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Books I've Read

This is a list of books I’ve read. It’s not perfectly complete but it is close to exhaustive for everything since 2015, which is when I started properly tracking the books I read. Most of these books should link to a short review or notes I’ve written on the book, though I can’t guarantee that all will.

This list is mostly non-fiction. Between 2012 and 2017 I read no fiction at all, though I’ve been slowly adding in more fiction (particularly science fiction and speculative fiction) since then. One result of this is that I don’t have a very good lay of the land when it comes to fiction, so recommendations here are especially appreciated. I tend to prefer the kind of fiction writing that can’t be captured well in other media, which usually means books with longwinded technical explanations of interesting things (e.g. Herman Melville, Neal Stephenson) or books where the interesting writing style is an integral part of the appeal (e.g. Irvine Welsh, Joseph Heller). If the only appeal is that the book tells a captivating story I’ll generally prefer to receive that story in the form of a movie or a TV show.

This link is ranked by quality rather than chronology, meaning books I liked more are closer to the top. Drawing up this ranking from scratch would be hard, so this ranking is generated by a program I wrote which chooses two books at random and asks me to pick the one I prefer. It then uses the Elo algorithm to turn this a series of binary head-to-head choices into a numeric score for each book, in the same way that rankings of Chess players Or if you prefer, Mark Zuckerberg’s website for ranking the attractiveness of female students as featured in The Social Network are generated. I run this scoring system from time to time, so there will usually be a number of books in the ‘Yet to be Ranked’ section at the top of the list. It should go without saying that the fact that a book was ranked highly does not mean that I agree with it, let alone the rest of the author’s body of work.

For the sake of clarity, the question I ask myself when ranking books is “which of these am I more glad to have read”, not “which would I recommend to someone” or any variant of that. This is because it’s hard to recommend a book in the general case, it’s very much dependent on who is receiving the recommendation. As a result, there will almost certainly be books near the top of the list that you won’t get any value out of, and books near the bottom of the list which would be an excellent choice for you. If you click through to the review/notes I have on a given book you’ll usually see a sentence or two on who (if anyone) I would recommend it to.

Yet to be Ranked

Ranked

  1. Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill
  2. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast Food World, Michael Pollan
  3. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Francis Fukuyama
  4. Command and Control: The Story of Nuclear Weapons and the Illusion of Safety, Eric Schlosser
  5. Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R. Hofstadter
  6. The Quest: Energy Security and the Remaking of the Modern World, Daniel Yergin
  7. Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
  8. A Man for all Markets, Edward O. Thorp
  9. On Politics: A History of Political Thought From Herodotus to the Present, Alan Ryan
  10. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
  11. The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth Stagflation and Social Rigidities, Mancur Olson
  12. Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo
  13. The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch
  14. Political Order and Political Decay: From The Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, Francis Fukuyama
  15. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner
  16. Superintelligence: Paths Dangers Strategies, Nick Bostrom
  17. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport
  18. From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy, Kenan Malik
  19. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Mancur Olson
  20. On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
  21. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  22. Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen
  23. How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, Jordan Ellenberg
  24. Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic, Michael Axworthy
  25. The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome, Robin Lane Fox
  26. The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-Breaking, Simon Singh
  27. Iran: Empire of the Mind: A History from Zoroaster to the Present Day, Michael Axworthy
  28. Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke
  29. The High Cost of Free Parking, Donald Shoup
  30. The Moral Law: Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant tr. Herbert James Paton
  31. Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present, Joanna Bourke
  32. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson
  33. Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice, Geoffrey Robertson QC
  34. The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers Minds and the Laws of Physics, Roger Penrose
  35. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, Paul Collier
  36. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
  37. The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity, Steven Pinker
  38. Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Brings You 90% of Everything, Rose George
  39. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and Alex Haley
  40. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, C.L.R. James
  41. A History of the Arab Peoples, Albert Hourani
  42. Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
  43. The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000 Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavour, Martin Meredith
  44. Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, Judea Pearl
  45. Who Gets What - and Why: The Hidden World of Matchmaking and Market Design, Alvin E. Roth
  46. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
  47. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter
  48. The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat, Vali Nasr
  49. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda’s Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright
  50. The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future, Vali Nasr
  51. History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
  52. The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran, David Crist
  53. Guns Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13000 Years, Jared Diamond
  54. The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence, Martin Meredith
  55. The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media How Our Time and Attention is Harvested and Sold, Tim Wu
  56. The Nature of Space and Time, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose
  57. Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
  58. Quantum Computing Since Democritus, Scott Aaronson
  59. Neuromancer, William Gibson
  60. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
  61. Seveneves, Neal Stephenson
  62. The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder
  63. Information Theory, Robert B. Ash
  64. The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas P.M. Barnett
  65. This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff
  66. What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terror, Alan Krueger
  67. Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways, Alan Dershowitz
  68. Anathem, Neal Stephenson
  69. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health Wealth and Happiness, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
  70. The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution, 1700-1850 Joel Mokyr
  71. Beyond Belief: The Catholic Church and the Child Abuse Scanda,l David Yallop
  72. The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock
  73. The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells
  74. War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells
  75. Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, Reza Aslan
  76. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Herman Melville
  77. The Embarrassed Colonialist, Sean Dorney
  78. Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb, Poundstone
  79. Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson
  80. Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  81. Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground the FBI and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, Bryan Burrough
  82. Buddha, Karen Armstrong
  83. Innovative State: How New Technologies can Transform Government, Aneesh Chopra
  84. Body Count: Fixing the Blame for the Global AIDS Catastrophe, Peter Gill
  85. @War: The Rise of Cyber Warfare, Shane Harris
  86. Midnight’s Descendants: South Asia from Partition to the Present Day, John Keay
  87. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Steven Pinker
  88. Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, Philip Ball
  89. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington
  90. The Impossible State: North Korea Past and Future, Victor Cha
  91. Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest to Discover the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Max Tegmark
  92. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Ray Kurzweil
  93. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, Marc Levinson
  94. The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse, Geoffrey Robertson QC
  95. Proof: The Science of Booze, Adam Rogers
  96. Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens
  97. The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, William Easterly
  98. Syria: A Recent History, John McHugo
  99. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein tr. Bertrand Russell
  100. The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What it Used to Be, Moisés Naím
  101. The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood, Karl Alexander Doris Entwisle and Linda Olson
  102. A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing, Lawrence Krauss
  103. Utopia for Realists: And How We Get There, Rutger Bregman tr. Elizabeth Manton
  104. Theories of International Politics and Zombies, Daniel Drezner
  105. Platonism and Antiplatonism in Mathematics, Mark Balaguer
  106. Condemned to Crisis?, Ken Ward
  107. The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, Tom Nichols
  108. Count Zero, William Gibson
  109. The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs, Stephen B. Johnson
  110. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon