These are books I’ve read within the past 20 years or so that I consider remarkable in one way or another. They have given me new ideas and genuinely fresh insights, changed the way I view the world, or left lasting impressions on me.
Books I’ve read most recently are at the top. I’ll be adding to this list whenever another remarkable book crosses my path.
Fiction
- Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
- Sorry Please Thank You: Stories, by Charles Yu
- Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, by David Eagleman
- The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker (You must listen to this one!)
- The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
- The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon
- The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss
- The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
- The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy
- Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
- Sophie’s World, by Jostein Gaarder
- The Bone People, by Keri Hulme
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
- Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Nonfiction
- The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch
- Reality is Broken, by Jane McGonigal
- The Ravenous Brain, by Daniel Bor
- Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
- Three Scientists and their Gods, by Robert Wright
- The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian
- Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
- Animals in Translation, by Temple Grandin
- Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
- The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond
- Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright
- Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond
- Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman
- Out of Control, by Kevin Kelly
- Everyday Sacred, by Sue Bender
- The Moral Animal, by Robert Wright
- The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker
- Money and the Meaning of Life, by Jacob Needleman
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks
- The Ape That Spoke, by John McCrone
- The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald A. Norman
- Freedom in Exile: the Autobiography of the Dalai Lama
- Home – A Short History of an Idea, by Witold Rybczynski
- Secrets of the Temple, by William Greider
- The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, by William Irwin Thompson
- The World’s Religions, by Huston Smith
You can also see what my book club has been reading.
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