Book recommendations
Listed alphabetically by title within each section. Also see my annual favorite books blog posts, authors I like, and the reading log.
Nonfiction
- The Accidental President / A. J. Baime
- Autobiography / John Stuart Mill
- Brunelleschi’s Dome / Ross King
- Caste / Isabel Wilkerson
- The Coming of the Third Reich / Richard J. Evans
- Dark Money / Jane Mayer
- Destiny of the Republic / Candice Millard
- The Dawn of Everything / David Graeber & David Wengrow
- The Dream Machine / M. Mitchell Waldrop
- Extra Life / Steven Johnson
- The Fabric of Civilization / Virginia Postrel
- How Big Things Get Done / Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner
- How Infrastructure Works / Deb Chachra
- How the Word Is Passed / Clint Smith
- The Idea Factory / Jon Gertner
- An Immense World / Ed Yong
- Indigenous Continent / Pekka Hämäläinen
- In the Garden of Beasts / Erik Larson
- In Praise of Slowness / Carl Honoré
- Inventing the Renaissance / Ada Palmer
- The Invention of Nature / Andrea Wulf
- Leadership / Doris Kearns Goodwin
- Let’s Talk about Race and Priesthood / W. Paul Reeve
- Longitude / Dana Sobel
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass / Frederick Douglass
- The Notebook / Roland Allen
- The Perfectionists / Simon Winchester
- The Power Broker / Robert Caro
- The River of Doubt / Candice Millard
- The Sixth Extinction / Elizabeth Kolbert
- The Small and the Mighty / Sharon McMahon
- The Splendid and the Vile / Erik Larson
- Supreme Inequality / Adam Cohen
- This Changes Everything / Naomi Klein
- The Wager / David Grann
- Ways of Being / James Bridle
- Why Nations Fail / Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson
Fiction
- Gilead / Marilynne Robinson
- Middlemarch / George Eliot
- Moby-Dick / Herman Melville
- War and Peace / Leo Tolstoy