2024
This year the obsessive compulsion to finish every book I start atrophied and fell away.
Strikeouts mean I cut my sunk costs and ran.
They don't mean the book was bad...just not for me.
Clearly, the year didn't begin well.
Imago — Octavia Butler
Adulthood Rites — Octavia Butler
Dawn — Octavia Butler
All six books of Dune (for the 2nd time)
Kindred — Octavia Butler
Fledgling — Octavia Butler
Nobody's Fool — Daniel Simons
Master Builder — Alfonso Martinez Arias
Better Angels of our Nature — Steven Pinker
2023
The first "chapter books" I read for myself were Tolkien's. All of them.
I started the Potter series (grudgingly) reading to my son.
I finished them reading to myself.
They're well-constructed stories with lots of adult allegory.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — J.K. Rowling
Sleeping Beauties — Andreas Wagner
Thinking in Systems — Donella Meadows
Don't Teach Coding Until You Read This Book — Lindsey Handley
Dune — Frank Herbert
Song of the Cell — Siddhartha Mukherjee
When the Heavens Went on Sale — Ashlee Vance
Transformer — Nick Lane
Hopeland — Ian McDonald
Ministry for the Future — Kim Stanley Robinson
Noor — Nnedi Okorofor
Wild Seed — Octavia Butler
Who Fears Death — Nnedi Okorofor
2021
I thought Margaret Atwood was the queen of dystopia.
Then I discovered Octavia.
Parable of the Sower — Octavia Butler
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets — J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban — J.K. Rowling
Parable of the Talents — Octavia Butler
2020
The Point of it All — Charles Krauthammer
Water Knife — Paolo Bacigalupi
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone — J.K. Rowling
Agency — William Gibson
The Library at Mount Char — Scott Hawkins
Daylight Forever — Mahvash Khajavi-Harvey
Treasure Island — Robert Lewis Stevenson
Elmer Gantry — Sinclair Lewis
Three Body Problem — Cixin Liu
2019
Finland, Cultural Lone Wolf — Richard Lewis
Blockchain Bubble or Revolution: The Present and Future of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies — Neel Mehta, Aditya Agashe, Parth Detroja
The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking — Saifedean Ammous
Structures: or Why Things Don't Fall Down — Gordon J.E.
Fall, or Dodge in Hell — Neal Stephenson
Rethinking Statistics — Richard McElreath
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism — Shoshanna Zuboff
Moon — Kim Stanley Robinson
2018
Medical Physiology — Guyton and Hall
Scale — Geoffrey West
Equations of Life:How Physics Shapes Evolution — Charles Cockell
Galileo's Dream — Kim Stanley Robinson
New York 2140 — Kim Stanley Robinson
Fluent Python — Luciano Ramalho
Antarctica — Kim Stanley Robinson
Dawn Watch — Maya Jasanoff
Red Mars — Kim Stanley Robinson
2017
Blue Mars — Kim Stanley Robinson
Skin Barrier — Peter M. Elias and Kenneth R. Feingold
Extracellular Matrix: an Overview — Robert Mecham
Autumn — Ali Smith
Exit West — Mohsin Hamid
Green Mars — Kim Stanley Robinson
The Memory of Whiteness — Kim Stanley Robinson
Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing out Digital Future — McAfee & Brynjolfsson
Narcisuss and Goldmund — Hermann Hesse
Demian — Hermann Hesse
Walkaway — Cory Doctorow
Aurora — Kim Stanley Robinson
Moonwalking with Einstein — Joshua Froer
2312 — Kim Stanley Robinson
The Third Window (reread) — Robert Ulanowicz
2016
The Letter of the Marque (Book 11 Aubrey/Maturin Novels) — Patrick O'Brian
Fundamental Analysis for Dummies (reread) — Matt Krantz
Far Side of the World (Book 10 Aubrey/Maturin Novels) — Patrick O'Brian
Treason's Harbor (Book 9 Aubrey/Maturin Novels) — Patrick O'Brian
R Inferno — Patrick Burns
When Breath Becomes Air — Paul Kalanithi
Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story — John Bloom
Seveneves (reread Part I) — Neal Stephenson
The Ionian Mission (Book 8 Aubrey/Maturin Novels) — Patrick O'Brian
Why Only Us: Language and Evolution — Berwick and Chomsky
Flow: The Pyschology of Optimal Experience — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Bright from the Start — Jill Stamm
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics — Carlo Rovelli
Serengetti Rules — Sean B. Carroll
Elements of Power — David S. Abraham
Omnivore's Dilemma — Michael Pollin
MaddAddam — Margaret Atwood
2015
The Year of the Flood — Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake — Margaret Atwood
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights — Salman Rushdie
Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse
Intelligence in the Flesh — Guy Claxton
A River Runs Again: India's Natural World in Crisis — Meera Subramanian
Seveneves — Neal Stephenson
Data and Goliath — Bruce Schneier
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch — Lewis Dartness
The Vital Question — Nick Lane
The Internet is not the Answer — Andrew Keene
Oxygen — Nick Lane
The Glass Bead Game — Hermann Hesse
A New History of Life — Peter Ward & Joe Kirschvink
The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology — Pier Luigi Luisi
Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius — Angeline Stoll Lillard
Ignorance: How it Drives Science — Stuart Firestein
The Peripheral — William Gibson
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days — Jessica Livingston
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future — Peter Thiel
Things that Matter — Charles Krauthammer
Innovator's Dilemma — Clayton Christenson
New Capitalist Manifesto: Building A Disruptively Better Business — Umair Haque
What's the Matter With Kansas — Thomas Frank
2014
Probably Approximately Correct — Leslie Valiant
The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking — Malcolm Gladwell
Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age — Paul Graham
Chapterhouse Dune — Frank Herbert
Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics — Nancy Forbes
Thinking Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
The Glass Cage — Nicholas Carr
No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State — Glenn Greenwald
Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R — Gareth James
The Third Window: Natural Life Beyond Newton and Darwin — Robert Ulanowicz
Heretics of Dune — Frank Herbert
God Emperor of Dune — Frank Herbert
Fundamental Analysis for Dummies — Matt Krantz
Liars and Outliers — Bruce Schneier
Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance — Julia Angwin
Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology, 12th Ed. — John E. Hall
Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages — Bruce A. Tate
The Circle — Dave Eggers
2013
Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception — Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, Susan Carnicero and Don Tennant
God Emperor of Dune (2nd reading) — Frank Herbert
Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality — Edward Frenkel
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking — Daniel C. Dennett
Developmental Biology, 10th Ed. — Scott F. Gilbert
Linux Kernel Development, 3rd Ed. — Robert Love
Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership — Thomas Cleary
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a rare 2nd reading) — Robert Pirsig
Rational Zen: The Mind of Dogen Zenji — Thomas Cleary
Zen Mind, Beginniner's Mind — Shunryu Suzuki
The Kitchen as Laboratory: Reflections on the Science of Food and Cooking — Cesar Vega, Job Ubbink, Erik van der Linden
What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained — Robert L. Wolke
Market Forces — Richard K. Morgan
Zen Reader — Thomas Cleary
The Diamond Sutra: The Perfection of Wisdom — Red Pine
Culinary Reactions — Simon Quellen Field
Surgeon's Mate (Book 7 Aubrey/Maturin Novels) — Patrick O'Brian
Fortune of War (Book 6 Aubrey/Maturin Novels) — Patrick O'Brian
Desolation Island (Book 5 Aubrey/Maturin Novels) — Patrick O'Brian
The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics — Leonard Susskind & George Hrabovsky
Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life — Robert Rosen
Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics and Life — Eric D Schneider & Dorion Sagan
2012
Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference — Judea Pearl
Emmy Noether's Wonderful Theorem — Dwight E. Neuenschwander
The Mauritius Command (Book 4 Aubrey/Maturin Novels) — Patrick O'Brian
Once a Warrior King: Memories of an Officer in Vietnam — David Donovan
Human Metabolism — J. R. Bronk
H.M.S. Surprise (Book 3 Aubrey/Maturin Novels) — Patrick O'Brian
The Prophet — Kahlil Gibran
Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life — Nick Lane
A Piaget Primer: How a Child Thinks; Revised Edition — Dorothy G. Singer, Tracey A. Revenson
The Shape of Inner Space: String Theory and the Geometry of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions — Shing-Tung Yau and Steve Nadis
Post Captain (Book 2 Aubrey/Maturin Novels) — Patrick O'Brian
Theories of Childhood: An Introduction to Dewey, Montessori, Erikson, Piaget & Vygotsky — Carol Garhart Mooney
The Backyard Beekeeper: An Absolute Beginner's Guide to Keeping Bees in Your Yard and Garden — Kim Flottum
Teaming With Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web — Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis
The Upanishads: Breath of the Eternal — Swami Prabhavananda
Underground — Suelette Dreyfus & Julian Assange
The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus — John Emsley
The Sense of an Ending — Julian Barnes
Woken Furies — Richard K. Morgan
River of Smoke — Amitav Ghosh
2011
The Biology of Cancer — Robert A. Weinberg
Reamde — Neal Stephenson
Moby Dick — Hermann Melville
Broken Angels — Richard K. Morgan
The Life of Pi — Yann Martel
The Windup Girl — Paolo Bacigalupi
Sea Runners — Ivan Doig
Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion Dollar Cybercrime Underground — Kevin Poulsen
Satanic Verses — Salman Rushdie
2010
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter — Richard Feynman
Zero History — William Gibson
Instruments of Amplification: Fun with Homemade Tubes, Transistors, and More — Peter H. Friedeichs
Homebrew Wind Power — Dan Bartmann & Dan Fink
The Dervish House — Ian McDonald
Flight of the Creative Class — Richard Florida
A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations — Daniel Fleisch
Wind Energy Basics: A Guide to Small and Micro Wind Systems — Paul Gipe
One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey — Sam Keith and Richard Proenneke
Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity — Stephen D. King
The Arabs: A History — Eugene Rogan
Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics was Reborn — Louisa Gilder
Ultimatum — Mathew Glass
Growing up bin Laden — Najwa bin Laden, Omar bin Laden, Jean Sasson
Cyberabad Days — Ian McDonald
2009
Master and Commander (Book 1 Aubrey/Maturin Novels) — Patrick O'Brian
River of Gods — Ian McDonald
Prolog Programming in Depth — Covington, Nute, & Vellino
Altered Carbon — Richard K. Morgan
The Age of Wonder — Richard Holmes
Netherland — Joseph O'Neill
Windpower Workshop — Hugh Piggott
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science — Edwin Jaynes (author) and G. Larry Bretthorst (editor)
God of Small Things — Arundhati Roy
Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles and the Efficient Market Fallacy — George Cooper
Of Beetles and Angels — Mawi Asgedom
Midnight's Children — Salman Rushdie
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed — Jared Diamond
Princeton Companion to Mathematics — Timothy Gowers, Editor
Dhammapada — Glenn Wallis (translator, commentator)
Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary — Linus Torvalds and David Diamond
2008
Hot, Flat and Crowded — Thomas Friedman
Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop-From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication — Neil Gershenfeld
Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins — Tom Perkins
Anathem — Neal Stephenson
Sea of Poppies — Amitav Ghosh
Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes — Mark Penn & E. Kinney Zalesne
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things — William McDonough
A Thousand Splendid Suns — Khaled Hosseini
Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas — Matthew O'Brien & Danny Mollohan
The Poincare Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe — Donal O'Shea
The Mathematician's Brain: A Personal Tour Through the Essentials of Mathematics and Some of the Great Minds Behind Them — David Ruelle
The Immune System — Peter Parham
2007
The High Performance Entrepreneur — Subroto Bagchi
The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad — Fareed Zakaria
The Blue Nowhere — Jeffrey Deaver
Super Crunchers: Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to be Smart — Ian Ayres
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA... — Steve Coll
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire — Chalmers Johnson
Spook Country — William Gibson
Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula: Cures Many Mathematical Ills — Paul Nahin
2006
Business Consulting: A Guide to How it Works and How to Make it Work — Gilbert Toppin and Fiona Czerniawska
Fischer Black And the Revolutionary Idea of Finance — Perry Mehrling
Dhalgren — Samuel R. Delaney
Arrowsmith — Sinclair Lewis
Babbit — Sinclair Lewis
Meta Math!: The Quest for Omega — Gregory Chaitan
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century — Thomas Friedman
Gamma: Exploring Euler's Constant — Julian Havil
2005
An Introduction to Support Vector Machines — Cristianini, Shawe-Taylor
Introduction to Protein Structure and Function — Gregory Petsko
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen — Harold McGee
System of the World — Neal Stephenson
2004
Abel's Proof: An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability — Peter Pesic
Practical Cryptography — Schneier, Ferguson
Fabric of the Universe — Brian Greene
Leviathan — Thomas Hobbes
Farenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
Oryx and Crake — Margaret Atwood
The Confusion — Neal Stephenson
Pattern Recognition — William Gibson
Quicksilver — Neal Stephenson
Advanced Object Oriented Analysis & Design Using UML — James J. Odell
Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML — Doug Rosenberg
Linked — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
2003
Building Embedded Linux Systems — Karim Yaghmour
Prime Obsession — John Derbyshire
Microbiology of the Cell, 4th Ed. — Bruce Alberts et al.
Neuromancer — William Gibson
Virtual Light — William Gibson
Idoru — William Gibson
The Millenium Problems — Keith Devlin
Five More Golden Rules — John Casti
Five Golden Rules — John Casti
Mona Lisa Overdrive — William Gibson
All Tomorrow's Parties — William Gibson
Where Mathematics Comes From — George Lakoff
802.11 Security — Potter & Fleck
The Unified Modeling Language User's Guide — Booch, et al
2002
Reading this year was dominated by studying for my FAA Private Pilot license.
Anna Karenina — Tolstoy
2001
Concurrent Programming in Java, 2nd Ed. — Doug Lea
Inside the Java2 Platform Security — Li Gong
The Big U — Neal Stephenson
Neither East Nor West — Christiane Bird
Secrets & Lies — Bruce Schneier
The Russia House — John LeCarre
Investigations — Stuart Kauffman
An Unquiet Mind — Kay Redfield Jamison
Abduction — Robin Cook
On Laughter and Forgetting — Milan Kundera
2000
Unbearable Lightness of Being — Milan Kundera
Pattern Hatching — John Vlissides
Sons of Profits — William Speidel
Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson
Zodiac — Neal Stephenson
Diamond Age — Neal Stephenson
An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms — Melanie Michell
E : The Story of a Number — Eli Maor
1999
Leave your dad's legacy alone, Brian!
Emergence : From Chaos to Order — John Holland
The World According to Wavelets — Barbara Burke Hubbard
The End of Certainty — Ilya Prigogine
The Astonishing Hypothesis — Francis Crick
Dune: House Atreides — Brian Herbert & Kevin Anderson
Faster — James Gleick
Mathematical Encounters of the 2nd Kind — Philip Davis
The Visionary Position — Fred Moody
Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson
Night of January 16th — Ayn Rand
Smilla's Sense of Snow — Peter Hoeg
Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity — John Holland
Firewalls and Internet Security — William R. Cheswick & Steven M. Bellovin
Applying UML and Patterns — Craig Larman
Learning the Bash Shell — Cameron Newham & Bill Rosenblatt
Pthreads Programming — Nichols, Buttlar, and Farrell
1998
For the New Intellectual — Ayn Rand
Inside Windows NT 2nd Edition — David Solomon
Inside Windows NT — Helen Custer
PCI System Architecture — Tom Shanley & Don Anderson
1997
How to Win Friends and Influence People — Dale Carnegie
Undaunted Courage — Stephen Ambrose
Overdrive: Bill Gates & the Race to Control Cyberspace — James Wallace
At Home in the Universe — Stuart Kauffman
Inside the C++ Object Model — Stanley Lippman
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software — Erich Gamma
The Annotated VRML 2.0 Reference Manual — Rikk Carey and Gavin Bell
TCP/IP Blueprints — Burk/ Bligh/ and Lee
1996
Windows NT Device Driver Book — Art Baker
C++ Programmers' Guide to STL — Mark Nelson
The Road Ahead — Bill Gates
Code Complete — Steve McConnell
Rapid Development — Steve McConnell
Dynamics of Software Development — Jim McCarthy
Debugging the Development Process — Steve Maguire
Writing Solid Code — Steve Maguire
1995
Anthem — Ayn Rand
We the Living — Ayn Rand
The 21st Century Jet — Karl Sabbagh
Design and Evolution of C++ — Bjarne Stroustrup
Thinking in C++ — Bruce Eckel
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies — Douglas Hofstadter
Fountainhead — Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand
Powershift — Alvin Toffler
Secret Agent — Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad
1994
Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Nuremberg Diary — Gustave M. Gilbert
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch — Alexander Solzhenitsen
Cancer Ward — Alexander Solzhenitsen
Gulag Archipelago I & II — Alexander Solzhenitsen
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Robert Pirsig
Inside the Third Reich — Albert Speer
Eudaemonic Pie — Thomas A. Bass
Out of Control: The New Biolog of Machines... — Kevin Kelly
Closing Time — Joseph Heller
Coming Plague — Laurie Garrett
In the Wake of Chaos — Stephen Kellert
What I can remember of my reading pre-'93
Dune — Frank Herbert
Chapterhouse Dune — Frank Herbert
Children of Dune — Frank Herbert
Dune Messiah — Frank Herbert
God Emperor of Dune — Frank Herbert
Heretics of Dune — Frank Herbert
Thus Spoke Zarathstra — Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Ecce Homo : How One Becomes What One Is — Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Human All Too Human — Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Portable Nietzsche — Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Kaufmann
Red Dragon — Thomas Harris
Crime and Punishment — Dostoyevski
Fathers and Sons — Turgenev
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman — Richard Feynman
What Do You Care What Other People Think — Richard Feynman
God and the New Physics — Paul Davies
The Mathematical Experience — Phillip Davis & Reuben Hersch
Turbulent Mirror — Briggs & Peat
Mathematics: The New Golden Age — Keith Devlin
The Tao of Physics — Fritjof Capra
Dancing Wu Li Masters — Gary Zukov
Does God Place Dice — Ian Stewart
Mathematics and the Unexpected — Ivars Ekeland
Archimedes Revenge — Paul Hoffman
Chaos — James Gleick
Catch 22 — Joseph Heller
Walden Two — BF Skinner
Exploring Complexity — Gregoire Nicolas & Ilya Prigogine
Order Out of Chaos — Isabelle Stengers & Ilya Prigogine
Complexity — Mitchel Waldrop
Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos — Roger Lewlyn
Media Lab — Steward Brand
Lost Horizons — Joseph Heller
Silmarillion — J.R.R. Tolkien
Return of the King — J.R.R. Tolkien
The Two Towers — J.R.R. Tolkien
Fellowship of the Ring — J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hobbit — J.R.R. Tolkien