Reading

People ask me for book recommendations more than almost anything else. This is the honest version of that answer: not a list of books I own or intend to read, but the ones I liked enough to actually finish. Consider it a seal of approval based on attention, which is the only currency I have less of every year.

Most of these come from the Toronto Public Library, which conveniently had a couple of years of borrowing history to seed the log with. The mix skews toward engineering, business, and psychology, with enough novels and oddities in it to prove I am not only reading for work.

If you want the shorter version: the books that changed how I actually run engineering teams are Radical Candor, The Checklist Manifesto, and Thinking in Bets. The one I recommend most often to founders is The Right It — most software fails because somebody built the wrong thing carefully.

2025 3 books

2024 15 books

2015
Henry Kissinger
2020
Eric Jorgenson
2020
Jenny Odell
2014
Thomas Erikson
2022
Ryan Holiday
2020
Sean B. Carroll
2019
John Mark Comer
2016
Bill Burnett, Dave Evans
2024
Noah Kagan
2017
Ray Dalio
2018
Danielle Town, Phil Town

2023 26 books

2018
Grace, Annie
2018
Matthew Walker
2023
Anna Lembke
2022
Dr. Nate Zinsser
2011
Daniel Kahneman
2011
Atul Gawande
2023
Katherine Morgan Schafler
2017
Kim Scott
2022
Mehdi Hasan
2022
Jon Meacham
2016
Angela Duckworth
2005
Malcolm Gladwell
2022
Karolina Rzadkowolska
2022
Tiago Forte
2014
Austin Kleon
2018
Annie Duke
2014
Yuval Noah Harari
2019
Dan Harris
2023
Rick Rubin
2021
Morgan Housel
2003
Tara Brach
2016
Chris Voss , Tahl Raz
2015
Mike Dow
2019
Ramit Sethi
2019
Mark Manson