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. 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. Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle [notes]
39. I Was Right On Time, Buck O’Neil
40. The Cider House Rules, John Irving
41. Effective Debugging, Diomidis Spinellis
42. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders
43. Suttree, Cormac McCarthy
44. Ace on the River, Barry Greenstein
45. Average is Over, Tyler Cowen
46. Abe, David S. Reynolds
47. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
48. Hold’Em Poker For Advanced Players
49. Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Martin Kleppmann
50. Battle Cry of Freedom, James M. McPherson
51. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
52. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
53. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
54. Music: A Subversive History, Ted Gioia [notes]
55. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
56. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
57. Bringing Up Bébé, Pamela Druckerman
58. The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
59. My Struggle, Book III, Karl Ove Knausgaard
60. My Losing Season, Pat Conroy
61. Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen
62. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
63. We Are In a Book, Mo Willems
64. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
65. The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzard
66. But What If We’re Wrong?, Chuck Klosterman
67. Adam’s Task, Vicki Hearne
68. The World According to Garp, John Irving
69. The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever [notes]
70. Seven-Card Stud for Advanced Players, David Sklansky et al.
71. The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen
72. Open Socrates, Agnes Callard
73. The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
74. Cribsheet, Emily Oster
75. The Art of Learning, Joshua Waitzkin
76. The Fifties, David Halberstam
77. The Discovery of Things, Wolfgang Mann
78. The Unexpected Professor, John Carey [notes]
79. The Pale King, David Foster Wallace
80. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis
81. Stoner, John Williams
82. The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis
83. The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
84. The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather [notes]
85. The Complacent Class, Tyler Cowen
86. Bottom of the 33rd, Dan Barry
87. Straight Man, Richard Russo
88. The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie
89. Precious Little Sleep, Alexis Dubief
90. 1984, George Orwell
91. Danny, the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl
92. A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr [notes]
93. The Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Gallwey
94. The Upside-Down World, Benjamin Moser
95. White Noise, Don DeLillo
96. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
97. High-Low Split Poker for Advanced Players, Ray Zee
98. Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes
99. Architecture Patterns with Python, Harry Percival and Bob Gregory
100. Elements of Poker, Tommy Angelo

Honorable mention (formerly on the list):

• Everything We Do is Music, Elizabeth Alker [notes]
• From Front Porch to Back Seat, Beth L. Bailey
• On the Calculation of Volume (volume 1), Solvej Balle [notes]
• Programming Pearls, Jon Bentley
• Super/System 2, Doyle Brunson et al.
• How Music Works, David Byrne
• The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron
• Bad Blood, John Carreyrou
• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai [notes]
• Talent, Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross
• The Last Days of Roger Federer, Geoff Dyer
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
• Summer of ‘49, David Halberstam
• A Widow For One Year, John Irving
• The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
• What I Talk About when I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
• The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
• Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick
• The Family Firm, Emily Oster
• Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell
• Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck
• Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
• On Writing Well, William Zinsser

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