January 04, 2026

Books to Read

notesbooksreading

First principles & mental models

  • Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models — Gabriel Weinberg & Lauren McCann
  • Poor Charlie’s Almanack — Charlie Munger
  • The Great Mental Models (series) — Farnam Street (Shane Parrish et al.)
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
  • Clear Thinking — Shane Parrish
  • The Art of Thinking Clearly — Rolf Dobelli
  • Principles — Ray Dalio
  • The Almanack of Naval Ravikant — Eric Jorgenson

Strategy, product, and execution

  • Good Strategy / Bad Strategy — Richard Rumelt
  • The Cold Start Problem — Andrew Chen
  • Play Bigger — Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney
  • The Lean Product Playbook — Dan Olsen
  • Product Management in Practice — Matt LeMay
  • Impact First Product Teams
  • Radical Focus — Christina Wodtke
  • The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman
  • No Rules Rules — Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer
  • Onward — Howard Schultz

Decision-making, incentives, and persuasion

  • How to Decide — Annie Duke
  • Nudge — Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein
  • The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind — Jonah Berger
  • The Tipping Point — Malcolm Gladwell

Psychology, behavior, and relationships

  • Behave — Robert Sapolsky
  • The Ten Types of Human — Dexter Dias
  • Read People Like a Book — Patrick King
  • The Art of Reading Minds
  • Think Like a Therapist
  • How to Think Like a Philosopher
  • Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?
  • Emotional Intelligence
  • (Explore more from) Stephen Joseph

Writing

  • On Writing Well — William Zinsser

Habits & productivity

  • Atomic Habits — James Clear
  • Timeboxing — Marc Zao-Sanders

Money, markets, and power

  • The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel
  • Same as Ever — Morgan Housel
  • Die with Zero — Bill Perkins
  • The Richest Man in Babylon — George S. Clason
  • Good to Great — Jim Collins
  • The 48 Laws of Power — Robert Greene
  • The Laws of Human Nature — Robert Greene
  • On the Edge — Nate Silver
  • The Changing World Order — Ray Dalio
  • The Bill Gates Problem — Tim Schwab
  • Antifragile — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Skin in the Game — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • The Rational Optimist — Matt Ridley
  • How Innovation Works — Matt Ridley
  • The Red Queen — Matt Ridley
  • Replacing Guilt — Nate Soares

History & big-picture systems

  • Guns, Germs, and Steel — Jared Diamond
  • How the World Really Works — Vaclav Smil
  • A Brief History of Time — Stephen Hawking

Engineering & technical

  • Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Martin Kleppmann
  • Common Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms — Jay Wengrow
  • The Software Engineer’s Guidebook — www.engguidebook.com
  • Team Topologies — Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais

Management & org design

  • The Effective Manager — Mark Horstman

AI / society

  • The Alignment Problem — Brian Christian

Climate

  • How to Avoid a Climate Disaster — Bill Gates

Science (bio / medicine)

  • Principles of Neural Science — Kandel et al.
  • Molecular Biology of the Cell — Alberts et al.
  • Janeway’s Immunobiology
  • Robbins Pathologic Basis of Disease
  • The Biology of Cancer — Robert Weinberg
  • Introduction to Proteins — Kessel & Ben-Tal
  • Developmental Biology — Scott Gilbert
  • Organic Chemistry — Clayden et al.

Classics, fiction, and memoir

  • 1984 — George Orwell
  • To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
  • Bullshit Jobs — David Graeber
  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz
  • Everything I Know About Love — Dolly Alderton
  • The Anthropocene Reviewed — John Green
  • This Is Going to Hurt — Adam Kay
  • Taste — Stanley Tucci
  • Anxious People — Fredrik Backman
  • Autobiography of a Yogi — Paramahansa Yogananda
  • The Paper Menagerie — Ken Liu
  • The Wave — Alex Grasshoff
  • Poor Things — Alasdair Gray
  • My Bright Abyss — Christian Wiman

Philosophy / spirituality

  • Bhagavad Gita
  • How Will You Measure Your Life — Clayton M. Christensen (with James Allworth & Karen Dillon)

Education

  • Dialogical education

Stats (grab-bag inference “tricks”)

  • Inference — Rohatgi
  • Inference — Stapleton
  • Game Theory — Brian Clegg

Links / lists

Movies (watchlist)

  • The Sixth Sense
  • Unbreakable
  • Poor Things
  • The Game Changers