Books I found interesting
I really love to read books. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but these were books I found interesting that I’ve read in the past decade plus. The categories are rough.

Higher education, academia
The slow professor – Barbara K. Seeber and Maggie Berg
A perfect mess – David Labaree
The trouble with ed schools – David Labaree
Breaking ranks – Colin Diver
Creating a class – Mitchell L. Stevens
The concept of a university – Kenneth Minogue
After the ivory tower falls – Will Bunch
The credential society – Randall Collins
Empires of ideas – William C. Kirby
Apprentice nation – Ryan Craig
The last professors – Frank Donoghue
The rise and decline of faculty governance – Larry G. Gerber
We scholars – David Damrosch
The academic tribes – Hazard Adams
Leaving academia – Christopher L. Caterine
“Whatever it is, I’m against it” – Brian Rosenberg
The breakdown of higher education – John M. Ellis
Attacking the elites – Derek Bok
Mission and money – Burton A. Weisbrod et al.
Lost in thought – Zena Hitz
Science fictions – Stuart Ritchie
Who gets in? – Rebecca Zwick
The privileged poor – Anthony Abraham Jack
The price of admission – Daniel Golden
Academically adrift – Richard Arum
The great American university – Jonathan R. Cole
One L – Scott Turow
Polarized by degrees – Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins
Born to rule – Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman
The entrepreneurial scholar – Ilana M. Horwitz
Educated out – Mara Casey Tieken
All the campus lawyers – Louis H. Guard and Joyce P. Jacobsen
The new PhD – Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch
Who needs college anymore? – Kathleen deLaski
Educated out – Mara Casey Tieken
Bad education – Matt Goodwin
Not for profit – Martha C. Nussbaum
Authoritarians in the academy – Sarah McLaughlin
The dean of Shandong – Daniel A. Bell
The highest exam – Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li

K-12 education
A wolf at the schoolhouse door – Jack Schneider and Jennifer C. Berkshire
Tangible equity – Colin Seale
Confessions of a school reformer – Larry Cuban
How schools work – Rebecca Barr and Robert Dreeben
Schoolteacher – Dan C. Lortie
School principal – Dan C. Lortie
Battle hymn of the tiger teachers – Katharine Birbalsingh
Schools that succeed – Karin Chenoweth
What the academy taught us – Eric Kalenze
Education is upside-down – Eric Kalenze
The malfunction of US education policy – Richard P. Phelps
The prize – Dale Russakoff
On the edge – Charlie Carroll
Progressively worse – Robert Peal
The education myth – Jon Shelton
Visible learning – John Hattie
Seven myths about education – Daisy Christodoulou
The death of public school – Cara Fitzpatrick
School moms – Laura Pappano
Homeschooling in America – Joseph F. Murphy
Someone has to fail – David Labaree
Tinkering towards utopia – David Tyack and Larry Cuban
Seeking common ground – David Tyack
Learning to improve – Anthony S. Bryk et al.
A search for common ground – Frederick M. Hess and Pedro A. Noguera
Brokering in education research-practice partnerships – Laura Wentworth et al.
Brave new words – Salman Khan
Among schoolchildren – Tracy Kidder
Meet me at the library – Shamichael Hallman
Teacher by teacher – John B. King Jr.
Lost boys – Alex Blower

Policy, society, poverty, inequality
A practical guide for policy analysis – Eugene S. Bardach and Eric M. Patashnik
Solving public problems – Beth Simone Noveck
Of boys and men – Richard V. Reeves
What we owe the future – William MacAskill
The precipice – Toby Ord
Men without work – Nicholas Eberstadt
Doing the best I can – Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson
Promises I can keep – Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas
The death and life of great American cities – Jane Jacobs
The Matthew effect – Daniel Rigney
End state – James Plunkett
Behind the beautiful forevers – Katherine Boo
The exceptions – Kate Zernike
The uncontrollability of the world – Hartmut Rosa
Evicted – Matthew Desmond
Poverty, by America – Matthew Desmond
A republic of equals – Jonathan Rothwell
The limits of policy change – Michael T. Hayes
Trial and error in criminal justice reform – Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox
Poor economics – Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Tilting at mills – Lis Harris
Lessons from the Covid war – Covid Crisis Group
No shame in my game – Katherine S. Newman
The mind at work – Mike Rose
Fragile neighborhoods – Seth D. Kaplan
The soul of civility – Alexandra Hudson
Uprooted – Grace Olmstead
Dignity – Chris Arnade
Age of the city – Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
The left behind – Robert Wuthnow
Hollowing out the middle – Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas
The pact – Sampson Davis et al.
No way to treat a child – Naomi Schaefer Riley
The anxious generation – Jonathan Haidt
The war on normal people – Andrew Yang
The death of the artist – William Deresiewicz
The tyranny of merit – Michael Sandel
Hand, head, heart – David Goodhart
Survival of the city – Edward Glaeser and David Cutler
The sexual paradox – Susan Pinker
Confessions of an accidental scholar – Tom Corbett
Success and luck – Robert Frank
Life 3.0 – Max Tegmark
White working class – Joan Williams
Last best hope – George Packer
Influencing social policy – Kenneth I. Maton
Family policy matters – Karen Bogenschneider
The fix – Jonathan Tepperman
Clear and present safety – Michael A. Cohen and Micah Zenko
Automating inequality – Virginia Eubanks
The age of surveillance capitalism – Shoshana Zuboff
The random factor – Mark Robert Rank
The poverty paradox – Mark Robert Rank
The road to freedom – Joseph E. Stiglitz
Best things first – Bjorn Lomborg
Government project – Edward C. Banfield and Kevin R. Kosar
Deep water – James Bradley
One mighty and irresistible tide – Jia Lynn Yang
Land rich, cash poor – Brian Reisinger
Taming Silicon Valley – Gary Marcus
Failed state – Sam Freedman
Undue burden – Shefali Luthra
We are not able to live in the sky – Mara Kardas-Nelson
Crisis averted – Caitlin Rivers
The Sing Sing files – Dan Slepian
Making it in America – Rachel Slade
Long haul – Frank Figliuzzi
The road to wisdom – Francis S. Collins
The lost and the found – Kevin Fagan
The affirmative action myth – Jason L. Riley
Why nothing works – Marc J. Dunkelman
The vanishing neighbor – Marc J. Dunkelman
Superbloom – Nicholas Carr
Seeking shelter – Jeff Hobbs
The occasional human sacrifice – Carl Elliott
Waste wars – Alexander Clapp
Monoculture – F. S. Michaels
Loose connections – Robert Wuthnow
Methland – Nick Reding
Dream land – Sam Quinones
When it all burns – Jordan Thomas
The devil’s drug – Teun Voeten
Life like a guide dog – Michael Hingson and Keri Wyatt Kent
The rent collectors – Jesse Katz
Valley of forgetting – Jennie Erin Smith
Libraries of the mind – William Marx
The researcher’s guide to influencing policy – Mark S. Reed
The Tech coup – Marietje Schaake
Work matters – Maureen Perry-Jenkins
Henry at work – John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle
Addiction by design – Natasha Dow Schull
Humanish – Justin Gregg
Lost connections – Johann Hari

Politics, culture, religion
The constitution of knowledge – Jonathan Rauch
The revolt of the public – Martin Gurri
Supreme disorder – Ilya Shapiro
Union – Jordan Blashek and Christopher Haugh
Bureaucracy – James Q. Wilson
Seeing like a state – James C. Scott
Two cheers for anarchism – James C. Scott
Weapons of the weak – James C. Scott
Blockchain democracy – William Magnuson
A philosopher looks at the religious life – Zena Hitz
Reading Lolita in Tehran – Azar Nafisi
The politics of resentment – Katherine J. Cramer
Urban rage – Mustafa Dikec
Elite capture – Olufemi O. Taiwo
A thousand small sanities – Adam Gopnik
The internet trap – Matthew Hindman
Technopoly – Neil Postman
Amusing ourselves to death – Neil Postman
Majority minority – Justin Gest
Goodbye, things – Fumio Sasaki
On tyranny – Timothy Snyder
The identity trap – Yascha Mounk
Janesville – Amy Goldstein
Attack from within – Barbara McQuade
AI needs you – Verity Harding
The loneliest Americans – Jay Caspian Kang
Bad therapy – Abigail Shrier
The road to unfreedom – Timothy Snyder
What are children for? – Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman
When bad things happen to good people Susan – Harold S. Kushner
Get married – Brad Wilcox
Capitol punishment – Jack Abramoff
The culture of narcissism – Christopher Lasch
The triumph of the slippers – Pascal Bruckner
Meditations for mortals – Oliver Burkeman
We have never been woke – Musa al-Gharbi
How to know a person – David Brooks
The happiness curve – Jonathan Rauch
I never thought of it that way – Monica Guzman
Hardball – Chris Matthews
No excuses – Robert Shrum
Too funny to be president – Morris K. Udall
Stream big – Nathan Grayson
That librarian – Amanda Jones
Opus – Gareth Gore
The quiet damage – Jesselyn Cook
A well-trained wife – Tia Levings
The kingdom, the power, and the glory – Tim Alberta
Son of Birmingham – Randall Woodfin
The invented state – Emily Thorson
Carbon – Paul Hawken
Searching for Sunday – Rachel Held Evans
It’s okay not to look for the meaning of life – Jikisai Minami
We know what to do – Lamar Alexander
De-valuing America – William J. Bennett
Infantilised – Keith Hayward
The war on science – Lawrence M. Krauss
Hannah’s children – Catherine Ruth Pakaluk
The war on words – Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen
The weaponization of expertise – Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson
The project – David A. Graham
Listening to the law – Amy Coney Barrett
That book is dangerous! – Adam Szetela
The death of expertise – Tom Nichols
For the sun after long nights – Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy
Outclassed – Joan C. Williams
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This – Omar El Akkad
Serving God under siege – Valentyn Syniy
Now departing – Victor M. Sweeney

Writing, journalism, reading, communication
Story craft – Jack Hart
A tactical guide to science journalism – Deborah Blum et al.
Don’t make me think – Steve Krug
The book on writing – Paula LaRocque
You’re not listening – Kate Murphy
Letting go of the words – Janice Redish
How to read a book – Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
How to talk about books you haven’t read – Pierre Bayard
The grant writing guide – Betty Lai
Building a StoryBrand – Donald Miller
On writing well – William Zinsser
The writer who stayed – William Zinsser
Writing places – William Zinsser
Journalism research that matters – Valerie Belair-Gagnon and Nikki Usher
Why you should read children’s books, even though you are so old and wise – Katherine Rundell
The marketplace of attention – James G. Webster
The scientist’s guide to writing – Stephen B. Heard
You talkin’ to me? – Sam Leith
Writing for busy readers – Todd Rogers
Listening to people – Annette Lareau
Working – Robert A. Caro
The elements of journalism – Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel
Mass appeal – Justin Gest
Always take notes – Simon Akam
Artful sentences – Virginia Tufte
Essays one – Lydia Davis
The economist’s craft – Michael S. Weisbach
Don’t be such a scientist – Randy Olson
Words that work – Frank Luntz
Meet the people – James Frayne
What I saw at the revolution – Peggy Noonan
On speaking well – Peggy Noonan
The political speechwriter’s companion – Robert Lehrman
Good prose – Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd
Publishing – Gail Godwin
The writing life – Annie Dillard
Letters to a young contrarian – Christopher Hitchens
Dust and light – Andrea Barrett
Why I write – George Orwell
The journalist and the murderer – Janet Malcolm
The education of a design writer – Steven Heller and Molly Heintz
Into the weeds (why I write) – Lydia Davis
Prisons we choose to live inside – Doris Lessing

Business, leadership, marketing, strategy
High growth handbook – Elad Gil
A world class production system – John R. Black and William F. Christopher
Working with AI – Thomas H. Davenport and Steven M. Miller
The marine corps way – Jason Santamaria et al.
Moats and marathons (complete series) – Jeffrey Towson
Being direct – Lester Wunderman
Attention factory – Matthew Brennan
Do hard things – Steve Magness
Power – Jeffrey Pfeffer
Never eat alone – Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz
Industry of anonymity – Jonathan Lusthaus
The great Indian phone book – Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey
The geek way – Andrew McAfee
The bureaucratic entrepreneur – Richard N. Haass
Wealth of humans – Ryan Avent
Ninety percent of everything – Rose George
How to manage in the public sector – Gordon Chase
Power and influence – John P. Kotter
The goal – Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Leadership – Henry Kissinger
The everything war – Dana Mattioli
Win – Frank Luntz
How the world ran out of everything – Peter S. Goodman
Playing with reality – Kelly Clancy
Reentry – Eric Berger
Social engineering – Christopher Hadnagy
Samsung rising – Geoffrey Cain
The ministry of common sense – Martin Lindstrom
Disciplined minds – Jeff Schmidt
The Nvidia way – Tae Kim
The practice of not thinking – Ryunosuke Koike
The leadership genius of Elon Musk – Dennis Kneale
Careless people – Sarah Wynn-Williams
There’s nothing like this – Kevin Evers
House of Huawei – Eva Dou
Positioning – Al Ries and Jack Trout
How to stop worrying and start living – Dale Carnegie
Unbreakable alliances – Robin Dreeke
The FBI way – Frank Figliuzzi
How things are made – Tim Minshall
The hidden persuaders – Vance Packard
Whistleblowers – C. Fred Alford
Moral mazes – Robert Jackall
Every screen on the planet – Emily Baker-White
Every day is Sunday – Ken Belson

History
Papyrus – Irene Vallejo
The years of Lyndon Johnson series – Robert A. Caro
The code book – Simon Singh
The Mississippi Chinese – James W. Loewen
For profit – William Magnuson
Delta empire – Jeannie Whayne
Fancy bear goes phishing – Scott J. Shapiro
Hiroshima – John Hersey
The radium girls – Kate Moore
Voices from Chernobyl – Svetlana Alexievich
Last witnesses – Svetlana Alexievich
Secondhand time – Svetlana Alexievich
The unwomanly face of war – Svetlana Alexievich
Zinky boys – Svetlana Alexievich
In search of the free individual – Svetlana Alexievich
To engineer is human – Henry Petroski
The big score – Michael S. Malone
Free speech – Jacob Mchangama
Thinking in time – Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May
Engineers of victory – Paul Kennedy
The plague cycle – Charles Kenny
The story of China – Michael Wood
Book Wars – John B. Thompson
America’s bank – Roger Lowenstein
Where is my flying car? – J. Storrs Hall
The chosen – Jerome Karabel
The aristocracy of talent – Adrian Wooldridge
Tor – Ben Collier
A history of the world in 100 objects – Neil MacGregor
Shakespeare’s restless world – Neil MacGregor
Living with the gods – Neil MacGregor
Ships’ cats – Val Lewis
Age of revolutions – Fareed Zakaria
If then – Jill Lepore
Father time – Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Isaac’s storm – Erik Larson
Heroes of progress – Alexander C. R. Hammond
Centers of progress – Chelsea Follett
The notebook – Roland Allen
The long history of the future – Nicole Kobie
The newsmongers – Terry Kirby
The new Koreans – Michael Breen
Into the quick of life – Jean Hatzfeld
Machete season – Jean Hatzfeld
The antelope’s strategy – Jean Hatzfeld
The chess revolution – Peter Doggers
The soul of a new machine – Tracy Kidder
Twelve trees – Daniel Lewis
The haunted wood – Sam Leith
Dark wire – Joseph Cox
Custodians of wonder – Eliot Stein
Astounding – Alec Nevala-Lee
Pillars of creation – Richard Panek
The bookshop – Evan Friss
American poison – Daniel Stone
The six – Steven Schwankert
84 charing cross road – Helene Hanff
Cue the sun – Emily Nussbaum
Strangers in the land – Michael Luo
Spellbound – Molly Worthen
The origins of victory – Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr.
Daughters of the bamboo grove – Barbara Demick
Apocalypse – Lizzie Wade
Peak human – Johan Norberg
Galileo’s fame – Anna-Luna Post

Biography
The contrarian – Max Chafkin
Maid – Stephanie Land
The man from the future – Ananyo Bhattacharya
The shape of a life – Shing-Tung Yao and Steve Nadis
Pieces of the action – Vannevar Bush
The life inside – Andy West
Inventor of the future – Alec Nevala-Lee
The top five regrets of the dying – Bronnie Ware
Where the wind leads – Vinh Chung and Tim Downs
The forgotten girls – Monica Potts
The man who solved the market – Gregory Zuckerman
A stone is most precious where it belongs – Gulchehra Hoja
Stalking the atomic city – Markiyan Kamysh
Nisei daughter – Monica Sone
A day in the life of Abed Salama – Nathan Thrall
How to talk dirty and influence people – Lenny Bruce
Lifescapes – Ann Wroe
The fund – Rob Copeland
Poor Charlie’s almanack – Charles T. Munger
The case for literature – Xingjian Gao
Essays after eighty – Donald Hall
Messages from my father – Calvin Trillin
Walk the blue line – James Patterson and Matt Eversmann
Troubled – Rob Henderson
Letters to a young poet – Rainer Maria Rilke
The code breaker – Walter Isaacson
Einstein – Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson
The one best way – Robert Kanigel
The man who knew infinity – Robert Kanigel
Genius – James Gleick
Isaac Newton – James Gleick
The strangest man – Graham Farmelo
Merchants of truth – Jill Abramson
Educated – Tara Westover
Deep South – Paul Theroux
The great railway bazaar – Paul Theroux
Ghost train to the eastern star – Paul Theroux
The last train to zona verde – Paul Theroux
The happy isles of oceania – Paul Theroux
As I lay dying – Richard John Neuhaus
From third world to first – Lee Kuan Yew
Private revolutions – Yuan Yang
Embracing hope – Viktor E. Frankl
Recollections – Viktor E. Frankl
Billionaire, nerd, savior, king – Anupreeta Das
This love is not for cowards – Robert Andrew Powell
All the houses I’ve ever lived in – Kieran Yates
Strength in what remains – Tracy Kidder
Patriot – Alexei Navalny
If you live to 100, you might as well be happy – Rhee Kun Hoo
Fierce attachments – Vivian Gornick
The impossible man – Patchen Barss
Ingrained – Callum Robinson
Why we make things & why it matters – Peter Korn
Shop class as soulcraft – Matthew B. Crawford
Starting point – Hayao Miyazaki
The troublemaker – Mark L. Clifford
The elements of Marie Curie – Dava Sobel
The country of the blind – Andrew Leland
Getting to know death – Gail Godwin
Ordinary Time – Annie B. Jones
Fear no evil – Natan Sharansky
Poets square – Courtney Gustafson
Source code – Bill Gates
The survivor – Josef Lewkowicz
Knife – Salman Rushdie
The Santaland diaries – David Sedaris
Invention – James Dyson
The world I live in – Helen Keller
On her game – Christine Brennan
Dark squares – Danny Rensch
Happening – Annie Ernaux
A girl’s story – Annie Ernaux

Science, technology, innovation, design, talent
The science of science – Dashun Wang
Streets of gold – Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan
How to avoid a climate disaster – Bill Gates
How to prevent the next pandemic – Bill Gates
Fifty inventions that shaped the modern economy – Tim Harford
The design of everyday things – Don Norman
The design of future things – Don Norman
The tyranny of talent – Joe Baker
Talent – Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross
Possible minds – John Brockman
The gift of global talent – William R. Kerr
Understanding the digital world – Brian W. Kernighan
The alignment problem – Brian Christian
Beyond measure – James Vincent
Good services – Louise Downe
Case for space – Robert Zubrin
The AI revolution in medicine – Peter Lee et al.
When the heavens went on sale – Ashlee Vance
Hackers and painters – Paul Graham
Normal accidents – Charles Perrow
How to be a founder – Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford
Engineering and the mind’s eye – Eugene S. Ferguson
Off the charts – Ann Hulbert
The conservative futurist – James Pethokoukis
Driven – Alex Davies
AI is good for you – Eric Jang
The nature of technology – W. Brian Arthur
The globotics upheaval – Richard Baldwin
Means of control – Byron Tau
The heart and the chip – Daniela Rus and Gregory Mone
Seeing what others cannot see – Thomas G. West
In the mind’s eye – Thomas G. West
Thinking like Einstein – Thomas G. West
T – Carole Hooven
The best practice – Charles C. Kenney
Pasteur’s quadrant – Donald E. Stokes
Apollo’s arrow – Nicholas A. Christakis
Scientific freedom –Donald Braben
Co-intelligence – Ethan Mollick
Digital liberty – Matt Stroud
Predicting the unpredictable – Susan Elizabeth Hough
The great quake debate – Susan Elizabeth Hough
Why greatness cannot be planned – Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman
The afterlife of data – Carl Ohman
Going infinite – Michael Lewis
Second act – Henry Oliver
Techlash – Tom Wheeler
Privacy is power – Carissa Veliz
Home matters – Penny Wincer
The metaverse – Matthew Ball
Statistical inference via data science – Chester Ismay and Albert Y. Kim
Be data literate – Jordan Morrow
Delete – Viktor Mayer-Schonberger
Genesis – Henry A. Kissinger et al.
The beauty of everyday things – Soetsu Yanagi
The creative act – Rick Rubin
Superagency – Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato
Mastering AI – Jeremy Kahn
Rinsed – Geoff White
The second fifty – Debra Whitman
Supremacy – Parmy Olson
We are anonymous – Parmy Olson
Why the Hindenburg had a smoking lounge – Edward Tenner
Mavericks – Jenny Draper
Doctored – Charles Piller
Seeing and believing – Richard Panek
The family dynamic – Susan Dominus
Cloud warriors – Thomas E. Weber
The silicon shrink – Daniel Oberhaus
Super agers – Eric Topol
The cybernetic society – Amir Husain
Ending medical reversal – Vinayak K. Prasad
If anyone builds it, everyone dies – Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares

International, geopolitics, global issues
Surveillance state – Josh Chin and Liza Lin
Getting China wrong – Aaron L. Friedberg
Marketing dictatorship – Anne-Marie Brady
Overreach: Owen Matthews
Narcas – Deborah Bonello
Nothing to envy – Barbara Demick
Eat the Budddha – Barbara Demick
Logavina street – Barbara Demick
Unshackled – Soundarya Balasubramani and Sameer Khedekar
The genius of Israel – Dan Senor and Saul Singer
Among the braves – Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin
Fear is just a word – Azam Ahmed
Flowers of fire – Hawon Jung
Some people need killing – Patricia Evangelista
The world – Richard Haass
Foreign policy begins at home – Richard Haass
A world in disarray – Richard Haass
Terrorist minds – John Horgan
Terra incognita – Robert Muggah and Ian Goldin
Close the pentagon – Charles Kenny
The return of great powers – Jim Sciutto
The new rules of war – Sean McFate
On China – Henry Kissinger
Russians among us – Gordon Corera
MI6 – Gordon Corera
Operation Columba – Gordon Corera
Area 51 – Annie Jacobsen
Nuclear war – Annie Jacobsen
Surprise, kill, vanish – Annie Jacobsen
The pentagon’s brain – Annie Jacobsen
Phenomena – Annie Jacobsen
The truth about immigration – Zeke Hernandez
World on the brink – Dmitri Alperovitch and Garrett M. Graff
The struggle for Taiwan – Sulmaan Wasif Khan
I will show you how it was – Illia Ponomarenko
Why war? – Richard Overy
Autocracy, Inc. – Anne Applebaum
The underworld – Susan Casey
How tyrants fall – Marcel Dirsus
Twenty years – Sune Engel Rasmussen
In the shadows – Mickey Bergman and Ellis Henican
The high seas – Olive Heffernan
Egyptian made – Leslie T. Chang
Factory girls – Leslie T. Chang
Target earth – Govert Schilling
Shadows into light – Theresa S. Betancourt
The Wagner group – Jack Margolin
Material world – Ed Conway
Chokepoints – Edward Fishman
Chickenhawk – Robert Mason
Thank you for your service – David Finkel
What it is like to go to war – Karl Marlantes
Unbroken – Laura Hillenbrand
Beast in the machine – George M. Dougherty
Breakneck – Dan Wang
The mission – Tim Weiner
Trident K9 warriors – Mike Ritland and Gary Brozek
The big one – Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker
AI, automation, and war – Anthony King
Charm – Julia Sonnevend
The good women of China – Xinran
The web beneath the waves – Samanth Subramanian
Antisemitism, an American tradition – Pamela S. Nadell
Shadow cell – Andrew Bustamente and Jihi Bustamente
Tokyo noir – Jake Adelstein

Fiction, literature, poetry
Invisible planets – Ken Liu
The three-body problem – Cixin Liu
The dark forest – Cixin Liu
Death’s end – Cixin Liu
The redemption of time – Baoshu
Small bodies of water – Nina Mingya Powles
When we cease to understand the world – Benjamin Labatut
The maniac – Benjamin Labatut
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 – Cho Nam-joo
The house on the marshland – Louise Gluck
The seven ages – Louise Gluck
Stories of your life and others – Ted Chiang
Exhalation – Ted Chiang
Last and first men – Olaf Stapledon
AI 2041 – Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan
Dear life – Alice Munro
The year of magical thinking – Joan Didion
The dog of the South – Charles Portis
Masters of Atlantis – Charles Portis
Mania – Lionel Shriver
The diamond age – Neal Stephenson
The vegetarian – Han Kang
Human acts – Han Kang
Greek lessons – Han Kang
All the lonely people – Mike Gayle
On character – General Stanley McChrystal
The songlines – Bruce Chatwin
The third reich of dreams – Charlotte Beradt
Gates of fire – Steven Pressfield
Never let me go – Kazuo Ishiguro
Remains of the day – Kazuo Ishiguro
An artist of the floating world – Kazuo Ishiguro
The memoirs of a survivor – Doris Lessing
Blindness – Jose Saramago
A shining – Jon Fosse
The goalie’s anxiety at the penalty kick – Peter Handke
Missing person – Patrick Modiano
Primeval and other times – Olga Tokarczuk

Miscellaneous
“A Very Short Introduction” series from Oxford University Press is excellent
“What Everyone Needs to Know” series from Oxford University Press is excellent

Books with author interviews/summaries
The explorer’s gene – Alex Hutchinson (interview)
Motivation myths – Wendy S. Grolnick et al. (interview)
Heroes of progress – Alexander C. R. Hammond (summary)
Counter-intelligence – Robert Hannigan (interview)
Family unfriendly – Timothy Carney (interview)
Motivation myth busters – Wendy S. Grolnick et al. (interview)
Goddess of the market – Jennifer Burns (interview)
Milton Friedman – Jennifer Burns (interview)
Arriving today – Christopher Mims (interview)
Hands of time – Rebecca Struthers (interview)
Fear – Robert Peckham (interview)
Nobody’s fool – Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris (interview)
The internet of things – Scott J. Shackelford (interview)
The sports gene – David Epstein (interview)
Range – David Epstein (interview)
Endure – Alex Hutchinson (interview)
Run forever – Amby Burfoot (interview)
Good to go – Christie Aschwanden (interview)
Science denial – Gale Sinatra and Barbara Hofer (interview)
The canceling of the American mind – Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott (interview)
Alien oceans – Kevin Peter Hand (interview)
The art of statistics – David Spiegelhalter (interview)
Dataclysm – Christin Rudder (interview)
Principles – Ray Dalio (summary)
Interdisciplinary research journeys – w/Catherine Lyall (summary)
Being an interdisciplinary academic – Catherine Lyall (summary)
Career & family – Claudia Goldin (interview)
How toddlers thrive – Tovah Klein (interview)
Conflicted – Ian Leslie (interview)
Confessions of an advertising man – David Ogilvy (summary)
Building a better teacher – Elizabeth Green (interview)
Evidence-based policymaking – Karen Bogenschneider and Tom Corbett (interview)
Between the state and the schoolhouse – Tom Loveless (interview)
Hybrid homeschooling – Michael McShane (interview)
Why bad policies spread (and good ones don’t): Charles R. Shipan and Craig Volden (interview)
Talent development in gifted education – Joyce VanTassel-Baska (interview)
The psychology of high performance – Rena F. Subotnik et al. (interview)
The boy who played with fusion – Tom Clynes (interview)
Elon Musk – Ashlee Vance (summary)
Geek heresy – Kentaro Toyama (interview)
The science of expertise – David Z. Hambrick et al. (summary)
Thinking, fast and slow – Daniel Kahneman (summary)
Understanding expertise – Fernand Gobet (summary)
Excellence gaps in education – Jonathan Plucker and Scott J. Peters (interview)
The handbook of secondary gifted education – Sidney Moon and Felicia Dixon (interview)
Achieving college dreams – Rhona S. Weinstein and Frank C. Worrell (interview)
Assessing the nation’s report card – Chester E. Finn, Jr. (interview)
Building better citizens – Holly Korbey (interview)
Reskilling America – Katherine S. Newman and Hella Winston (summary)
How to educate an American – Michael Petrilli and Chester e. Finn, Jr. (summary)
Who gets in and why – Jeffrey Selingo (interview)
Two cheers for higher education – Steven G. Brint (interview)
Common sense evidence – Nora Gordon and Carrie Conaway (interview)
When can you trust the experts? – Daniel T. Willingham (interview)
Outsmart your brain – Daniel T. Willingham (summary)
Gradual – Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox (interview)
A nation at thought – David Steiner (interview)
Policy and evidence in a partisan age – Paul Gary Wyckoff (interview)
Sparks – Ian Johnson (interview)
Wild grass – Ian Johnson (interview)
A mosque in Munich – Ian Johnson (interview)
The souls of China – Ian Johnson (interview)
Xi Jinping – Alfred Chan (interview)
Asian/American scholars of education – Nicholas D. Hartlep et al. (interview)
Love in a damp climate – Quentin Fottrell (interview)
Invisibles – David Zweig (interview)
Selfish reasons to have more kids – Bryan Caplan (interview)
Smart people should build things – Andrew Yang (interview)
Average is over – Tyler Cowen (interview)
Smarter than you think – Clive Owen (interview)
The best American infographics – Gareth Cook (interview)
Ungifted – Scott Barry Kaufman (interview)
The new geography of jobs – Enrico Moretti (interview)
Lean in – Sheryl Sandberg (summary)
What’s the big idea? – Marty Nemko (interview)
The same thing over and over again – Rick Hess (interview)
The one world schoolhouse – Salman Khan (interview)
One size does not fit all – Nikhil Goyal (interview)
Human capitalism – Brink Lindsey (interview)
About time – Adam Frank (interview)
100 plus – Sonia Arrison (interview)
Zero to one – Peter Thiel (summary)
Getting smart – Tom Vander Ark (interview)
The torchlight list – James R. Flynn (interview)
Cultural literacy – E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (summary)
The everything store – Brad Stone (summary)
The village effect – Susan Pinker (summary)
Hive mind – Garett Jones (summary)

Summaries of books in a particular area
Doing and communicating science (summary)
The art of doing science and engineering – Richard Hamming
You and your research – Richard Hamming
So you want to be scientist? – Philip Schwartzkroin
Good work if you can get it – Jason Brennan (summary)
The early career researcher’s toolbox – Andres de los Reyes (summary)
Escape from the ivory tower – Nancy Baron
The craft of science writing – Siri Carpenter (interview)

Economics (summary)
Thinking like an economist – Elizabeth Popp Berman
Doing economics – Marc F. Bellemare

An Odyssean reading list from Dominic Cummings(list)

Book reviews (recent)
On pedantry – Arnoud Visser (review)
This is for everyone – Tim Berners-Lee (review)
Labwork to leadership – Jen Heemstra (review)
The teacher in the machine – Anne Trumbore (review)
How to mentor anyone in academia – Maria LaMonaca Wisdom (review)
Citizen scholar – Philip N. Cohen (review)
Mindmasters – Sandra Matz (review)
Academic writing as if readers matter – Leonard Cassuto (review)
Class dismissed – Anthony Abraham Jack (review)
The last human job – Allison Pugh (review)
The ordinal society – Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy (review)
Audit culture – Cris Shore and Susan Wright (review)
Wasted education – John Skrentny (review)
On disinformation – Lee Mcintyre (review)
Why we teach science – John L. Rudolph (review)
Knowledge towns – David J. Staley and Dominic D. J. Endicott (review)
Visual thinking – Temple Grandin (review)
Getting at the heart of science communication – Faith Kearns (review)