Happy new year! What’s happy about it, you ask? …well, there’s always books.

Curious George reading

Digging through some old journals, I came across a bunch of notes and lists of books I read in past years. I remember having a conversation with my then-50-ish Dad in which he couldn’t remember whether or not he’d read some book I was excited about. I was astonished that he could possibly have read an entire book and completely forgotten it. Now, 50-ish myself, I get it.

So on that note, here are as many books as I can dig out of these notes and my collapsing memory:

2010

  • A Splendid Exchange – William J. Bernstein
  • Shadow Cities, A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World – Robert Neuwirth
  • The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
  • …incomplete list

2011

  • Point Omega – Don DeLillo
  • The Origins of Political Order – Francis Fukuyama
  • …incomplete list

2012

  • The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia
  • Power, Inc. – David Rothkopf
  • The Joy of Clojure – Chris Houser and Michael Fogus (notes)
  • Machine Learning for Hackers – Drew Conway and John Myles White
  • …incomplete list

2013

  • Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 – Odd Arne Westad
  • The Signal and the Noise – Nate Silver (notes)
  • Big Data – Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (notes)
  • The Great Stagnation – Tyler Cowen
  • Nature, an Economic History – Geerat J. Vermeij (unfinished)
  • Automate This! – Christopher Steiner (notes)
  • Where the Mountain Meets the Moon – Grace Lin (possibly 2014?)
  • …incomplete list

2014

  • The Road – Cormac McCarthy
  • Lexicon – Max Barry
  • A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan
  • The Fall – Albert Camus
  • From the Ruins of Empire – Pankaj Mishra
  • Brave Genius – Sean B. Carroll (notes)
  • The Master Switch – Tim Wu (notes)
  • Programming in Haskell – Graham Hutton
  • Consider Phlebas – Iain M. Banks
  • Halting State – Charles Stross
  • Learn you a Haskell (unfinished)

2015

  • Amsterdam, a history of the World’s Most Liberal City – Russell Shorto
  • But Beautiful – Geoff Dyer
  • The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
  • The Circle – Dave Eggers
  • Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone – J.K. Rowling
  • Seveneves – Neal Stephenson
  • So Good They Can’t Ignore You – Cal Newport
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – J.K. Rowling
  • Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata
  • Economics, a very short introduction – Partha Dasgupta
  • Nexus – Ramez Naam
  • Political Order and Political Decay – Francis Fukuyama

Books 2015

2016

  • 1688 – John E. Wills Jr.
  • The Master Algorithm – Pedro Domingos
  • The Three-Body Problem – Cixin Liu
  • The Sense of Style – Steven Pinker
  • Hieroglyphs (anthology)
  • Blueprints of the Afterlife – Ryan Boudinot
  • The Seventh Sense – Joshua Cooper Ramo
  • Functional Programming in Scala (unfinished)
  • The Martian – Andy Weir
  • The Edge of the World – Michael Pye
  • Algorithm Design Manual, 2nd Ed. – Steven Skiena

Books 2016

2017

  • Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World – Jack Weatherford
  • Fluent Python – Luciano Ramalho
  • The Dark Forest – Cixin Liu
  • Starry River of the Sky – Grace Lin
  • Animal Farm – George Orwell
  • The Mysterious Benedict Society – Trenton Lee Stewart
  • The Sleepwalkers – Christopher Clark
  • Logavina Street – Barbara Demick
  • Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel
  • Heretics – Leonardo Padura
  • Ancillary Justice – Ann Leckie
  • Thinking Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahnemann

Books 2017

2018

  • The Peripheral – William Gibson
  • Data Science from Scratch – Joel Grus (repo)
  • When the Sea Turned to Silver – Grace Lin
  • Sapiens – Yuval Harari
  • The Silk Roads – Peter Frankopan
  • The Lean Startup – Eric Ries
  • Stories of Your Life and Others – Ted Chiang
  • SPQR – Mary Beard
  • Borne – Jeff Vandermeer
  • The Perfect Weapon – David Sanger
  • The Death of Truth – Michiko Kakutani
  • The Fifth Risk – Michael Lewis
  • Agents of Empire – Noel Malcolm (notes)

Books 2018