The 100 books nearest to my heart
Work in progress. There is a changelog at the bottom.
Not the 100 books I recommend the most, nor even the 100 best books I've ever read, 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
- 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
- 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
- Peak
Sports and games
- The Breaks of the Game
- What I Think About When I Think About Running
- The Biggest Game in Town
- 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
- Consider the Lobster
- 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
- An Economist Gets Lunch
Baseball!
- The Baseball 100
- I was Right on Time
- Bottom of the 33rd
- The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
- Summer of '49
- October 1964
Business
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things
- High Output Management
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
- Their Eyes were Watching God
- Play It as It Lays
- The Great Fire
- Straight Man
- The Power and the Glory
- The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles
Changelog
Date | New book | Removed book | Reason |
---|---|---|---|
2022-01-19 | The Sea, The Sea | An Economist Gets Lunch | Oversight |
2022-01-19 | What I Think About When I Think About Running | TJ: My 26 Years in Baseball | Oversight |
2022-01-23 | Adam's Task | The Outsiders | Oversight |
2022-01-28 | The Power and the Glory | Dear Committee Members | Oversight |
2022-01-28 | Crossroads | What You Do Is Who You Are | New read |
2022-04-03 | The Art of Learning | Oblivion | Oversight |
2022-05-04 | The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles | A Jane Austen Education | New read |