My book recommendations (updated annually)

This is a list of my personal favourite books and ones that stuck with me, shaped my thinking, or were particularly memorable. Not necessarily the most well-written.

I update this list each December with the best books that I read for the first time in that year, regardless of when they were originally released.

2023 book recommendations

• Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub
• For Blood and Money: Billionaires, Biotech, and the Quest for a Blockbuster Drug
• Breakthrough: The Discovery of Modern Medicines at Janssen

2022 book recommendations

• The Dispossessed
• Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
• Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

2021 book recommendations

• Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom
• Principles of Neural Information Theory: Computational Neuroscience and Metabolic Efficiency
• The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
• The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
• The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• When Blood Breaks Down: Life Lessons from Leukemia
• Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

2020 book recommendations

• Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
• Brain Fables: The Hidden History of Neurodegenerative Diseases and a Blueprint to Conquer Them
• Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
• Good Enough: The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society
• I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self
• Nature: An Economic History
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• The Ancient Origins of Consciousness: How the Brain Created Experience
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb
• The Tartar Steppe
• The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel
• What Is Health?: Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design

2019 book recommendations

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
• Principles of Neural Design
• Quantum Computing for Everyone
• The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data
• The Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages
• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
• The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

2018 book recommendations

• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
• House of Leaves
• Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
• Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
• Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
• The Glass Bead Game
• To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

2017 book recommendations

• Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
• The Antidote: A Small Competitor Challenges the Drug Giants: Conquests in New Pharma
• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t
• Thinking, Fast and Slow
• When Breath Becomes Air

Earlier recommendations (mostly sci-fi)

• Blindsight
• Climbing Mount Improbable
• Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist
• Dune
• Embassytown
• Excession
• Feersum Endjinn
• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
• Look to Windward
• Perdido Street Station
• The Bone Clocks
• The Eighth Day of Creation
• The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene
• The Player of Games
• The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
• The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy