Nate Meyvis

The 100 books nearest to my heart

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

Honorable mention (formerly on the list):

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