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I have been keeping a log of every book I read, plus a rating, since the end of 2017. This was originally on Goodreads, but I wanted to own the data rather than giving it to Amazon. I still think the Kindle is great, but I want to control the publication of my reading history.
I update this page periodically and I write an annual blog post listing my favourite books of that year. I also have a post with book recommendations for startup founders.
Books below are sorted in the order I read them, most recent first. My rating system is as follows:
- Good: Recommended reading.
- Ok: Not a bad book, but not recommended. There’s too little time and too many books, so you might as well focus on the best ones.
- Bad: Do not read.
2025
| Author | Title | Published | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Martin Gurri | The Revolt of the Public | 2014 | Good |
| JRR Tolkien | The Two Towers | 1954 | Good |
| Epictetus | The Enchiridion | 125 | Good |
| JRR Tolkien | The Fellowship of the Ring | 1954 | Good |
| Donald Robertson | How to think like a Roman emperor | 2019 | Good |
| Tae Kim | The Nvidia Way | 2024 | Good |
| Keyu Jin | The New China Playbook | 2023 | Ok |
| Brandon Sanderson | The Well of Ascension | 2007 | Good |
| Alex Karp | The Technological Republic | 2025 | Good |
| Brandon Sanderson | The Hero of Ages | 2008 | Good |
| Brandon Sanderson | The Alloy of Law | 2011 | OK |
| Arthur C Clarke | Rendezvous with Rama | 1973 | Good |
| Arthur C Clarke | The Hammer of God | 1973 | Good |
| Arthur C Clarke | Childhood’s End | 1953 | Good |
| Arkady Martine | A Memory Called Empire | 2019 | Good |
2024
| Author | Title | Published | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adrian Tchaikovsky | Children of Time | 2015 | Good |
| Patrick Rothfussz | The Narrow Road Between Desires | 2023 | Good |
| Lian Hearn | Across the Nightingale Floor | 2002 | Good |
| Lian Hearn | Grass for His Pillow | 2003 | Ok |
| Ben Horowitz | The Hard Thing About Hard Things | 2014 | Good |
| Emily Tesh | Some Desperate Glory | 2023 | Good |
| Andrew Krivak | The Bear | 2020 | Good |
| Adam Frankl | The Developer Facing Startup | 2024 | Good |
| Chris Broad | Abroad in Japan | 2023 | Ok |
| Michael Ovitz | Who is Michael Ovitz? | 2018 | Good |
| Brandon Sanderson | Mistborn | 2006 | Good |
2023
| Author | Title | Published | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Patrick Rothfuss | The Wise Man’s Fear | 2011 | Good |
| Patrick Rothfuss | The Name of the Wind | 2007 | Good |
| Walter Isaacson | Elon Musk | 2023 | Good |
| Walter Isaacson | Steve Jobs | 2011 | Good |
| Orson Scott Card | Ender’s Game | 1985 | Good |
| Tom Holland | Rubicon | 2004 | Good |
| Robert Harris | Pompeii | 2003 | Good |
| Will Larson | An Elegant Puzzle | 2019 | Ok |
| Ramadan, Peterson, Lockhead, Maney | Play Bigger | 2016 | Good |
| Daniel Suarez | Delta-V | 2019 | Good |
| Frank Herbert | Dune Messiah | 1969 | Ok |
| Chris Miller | Chip War | 2022 | Ok |
| James Corey | Caliban’s War | 2012 | Good |
| Thomas Sowell | The Vision of the Anointed | 1996 | Good |
| Niall Ferguson | The War of the World | 2012 | Good |
| Nick Bostrom | Superintelligence | 2014 | Good |
| James Corey | Leviathan Wakes | 2011 | Good |
| Robert Harris | Lustrum | 2009 | Good |
| Robert Harris | Dictator | 2015 | Good |
2022
| Author | Title | Published | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Robert Harris | Imperium | 2006 | Good |
| Peter Zeihan | The end of the world is just the beginning | 2022 | Good |
| George R R Martin | A Dance with Dragons | 2011 | Good |
| Kyle Harper | The Fate of Rome | 2018 | Good |
| Ray Dalio | The Changing World Order | 2021 | Good |
| Michael Shellenberger | Apocalypse Never | 2020 | Ok |
| J.R.R. Tolkien | The Hobbit | 1937 | Good |
| Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt | The Coddling of the American Mind | 2018 | Good |
| How Innovation Works | Matt Ridley | 2021 | Good |
| Margaret Atwood | The Handmaid’s Tail | 1985 | Good |
| Sebastian Mallaby | The Power Law | 2022 | Good |
| George R R Martin | A Feast for Crows | 2005 | Good |
| Tom Holland | Persian Fire | 2005 | Ok |
| Anand Giridharadas | Winners Take All | 2018 | Ok |
2021
| Author | Title | Published | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Philip K Dick | Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | 1968 | Good |
| Kate Raworth | Doughnut Economics | 2017 | Ok |
| Carmen Reinhart & Kenneth Rogoff | This Time Is Different | 2011 | Good |
| Ernest Cline | Armada | 2015 | Good |
| Chan Koochung | The Fat Years | 2011 | Good |
| Desmond Shum | Red Roulette | 2021 | Ok |
| William R Forstchen | One Second After | 2014 | Good |
| Kim Stanley Robinson | The Ministry for the Future | 2020 | Good |
| William Gibson | Neuromancer | 1984 | Bad |
| Ayn Rand | Atlas Shrugged | 1957 | Good |
| Niall Ferguson | Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe | 2021 | Good |
| Taylor Downing | 1983: The World at the Brink | 2018 | Good |
| Cixin Liu | Ball Lightning | 2004 | Good |
| Robert Harris | V2 | 2020 | Ok |
| Ben Horowitz | The Hard Thing About Hard Things | 2014 | Good |
| Frank Herbert | Dune | 1965 | Good |
| Niall Ferguson | Civilization: The West and the Rest | 2011 | Good |
| Robert Harris | Archangel | 1998 | Ok |
| Douglas Adams | The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy | 1979 | Good |
| Robert Harris | Fatherland | 1991 | Good |
| George Orwell | The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius | 1941 | Good |
| CJ Sansom | Dominion | 2012 | Good |
2020
| Author | Title | Published | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Neil Gaiman | Norse Mythology | 2017 | Ok |
| Alexandr Bogdanov | Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia | 1908 | Ok |
| Liu Cixin | Death’s End | 2010 | Good |
| Thomas Piketty | Capital in the Twenty-First Century | 2013 | Good |
| RIchard K Morgan | Altered Carbon | 2002 | Good |
| PW Singer | Ghost Fleet | 2015 | Ok |
| George RR Martin | A Storm of Swords | 2000 | Good |
| Steven Pinker | The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined | 2010 | Ok |
| George RR Martin | A Clash of Kings | 1998 | Good |
| Liu Cixin | The Dark Forest | 2008 | Good |
| John Stuart Mill | On Liberty and Other Essays | 1859 | Good |
| Peter Frankopan | The Silk Roads | 2015 | Good |
| Sam Hughes | Ra | 2014 | Bad |
| James Clavell | Shogun | 1975 | Good |
| Alex Kerr | Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan | 2001 | Ok |
| Walter Isaacson | The Innovators | 2014 | Ok |
| George RR Martin | A Game of Thrones | 1996 | Good |
| Andreas Antonopoulos | The Internet of Money Volume Three | 2019 | Ok |
| Niall Ferguson | The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World | 2007 | Good |
| Mary Beard | SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome | 2015 | Good |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | The Sorrows of Young Werther | 1774 | Ok |
| Barbara W. Tuchman | The Guns of August | 1962 | Good |
| Liu Cixin | The Three-Body Problem | 2006 | Good |
| Charles Dickens | Great Expectations | 1861 | Good |
| Yoshida Kenkō | A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees | 1340 | Good |
| Ben Horowitzs | What You Do Is Who You Are | 2019 | Ok |
| Kakuzō Okakura | The Book of Tea | 1906 | Good |
| Jesse Norman | Adam Smith: What He Thought, and Why it Matters | 2018 | Ok |
| David Boaz | The Libertarian Mind | 1997 | Ok |
| John Lanchester | The Wall | 2019 | Good |
2019
| Author | Title | Published | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| David Cameron | For The Record | 2019 | Ok |
| Tom Wright, Bradley Hope | Billion Dollar Whale | 2018 | Ok |
| David JC MacKay | Sustainable Energy – without the hot air | 2008 | Good |
| Robert J Smith | Japanese Society: Tradition, Self, and the Social Order | 1983 | Ok |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | The Social Contract | 1762 | Good |
| Stuart Turton | The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle | 2018 | Bad |
| Ursula K Le Guin | Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story | 1998 | Good |
| Lewis Dartnell | The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch | 2014 | Ok |
| Daniel Keyes | Flowers for Algernon | 1966 | Good |
| William Strunk Jr | The Elements of Style | 1918 | Ok |
| Marie Le Conte | Haven’t You Heard?: Gossip, power, and how politics really works | 2019 | Ok |
| Barry C Field | Environmental Economics | 2016 | Ok |
| The World Commission on Environment and Development | Our Common Future | 1987 | Ok |
| Mal Peet | Mr Godley’s Phantom | 2019 | Ok |
| Ted Chiang | Exhalation | 2019 | Good |
| Charles D. Kolstad | Intermediate Environmental Economics | 2011 | Ok |
| Nami Sano | Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto, Vol. 1 | 2013 | Ok |
| Jane Jacobs | Dark Age Ahead | 2004 | Ok |
| Ken Liu | The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories | 2016 | Good |
| Robert Harris | The Second Sleep | 2019 | Good |
| Elizabeth Fisher | Environmental Law: A Very Short Introduction | 2017 | Ok |
| Robert Harris | Conclave | 2016 | Good |
| Carolyn Snell, Gary Haq | The short guide to environmental policy | 2014 | Bad |
| DK Publishing | The Ecology Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained | 2019 | Ok |
| Kazuo Ishiguro | The Remains of the Day | 1989 | Good |
| Robert A. Heinlein | Stranger in a Strange Land | 1961 | Ok |
| Sam Harris, Maajid Nawaz | Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue | 2015 | Good |
| Jeremy L Caradonna | Sustainability: A History | 2014 | Good |
| Stephen Smith | Environmental Economics: A Very Short Introduction | 2011 | Ok |
| Peter Zeihan | The Absent Superpower | 2017 | Good |
| Derek Rowntree | Statistics without Tears | 1981 | Good |
| Vaclav Smil | Energy: A Beginner’s Guide | 2006 | Good |
| Clayton M Christensen | Competing Against Luck | 2016 | Good |
| Marcus Aurelius | Meditations | 180 | Good |
| Philip Pullman | The Amber Spyglass | 2000 | Good |
| Epictetus | The Manual | 100 | Good |
| Wolfgang Streeck | How Will Capitalism End? | 2016 | Bad |
| RG Collingwood | An Autobiography | 1939 | Ok |
| Martin Goodman | A History of Judaism | 2017 | Ok |
| Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson | Why Nations Fail | 2012 | Good |
| Jim Al-Khalili | Sunfall | 2019 | Ok |
| Henry Kissinger | World Order | 2014 | Good |
| Kazuo Ishiguro | Never Let Me Go | 2005 | Good |
| Donella H. Meadows | The Limits to Growth | 1972 | Good |
| Julia Boyd | Travellers in the Third Reich | 2017 | Good |
| Philip Pullman | The Subtle Knife | 1997 | Good |
| Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Alain de Botton, Malcolm Gladwell | Do Humankind’s Best Days Lie Ahead? | 2016 | Ok |
| Alan Alda | If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? | 2017 | Ok |
| Philip Pullman | Northern Lights | 1995 | Good |
| Seneca | On the Shortness of Life | 49 | Good |
| Winston S Churchill | Painting as Pastime | 1948 | Ok |
| Simon Schama | The Story of the Jews | 2013 | Ok |
| Jun’ichirō Tanizaki | In Praise of Shadows | 1933 | Good |
| F. Scott Fitzgerald | The Great Gatsby | 1925 | Ok |
| Niall Ferguson | Virtual History | 1997 | Ok |
| Ian Kerner | She Comes First | 2004 | Good |
| Aldous Huxley | Brave New World | 1932 | Good |
| Erling Kagge | Silence: In the Age of Noise | 2016 | Ok |
| Stephen Greenblatt | Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power | 2018 | Good |
| The School of Life | Relationships | 2016 | Good |
| Robert Macfarlane | Mountains of the Mind | 2003 | Good |
| Neal Stephenson | Snow Crash | 1992 | Good |
| Alain de Botton | The Pleasures and Sorrows of Works | 2008 | Ok |
| Alain de Botton | The Course of Love | 2016 | Good |
| Yevgeny Zamyatin | We | 1920 | Good |
2018
| Author | Title | Published | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bruce Schneier | Data and Goliath | 2015 | Ok |
| George Orwell | Orwell on Truth | 2017 | Ok |
| Jaron Lanier | Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now | 2018 | Ok |
| Niall Ferguson | The Square and the Tower | 2017 | Good |
| Jaron Lanier | Who Owns the Future? | 2013 | Ok |
| J Jefferson Fargeon | Mystery in White | 1937 | Ok |
| Yuval Noah Harari | 21 Lessons for the 21st Century | 2018 | Good |
| Sarah Waters | Fingersmith | 2011 | Ok |
| Adam Smith | The Wealth of Nations | 1776 | Good |
| Blake Masters, Peter Thiel | Zero to One | 2014 | Good |
| RG Collingwood | The Idea of History | 1946 | Ok |
| Robert Harris | Enigma | 1995 | Good |
| Robert Harris | Munich | 2017 | Good |
| Rachel Carson | Silent Spring | 1962 | Good |
| Peter F Drucker | The Effective Executive | 1966 | Good |
| Robert A Heinlein | The Moon is a Harsh Mistress | 1966 | Good |
| Gyles Brandreth | Breaking the Code | 1999 | Ok |
| Henry Kissinger | On China | 2011 | Good |
| Dan Olsen | The Lean Product Playbook | 2015 | Good |
| Margaret Atwood | Oryx and Crake | 2003 | Ok |
| Valter Longo | The Longevity Diet | 2016 | Good |
| Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, Nate Walkingshaw | Product Leadership | 2017 | Ok |
| Gerald M Weinberg | Becoming a Technical Leader | 1986 | Ok |
| Sam Harris | Lying | 2013 | Good |
| Niall Ferguson | The Great Degeneration | 2012 | Good |
| Alain de Botton | The Consolations of Philosophy | 2000 | Ok |
| Robert Harris | Pompeii | 2003 | Good |
| Alain de Botton | Essays in Love | 2014 | Good |
| Alain de Botton | How Proust Can Change Your Life | 1997 | Ok |
| Elad Gil | High Growth Handbook | 2018 | Good |
| Kristian Niemietz | Universal Healthcare without the NHS | 2016 | Good |
| James P Carse | Finite and Infinite Games | 2011 | Ok |
| Isaiah Berlin | The Hedgehog and the Fox | 1953 | Ok |
| Thomas More | Utopia | 1516 | Good |
| Matthew Walker | Why We Sleep | 2016 | Good |
| Isaac Asimov | Foundation | 1951 | Ok |
| Aristotle | The Art of Rhetoric | 322 BC | Good |
| Philip Collins | When They Go Low, We Go High | 2017 | Ok |
| Robert Harris | Dictator | 2015 | Good |
| Robert Harris | Lustrum | 2009 | Good |
| Robert Harris | Imperium | 2006 | Good |
| Gordon Livingstone | Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart | 2004 | Bad |
| Peter Hennessy | Reflections: Conversations with Politicians | 2016 | Ok |
| Milton Friedman | Capitalism and Freedom | 1962 | Good |
| Christopher Mallaby | Living the Cold War | 2017 | Ok |
| Nick DeBois | Confessions of A Recovering MP | 2018 | Ok |
| Leonard Susskind | The Theoretical Minimum | 2013 | Ok |
| Peter Higgins | Numbers: A Very Short Introduction | 2010 | Bad |
| Sam Harris | Free Will | 2012 | Good |
| Cynthia Stokes Brown | Big History | 2007 | Ok |
| Will Durant | Story of Philosophy | 1926 | Good |
| Friedrich A. Hayek | The Road to Surfdom | 1944 | Good |
| David Cannadine | Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800–1906 | 2017 | Ok |
| Will Durant, Ariel Durant | The Lessons of History | 1968 | Good |
| Vaclav Smil | Should We Eat Meat | 2013 | Good |
| Michael Wolff | Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House | 2018 | Ok |
| Ray Dalio | Principles | 2017 | Ok |
| Darren McGarvey | Poverty Safari | 2017 | Good |
2017
| Author | Title | Published | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ursula K Le Guin | The Dispossessed | 1974 | Ok |
| Stuart Clark | The Search For Earth’s Twin | 2016 | Ok |
| Philip Pullman | La Belle Sauvage | 2017 | Good |
| Anthony Seldon, Peter Snowdon | Cameron at 10 | 2015 | Ok |
| Brad Stone | The Everything Store | 2013 | Bad |
| Tim Shipman | Fall Out | 2017 | Good |
| Graham Allison | Destined for War | 2017 | Good |
| David Harvey | Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason | 2017 | Ok |