If I’m not busy outside exploring the world and talking to people, I like to explore the world vicariously through other people (i.e. books). If it’s crossed off I’ve finished most of the book in question; if it’s italicized, I’m reading it; if not either, I’ve yet to come to it. If it’s starred, I found it particularly striking and you should come talk to me about it. This is what’s on my reading list since December 2015:
Fiction
*The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
A Confession, War & Peace, Anna Karenina – Tolstoy
Fight Club – Chuck Palanuick
Speak, Memory – Vladimir Nabokov
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia – Mohsin Hamid
*Confessions of a Mask – Yukio Mishima
Sophie’s Choice – William Styron
*Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius – Jorge Luis Borges
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
The City and the Pillar, Myra Breckinridge, The Last Empire – Gore Vidal
他的国 – 韩寒
红罗蒙 – 曹雪芹
三体 – 刘慈欣
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Catch-22
The Vegetarian – Han Kang
The Man in the High Castle – Philip Roth
The Razor’s Edge – W. Somerset Maugham
Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
The Electric Cool-aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
Too Loud a Solitude – Bohumil Hrabal
The Old Man and the Sea – Hemmingway
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Naked Lunch – William Buroughs
All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
The Paper Menagerie – Ken Liu
China in Ten Words – Yu Hua
Snowcrash – Neal Stephenson
American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
Exhalation – Ted Chiang (2020)
Factory Girl – Josanne La Valley (2020)
Pachinko – Min Jin Lee (2020)
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov (2020)
Nine Stories – J.D. Salinger (2020)
Non-fiction/History/Journalism
Young Money – Kevin Roose
*The Opposite of Loneliness – Marina Keegan
*Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future – Ashlee Vance
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
Maximum City – Suketu Mehta
All the President’s Men – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
Dateline Mongolia: An American Journalist in Nomand’s Land – Michael Kohn
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig
Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War – Val Lance
Master of the Senate (The Years of Lyndon Johnson) – Robert Caro
Detroit: An American Autopsy – Charlie DeLuff
Apologies to my Censor – Mitch Moxley
Hiroshima – John Hersey
On China – Henry Kissinger
Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia – Anne Garrels
*Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China – Susan Greenhalgh
The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey – Che Guevara
The Big Short – Michael Lewis
The Happiness Industry – William Davies
*From 0 to 1 – Peter Thiel
Capital in the 21st Century – Thomas Piketty
Red Cavalry – Isaac Babel
Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics – Huang
Capitalizing On Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance – Greta Krippner
Great Transformations – Mark Blyth
New Spirit of Capitalism – Luc Boltanski
Three Lectures on Post-Industrial Society – Daniel Cohen, Willia Mccuaig
The Lean Start-up – Eric Ries
The Rare Find: How Great Talent Stands Out – George Anders (Tabled)
Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites – Mitchell L. Stevens
War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning – Chris Hedges
The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World that Values Sameness – L. Todd Rose
Two Speeches – Malcolm X
The Search for Modern China – Jonathan Spence
Deng Xiaoping: My Father – Deng Maomao (Tabled)
In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India – Edward Luce
*Drift and Mastery – Walter Lippmann
To Serve God and Walmart – Bethany Moreton
Barbarians at the Gate – John Heylar, Bryan Burrough
*White Collar – C. Wright Mills
Beyond the Beautiful Forevers – Katherine Boo
*Machine Dreams – Philip Mirowski
*Carbon Democracy – Timothy Mitchell
A Problem From Hell – Samantha Power
The History of the Standard Oil Company – Ida Tarbell
Rise of the Red Engineers – Joel Andreas
A Random Walk Down Wall Street – Burton Malkiel
An Inheritance – Rama Rau
The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger – Margaret Sanger
The Physics of Wall Street – James Owen Weatherall
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains – Nicholas Carr
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China – Evan Osnos
Tribe – Sebastian Junger
Friday Night Lights – H. G. Bissinger
The Southwest Airlines Way – Jody Hoffer Gittell
No Good Men Among the Living – Gopal Anand
Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot – Kim Barker
Disrupted – Daniel Lyons
The Price of Admission – Daniel Golden
This Town – Mark Leibovich
Beyond Equality – David Montgomery
The Fall of the House of Labor – David Montgomery
A Feast of Vultures – Joseph Josy
The Race Between Education and Technology – Claudia Goldin
*Built to Last – Jim Collins
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman – Richard Feynman
The 48 Laws of Power – Robert Greene
Democracy in America – Alexis De Tocqueville
*The Complacent Class – Tyler Cowen
*Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow – Yuval Noah Harari
ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror – Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan
A Brief History of Neoliberalism – David Harvey
The Deplorable’s Guide to Making America Great Again – Todd Starnes
The Firm: The Story of McKinsey – Duff McDonald
The Power Broker – Robert Caro
Master of the Senate – Robert Caro
Little Big Man – Alex Tizon
Fire Shut Up in My Bones – Charles Blow
Hillbilly Elegy – J.D. Vance
Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth Century World – Rebecca Karl
iGen – Jean Twenge
Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China – Ezra Vogel
This Kind of War – T.R. Fehrenbach
*Who Owns the Future? – Jaron Lanier
A.I. Super Powers – China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order – Kai-Fu Lee
The Party – Richard McGregor
Two Billion Eyes – Ying Fu
Investigative Journalism in China – David Bandurski and Martin Hala
*The Closing of the American Mind – Allan Bloom
America Against America (美国反对美国) – Wang Huning (王沪宁）
Wealth and Power – Orville Schell and John Delury
CEO, China – Kerry Brown
The Uyghurs: Strangers in their own land – Gardner Bovingdon
*The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcolm X
*Armageddon Averted – Stephen Kotkin
Soviet Baby Boomers – Donald Raleigh
*The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep – David Satter
*Nothing to Envy – Barbara Demick
*Manufacturing Consent – Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
The Tiananmen Papers – Edited by Perry Link, Andrew J. Nathan
Out of Mao’s Shadow – Philip P. Pan
*The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Future is History – Masha Gressen
The China-Pakistan Axis – Andrew Small
Mao’s Last Revolution – Roderick MacFaquhar, Michael Schoenhals
Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order – Bruno Macaes
The Curse of Bigness – Tim Wu
Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, The United States, and the World – Graham Allison and Robert Blackwill
Hiroshima – John Hersey
Strange Stones – Peter Hessler
Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order – Bruno Macaes
Age of Ambition – Evan Osnos
China’s Assistance Program in Xinjiang – Yuhui Li
Kitchen Confidential – Anthony Bourdain
Conspiracy – Ryan Holiday
Chinese Communist Espionage – Matt Brazil and Peter Mattis (2020)
Ill Winds – Larry Diamond
Xi Jinping – Francois Bougon
The Private Life of Chairman Mao – Li Zhisui
Magnificent Delusions – Husain Haqqani (2019)
看见 (Insight) – 柴静 (Chai Jing) (2019 -)
*Tokyo Vice – Jake Adelstein (2019)
Permanent Record – Edward Snowden (2019)
Reporting on Hitler – Will Wainewright (2019)
Xi Jinping: The Backlash – Richard McGregor (2019)
*Trick Mirror – Jia Tolentino (2019)
Behave – Robert M. Sapolsky (2020)
How to be a Dictator – Frank Dikötter (2019)
Mao’s Great Famine – Frank Dikötter (2020)
Why I am a Hindu – Shashi Tharoor (2019)
Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney at the White House – Peter Baker (2020)
Korea: The Impossible Country – Daniel Tudor (2020)
MBS – Ben Hubbard (2020)
Superpower Showdown – Lingling Wei, Bob Davis (2020)
The Righteous Mind – Jonathan Haidt (2020)
Whistleblowers, Fears and Courage: The Coronavirus Reports – Caixin (2020)
1587 – Ray Huang (2020)
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Philosophy
Thus Spoke Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzsche
*Geneology of Morals – Friedrich Nietzsche
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Man’s Search For Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl
Philosophical Investigations – Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tabled)
The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir
History of Sexuality – Michel Foucault
Phenomenology of Spirit – Hegel
The Mahabharata
*The Works of Mencius – Mencius
The Analects – Confucius
The Republic – Plato
Politics – Aristotle
*Nicomachean Ethics – Aristotle
The Ramayana (Tabled)
The Bhagavad Gita
The Quran (Tabled)
The Myth of Sisyphus – Albert Camus
A Theory of Justice – John Rawls
Reflections on Violence – Georges Sorel
Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas – Isaiah Berlin
*Capitalism and Freedom – Milton Friedman
Superintelligence: Path, Dangers, Strategies – Nick Bostrom
The Idea of a Social Science and It’s Relation to Philosophy – Peter Winch
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – Thomas Kuhn
The Malaise of Modernity – Charles Taylor
Cosmopolis – Stephen Toulmin
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, The End of Ideology – Daniel Bell
*The Universe in a Single Atom – Dalai Lama
The Fox and the Hedgehog – Isiah Berlin
Eichmann in Jerusalem – Hannah Arendt
*Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt
*Cosmopolitanism – Kwame Anthony Appiah
Siddartha – Hermann Hesse
Hind Swaraj – Gandhi
Beyond Wisdom – Luang Por Dhammajayo
Godel, Escher, Back: An Eternal Golden Braid – Douglas Hofstadter
The Twilight of Human Rights Law – Eric Posner
The Denial of Death – Ernest Becker
Eclipse of Reason – Max Horkheimer
Passages – Gail Sheehy
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the value of work – Matthew Crawford
Notes on Camp – Susan Sontag
Heidegger Explained – Graham Harman (Note: Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ is an awfully written book, one of the most terribly written books I’ve ever tried to read. This book is much better.)
Iron John – Robert Bly
Radical Markets – Eric Posner and Glen Weyl
Modern Man in Search of a Soul – Carl Jung
The Governance of China – Xi Jinping
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – Shoshana Zuboff
Democracy in China – Ci Jiwei
The Kingdom of God is Within You – Leo Tolstoy
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Extremes
*Industrial Society and Its Future – Ted Kaczynski
*S.C.U.M. Manifesto – Valerie Solanas
Dabiq – The Islamic State
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Practicalities
The Intelligent Investor – Benjamin Graham
The World on a String – Al Goodman, John Pollack
7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey
Deep Work – Cal Newport
How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie
Macroanalysis
Introduction to Econometrics
Natural Language Processing with Python
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Long-form Journalism
I also enjoy reading long pieces. Here’s a piece on Samantha Power that’s really about the promise and perils of human rights discourse. He’s a piece on Marie Colvin that I’m dangerously romantic about – an inspiration and a warning, both. Here’s an AP article on freeing seafood industry slaves that made me cry. Here’s a piece on ex-cons at Berkeley that I love. Here’s a fun piece from Vice on how the complexity of modern society makes it impossible to be president that speaks directly to my interests. This epic tale of Elon Musk sends the imagination soaring and the spine shivering. Here’s an oldie but a goodie – George Orwell on the inhumanity of Gandhi’s sainthood. And most recently, this piece, on modern slavery, but really, also, about self-discovery and the American dream, took my breath away. And countless others.