New Book Recommendations (2020)

Compiling Sam Altman's tweet replies

I’m trying to be helpful and listing some of people’s favourite new books, sort them into categories and link to them. 

Comments and book suggestions come from replies to Sam Altman’s tweet, Could I please get some new book recommendations?

Sam Altman @sama

Could I please get some new book recommendations?

Biographies and Autobiographies

• A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman

• A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Life of William Dampier by Diana & Michael Preston

• Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

• Eat a Peach: A Memoir by David Chang

• Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

• From Third World to First: The Singapore Story – 1965-2000 by Lee Kuan Yew

• Isaac Newton by James Gleick

• Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

• Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel

• My Inventions by Nikola Tesla

• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman

• The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers by Amy Hollingsworth

• The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson

• The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles Mann

• Trailblazer by Marc Benioff

• Travels by Michael Crichton

Business and Investing

• Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

• Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan (Recommended by Chamath Palihapitiya)

• American Kingpin by Nick Bilton

• Bank 4.0 by Brett King

• Bet, Build, Go: Build Startups Like a Poker Player by Derek Kwan

• Billion Dollar Whale by Bradley Hope and Tom Wright

• Business Adventures by John Brooks

• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A Moore

• Engines That Move Markets by Alisdair Nairn

• Good Economics for Hard Times by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

• How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley

• Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America Hardcover by Christopher Leonard

• Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright

• No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

• No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

• Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

• Red Notice by Bill Browder

• Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business by Danny Meyer

• Stories that Stick by Kindra Hall

• The Investment Zoo by Stephen A. Jarislowsky

• The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

• The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care–and How to Fix It by Marty Makary

• The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

• The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

• The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future by Steve Case

• This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

Classic Literature & Fiction

• 1984 by George Orwell

• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

• Anathem by Neal Stephenson

• Animal Farm by George Orwell

• Anathem by Neil Stephenson

• Asian Saga Book Series by James Clavell

• A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

• City of Thieves by David Benioff

• Dune by Frank Herbert

• Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

• Exhalation: Stories Hardcover by Ted Chiang

• Foundation by Isaac Asimov

• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

• His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem (Recommended by Andrej Karpathy)

• Lying Awake by Mark Salzman

• More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow

• Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

• Orfeo by Richard Powers

• Post Office by Charles Bukowski

• Recursion by Blake Crouch

• Shiva Trilogy by Amish Tripathi

• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

• Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

• The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle (Recommended by Andrej Karpathy)

• The Dying Animal by Philip Roth

• The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

• The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

• The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure

• The Overstory by Richard Powers

• The Rise and Fall of DODO by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland

• The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

• The Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

• The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

• The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

• Vikramaditya Veergatha Series by Shatrujeet Nath

• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

• Zima Blue and Other Stories by Alastair Reynolds

History & Recollections

• 438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea by Jonathan Franklin

• Civilization by Niall Ferguson

• Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

• Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

• Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage Paperback by Alfred Lansing

• Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty

• Humankind – A Hopeful History from Rutger Bregman

• Light from Many Lamps by Lillian Watson

• Markets, Minds, and Money by Miguel Urquiola

• Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt

• Story of Civilization by Will & Ariel Durant (Recommended by Elon Musk)

• The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

• The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World by Robert Garland

• The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 by David McCullough

• The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin

• The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

• The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

Government, Politics & Nations

• Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? by Graham Allison

• Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World by Peter Zeihan

• For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto by Murray N. Rothbard

• I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad by Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg

• Korea’s Place in the Sun (A Modern History) by Bruce Cumings

• Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama

• Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall

• Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah

• Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept by Robert Spalding

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

• The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower by Michael Pillsbury

• The People’s House by David Pepper

• Trade Wars are Class Wars by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis

• We Are Indivisible: A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump by Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin

• When China Rules the World by Martin Jacques

• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Science & Tech

• A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics by Stephen Wolfram

• Algorithmic Game Theory by Noam Nisan

• Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

• Biohazard by Ken Alibeck

• Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban

• Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art Hardcover by James Nestor

• Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

• Darwin among the Machines by George Dyson

• Einstein on Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms by Albert Einstein

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship by Andrey Miroshnichenko

• Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain by David Eagleman

• Novacene by James Lovelock

• Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith

• Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

• Programming the Universe by Seth Lloyd

• Regenesis by George Church

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

• Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life by Steven H. Strogatz

• The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn by Richard W. Hamming

• The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop

• The Hidden Half of Nature by David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé

• The Humachine by Nada R Sanders

• The Molecular Biology of the Cell (Recommended by Andrej Karpathy)

• The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman & Michael E. Long

• The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

• The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

• The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson

• To Shake the Sleeping Self by Jedidiah Jenkins

• Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past by J Storrs Hall

• Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

• Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghba

Psychology & Behavioural

• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

• Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions by Robert H. Frank

• Self Compassion by Kristin Neff

• Status Anxiety by Alain De Botton

• Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal

• The Chimp Paradox by Dr. Steve Peters

• The Great Mental Models by Farnam Street

• The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey

• The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin

• The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

• Unlimited Memory by Kevin Horsley

Self Improvement

• Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously by Osho

• Deep Work by Cal Newport

• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success

• Atomic Habits by James Clear

• Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age by Bruce Feiler

• Mastery by Robert Green

• Never Split the Difference by Christopher Voss

• Nobody Wants To Read Your Sh*t by Steven Pressfield

• On Writing Well by William Zinsser

• The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

• The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh

Design

• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

• Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by Ross King

• Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud

Misc

• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman

• Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

• Deceit, Desire and the Novel by René Girard

• Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done by Jon Acuff

• How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

• How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

• Incerto: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile, Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky

• LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media by P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking

• Metaphors We Live by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

• Moral Uncertainty by William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist & Toby Ord

• Profiles of the Future by Arthur C. Clarke (Recommended by Andrej Karpathy)

• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

• Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell

• The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

• The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Finga

• The Mamba Mentality by Kobe Bryant

• The Man’s Guide To Women by John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman

• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

• The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens

• Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

• When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold S. Kushner

• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

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