Updated: Nov’24
An (always incomplete) list
Short reads
The Education of a Libertarian – Peter Thiel
You and Your Research – Richard Hamming
Paul Graham’s essays
The Marginalian – Tolstoy and Meaning, Anna Dostoyevskaya on the Secret to a Happy Marriage
This is Water, David Foster Wallace
The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant
Kierkegaard and Entrepreneurship – Amjad Masad
(One of)Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Theo
David Graeber – Bullshit Jobs
Fiction
Kafka – Everything he wrote (Long stories – The Trial, America, The Castle + Short stories)
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, Notes from the Underground (more to be added)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – The Little Prince
Camus – The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall
David Foster Wallace – Infinite Jest (yes it’s long, but worth it)
George Orwell – 1984, Animal Farm
Joseph Heller – Catch 22 (perhaps the single funniest book I’ve read)
Upmanyu Chatterjee – English, August (funny, real and too relatable)
Erich Maria Remarque – All Quiet on The Western Front, The Road Back (to get an idea of WW1)]
John Kennedy Toole – A Confederacy of Dunces
P.G Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, John Grisham, Jeffrey Archer, Gerald Durrell – all good reads from childhood,
Non-Fiction
Soren Kierkegaard – Either/or, Fear and Trembling
Orwell’s Essays (even better than his fiction)
Jiddu Krishnamurti – The Book of Life, Think on These Things
GK Chesterton – Heretics, Orthodoxy
Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
The Enchiridion – Epictetus
Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Ecce Homo
Boerthius – The Consolation of Philosophy
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (rare HR book that isn’t trite)
Peter Thiel – Zero to One (rare business book that’s original)
Harry Browne – How I found Freedom in an Unfree World
Edhi: A Mirror to the Blind
Martin Seligman – Learned Optimism
Maxwell Maltz – Psycho-Cybernetics
Viktor Frankl – Man’s search for Meaning
Taleb – Skin in the Game
Yanis Varoufakis – Talking to my Daughter about the Economy (simple, and partisan yet objective)
Others
Waiting for Godot (Play)