Books

For the past few years I’ve been taking notes on the books I read so they don’t just go in one eye and out the other. This is a list of the books I’ve read and any notes I’ve taken on them, including quotes or summaries. I have underlined books which I thought were very good, and bolded and underlined books I found to be outstanding.

Fiction:

  • Dune – Frank Herbert
  • Candide – Voltaire
  • Lord of the Flies – William Golding
  • Utopia – Thomas More
  • Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera

Biographies:

  • Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson
  • Leonardo Da Vinci – Walter Isaacson
  • Albert Einstein – Walter Isaacson
  • Epic Measures: One Doctor, Seven Billion Patients (Dr Chris Murray) – Jeremy Smith
  • War Doctor (David Nott) – David Nott
  • Shoe Dog (Nike) – Phil Knight
  • Titan (John Rockefeller Snr.) – Ron Chernow

Philosophy

  • Man’s Search for Meaning – Victor Frankl
  • Going to Pieces without Falling Apart – David Epstein
  • Buddhism Without Beliefs – Stephen Batchelor
  • Ego is the Enemy – Ryan Holiday

Business / Self-Help:

  • Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve it – Richard Koch
  • Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t – Jim Collins
  • A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life – Donald Miller
  • Nerve: Journeys Through Fear – Eva Holland
  • Anything You Want – Derek Sivers

Travel / History:

  • Sapiens: A brief history of humankind – Yuval Noah Harari
  • The Hunt for Everest – Craig Storti
  • A month in Siena – Hisham Matar
  • The Upright Thinkers – Leonard Mlodinow
  • Levant – Philip Mansel
  • Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Empire – Tom Holland

Generally interesting:

  • Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance – Alex Hutchinson
  • Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood – Rose George
  • Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men – Caroline Criado-Perez
  • This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality – Peter Pomerantsev
  • The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
  • Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures – Merlin Sheldrake
  • Effectiveness And Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services – Archibald Cochrane
  • This is Going to Hurt – Adam Kay