top
- Pride and Prejudice
- The Great Gatsby
- Crime and Punishment
- Love in the Time of Cholera
Big American novels
- All the Pretty Horses
- My Ántonia
- Lonesome Dove
- The Scarlet Letter
- East of Eden
- The Crossing
- A Prayer for Owen Meany
- Crossroads
- The Grapes of Wrath
- Suttree
- The Cider House Rules
- Freedom
- The Corrections
- The World According to Garp
Big non-American novels
- My Struggle, Book VI
- My Struggle, Book I
- My Struggle, Book II
- My Struggle, Book III
- The Sea, The Sea
Other novels
- Midnight's Children
- Mrs. Dalloway
- The Remains of the Day
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Childhood / adolescence / formative
- Baseball By the Rules
- Friday Night Lights
- Gödel, Escher, Bach
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- 1984
Turns out most of my favorite philosophy isn't in book form
- The Discovery of Things
- Philosophical Explanations
- Meditations on First Philosophy
Self-help
- Getting Things Done
- The Artist's Way
- The Art of Learning
- Never Split the Difference
Sports and games
- The Breaks of the Game
- The Biggest Game in Town
- My Losing Season
- What I Think About When I Think About Running
- The Inner Game of Tennis
Computers
- Working Effectively with Legacy Code
- Refactoring
- Effective Debugging
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications
- Programming Pearls
- Fluent Python
- Architecture Patterns with Python
I went through a phase
- Infinite Jest
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
- The Pale King
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
A lot of what I know about thinking came from poker
- Ace on the River
- Hold'em Poker for Advanced Players
- Seven-Card Stud for Advanced Players
- High-Low Split Poker for Advanced Players
- Super/System 2
- Elements of Poker
Parenting books are way underrated
- Precious Little Sleep
- Expecting Better
- No Bad Kids
- Oh, Crap!
- Bringing Up Bébé
- Cribsheet
- The Family Firm
Economics
- Average is Over
- The Great Stagnation
- The Complacent Class
Baseball!
- The Baseball 100
- I was Right on Time
- Bottom of the 33rd
- The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
- Summer of '49
Business
- Talent
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Catch-all (nonfiction)
- A Moveable Feast
- The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass
- Walden
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
- A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
- Abe
- But What If We're Wrong?
- Bad Blood
- Battle Cry of Freedom
- Adam's Task
- RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
- The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen
- Self-Portrait in Black and White
Catch-all (fiction)
- The Dog
- Play It as It Lays
- The Great Fire
- Straight Man
- The Power and the Glory
- Their Eyes were Watching God
- The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles
Published 2022-05-29.