Other books

2026

  1. The Power Elite
    C. Wright Mills
  2. American Cosmic
    D.W. Pasulka
  3. Forbidden Notebook
    Alba de Céspedes
  4. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
  5. Master and Man and Other Stories
    Leo Tolstoy
  6. Piranesi
    Susanna Clarke
  7. How to Hide an Empire
    Daniel Immerwahr
  8. The Gift of Rain
    Tan Twan Eng

2025

  1. In the First Circle
    Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
  2. Music for Silenced Voices
    Wendy Lesser
  3. No One Is Talking About This
    Patricia Lockwood
  4. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
    Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
  5. The Apprentice
    Jacques Pepin
  6. Braiding Sweetgrass
    Robin Wall Kimmerer
  7. Debt
    David Graeber
  8. Biography of X
    Catherine Lacey
  9. The Utopia of Rules
    David Graeber
  10. Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love
    Rebecca Vilkomerson
  11. Seeing Like a State
    James C. Scott
  12. Essential Works of Lenin
    Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
  13. Pride and Prejudice
    Jane Austen
  14. The Wall
    Marlen Haushofer
  15. 84, Charing Cross Road
    Helene Hanff
  16. The Ministry for the Future
    Kim Stanley Robinson
  17. Old Man's War
    John Scalzi
  18. Cathedral
    Raymond Carver
  19. Uncle Tom's Cabin
    Harriet Beecher Stowe
  20. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
    Omar El Akkad
  21. Pnin
    Vladimir Nabokov

2024

  1. James: A Novel
    Percival Everett
  2. The Husbands
    Holly Gramazio
  3. Gulliver's Travels
    Jonathan Swift
  4. Radical Acceptance
    Tara Brach
  5. The Message
    Ta-Nehisi Coates
  6. Doppelganger
    Naomi Klein
  7. Bloodlines
    Meital Yaniv
  8. Too Loud a Solitude
    Bohumil Hrabal
  9. Babel-17
    Samuel R. Delany
  10. The Dispossessed
    Ursula K. Le Guin
  11. The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
    Rashid Khalidi
  12. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
    Lindsay C. Gibson
  13. A Companion to Marx's Capital
    David Harvey

2023

  1. Kolyma Tales
    Varlan Shalamov
  2. The Solace of Open Spaces
    Gretel Ehrlich
  3. Saving Time
    Jenny Odell
  4. The Baron in the Trees
    Italo Calvino
  5. Why Marx Was Right
    Terry Eagleton
  6. Stay True
    Hua Hsu
  7. A People's Guide to Capitalism
    Hadas Thier
  8. Rest Is Resistance
    Tricia Hersey
  9. Unraveling
    Peggy Orenstein
  10. Bullshit Jobs
    David Graeber
  11. The Disappearance of Rituals
    Byung-Chul Han

2022

  1. China
    Cho-yun Hsu
  2. The Peripheral
    William Gibson
  3. Four Thousand Weeks
    Oliver Burkeman
  4. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
    Gabrielle Zevin
  5. Chilean Poet
    Alejandro Zambra
  6. Cassandra at the Wedding
    Dorothy Baker
  7. Red Cavalry
    Isaac Babel
  8. Shuggie Bain
    Douglas Stuart
  9. The Mountains Sing
    Que Mai Phan Nguyen
  10. One Two Three
    Laurie Frankel
  11. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
    Lewis Carroll
  12. Understanding Second Language Acquisition
    Lourdes Ortega
  13. Mrs. Dalloway
    Virginia Woolf
  14. Playing the Palace
    Paul Rudnick
  15. Either/Or
    Elif Batuman
  16. The Idiot
    Elif Batuman
  17. The Meaning of Matthew
    Judy Shepard
  18. How to Break Up With Your Phone
    Catherine Price
  19. Digital Minimalism
    Cal Newport
  20. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
    John Berendt
  21. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
    Ilan Pappe
  22. After the Prophet
    Lesley Hazleton
  23. Make It Stick
    Peter C. Brown
  24. The Hourglass Throne
    K.D. Edwards
  25. A Gentleman in Moscow
    Amor Towles
  26. Never Split the Difference
    Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
  27. Enemies and Neighbors
    Ian Black
  28. Minor Feelings
    Cathy Park Hong
  29. Priestdaddy
    Patricia Lockwood
  30. There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job
    Last accessed on
  31. How Not to Die Alone
    Richard Roper
  32. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
    Shunryu Suzuki
  33. Spectrum of Ecstasy
    Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen
  34. Seeing That Frees
    Rob Burbea
  35. That Old Country Music
    Kevin Barry
  36. Chinese Grammar Wiki BOOK
    John Pasden
  37. Tell the Wolves I'm Home
    Carol Rifka Brunt
  38. Moonwalking With Einstein
    Joshua Foer
  39. Bel Canto
    Ann Patchett
  40. The Tsar of Love and Techno
    Anthony Marra
  41. Severance
    Ling Ma
  42. The Weddings
    Alexander Chee
  43. The Hanged Man
    K. D. Edwards
  44. These Precious Days
    Ann Patchett
  45. Five Tuesdays in Winter
    Lily King
  46. The Heart's Invisible Furies
    John Boyne
  47. Harlem Shuffle
    Colson Whitehead
  48. Kink
    R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell
  49. Afterparties
    Anthony Veasna So
  50. Love in the Big City
    Sang Young Park and Anton Hur
  51. Kudos
    Rachel Cusk
  52. Transit
    Rachel Cusk
  53. Outline
    Rachel Cusk
  54. Borrowed Time
    Paul Monette
  55. The World Atlas of Coffee
    James Hoffmann

2021

  1. The Second Self
    Sherry Turkle
  2. The Empathy Diaries
    Sherry Turkle
  3. Death's End
    Cixin Liu
  4. First Love and Other Sorrows
    Harold Brodkey
  5. Live More Think Less
    Pia Callesen
  6. Tell Me What You Want
    Justin J. Lehmiller
  7. Thinking in Systems
    Donella H. Meadows
  8. The Sabbath World
    Judith Shulevitz
  9. And the Band Played On
    Randy Shilts
  10. We Both Laughed in Pleasure
    Lou Sullivan, Ellis Martin, Zach Ozma, and Susan Stryker
  11. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
    George Saunders
  12. Atomic Habits
    James Clear
  13. Everything in Its Place
    Dan Charnas
  14. Demon-Haunted World
    Carl Sagan
  15. Dead Souls
    Nikolay Gogol and Robert A. Maguire
  16. Self-Therapy
    Jay Earley
  17. Death in Her Hands
    Ottessa Moshfegh
  18. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
    Lori Gottlieb
  19. Gowanus
    Joseph Alexiou
  20. Polysecure
    Jessica Fern, Eve Rickert, and Nora Samaran
  21. Euphoria
    Lily King
  22. It's Not Always Depression
    Hilary Jacobs Hendel
  23. Please Understand Me II
    David Keirsey
  24. Boys & Sex
    Peggy Orenstein
  25. Genius & Anxiety
    Norman Lebrecht
  26. On Photography
    Susan Sontag
  27. Housekeeping
    Marilynne Robinson
  28. Man's Search for Meaning
    Viktor E. Frankl
  29. Gene Smith's Sink
    Sam Stephenson
  30. Thanks for the Feedback
    Douglas Stone, Sheila Heen

2020

  1. The Last Samurai
    Helen DeWitt
  2. What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat
    Aubrey Gordon
  3. Ashtanga Yoga
    Gregor Maehle
  4. A Pale View of Hills
    Kazuo Ishiguro
  5. An Artist of the Floating World
    Kazuo Ishiguro
  6. Mourning Diary
    Roland Barthes and Richard Howard
  7. Fragrant Palm Leaves
    Thich Nhat Hanh and His Holiness The Dalai Lama
  8. The Yoga of Breath
    Richard Rosen
  9. One Simple Thing
    Eddie Stern and Deepak Chopra
  10. The Night Watchman
    Louise Erdrich
  11. The Art of Vinyasa
    Richard Freeman, Mary Taylor
  12. Introduction to Tantra
    Lama Yeshe, Philip Glass, and Jonathan Landaw
  13. The Socrates Express
    Eric Weiner
  14. The Magical Language of Others
    E. J. Koh
  15. Writers & Lovers
    Lily King
  16. Writing to Learn
    William Zinsser
  17. Under the Banner of Heaven
    Jon Krakauer
  18. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
    Samin Nosrat
  19. To Kill a Mockingbird
    Harper Lee
  20. How to Take Smart Notes
    Sönke Ahrens
  21. The Great Mental Models
    Shane Parrish, Rhiannon Beaubien
  22. Surviving Autocracy
    Masha Gessen
  23. Restless Empire
    Odd Arne Westad
  24. Manual of Insight
    Mahasi Sayadaw
  25. When Awareness Becomes Natural
    Sayadaw U Tejaniya
  26. Ninety Percent of Everything
    Rose George
  27. The Awakening Body
    Reginald A. Ray
  28. The Glass Hotel
    Emily St. John Mandel
  29. Days of Distraction
    Alexandra Chang
  30. The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory
    Stephen W. Porges
  31. Don't-Know Mind
    Richard Shrobe
  32. The Heart of Thoreau's Journals
    Odell Shepard
  33. Endurance
    Scott Kelly
  34. Magic for Liars
    Sarah Gailey
  35. Catch and Kill
    Ronan Farrow
  36. Art & Fear
    David Bayles, Ted Orland
  37. The Dutch House
    Ann Patchett
  38. Designer Relationships
    Mark Michaels

2019

  1. From the First Bite
    Kay Sheppard
  2. Trick Mirror
    Jia Tolentino
  3. The 5 Choices
    Kory Kogon, Adam Merrill, Leena Rinne
  4. Eileen
    Ottessa Moshfegh
  5. Based on a True Story
    Norm Macdonald
  6. The Topeka School
    Ben Lerner
  7. Year of the Monkey
    Patti Smith
  8. Sm 101
    Jay Wiseman
  9. Love in Abundance
    Kathy Labriola
  10. The Body Keeps the Score
    Bessel van der Kolk MD
  11. Beloved
    Toni Morrison
  12. Conversations With Friends
    Sally Rooney
  13. The Ethical Slut
    Janet W. Hardy, Dossie Easton
  14. Jitterbug Perfume
    Tom Robbins
  15. Coming to My Senses
    Alyssa Harad
  16. Trust Exercise
    Susan Choi
  17. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
    Ocean Vuong
  18. Radicalized
    Cory Doctorow
  19. How to Do Nothing
    Jenny Odell
  20. The Great Believers
    Rebecca Makkai
  21. Hold Tight
    Christopher Bram
  22. There There
    Tommy Orange
  23. So Here's the Thing . . .
    Alyssa Mastromonaco
  24. My Sister, the Serial Killer
    Oyinkan Braithwaite
  25. Cræft
    Alexander Langlands
  26. Educated
    Tara Westover
  27. Managing Humans
    Michael Lopp
  28. The Remains of the Day
    Kazuo Ishiguro
  29. The Swimming-Pool Library
    Alan Hollinghurst
  30. Eat to Live
    Joel Fuhrman
  31. My Year of Rest and Relaxation
    Ottessa Moshfegh
  32. A Wizard of Earthsea
    Ursula K. Le Guin
  33. A Lesser Photographer
    CJ Chilvers

2018

  1. The Line of Beauty
    Alan Hollinghurst
  2. A Manual for Cleaning Women
    Lucia Berlin, Stephen Emerson, and Lydia Davis
  3. Less
    Andrew Sean Greer
  4. The Fifth Risk
    Michael Lewis
  5. The Waitress Was New
    Dominique Fabre and Jordan Stump
  6. Your Duck Is My Duck
    Deborah Eisenberg
  7. The Odd Woman and the City
    Vivian Gornick
  8. The City and the Pillar
    Gore Vidal
  9. Maurice
    E.M. Forster
  10. Edinburgh
    Alexander Chee
  11. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
    Alexander Chee
  12. Essentialism
    Greg McKeown
  13. Secret of the Vajra World
    Reginald A. Ray
  14. A Trackless Path
    Ken McLeod
  15. Florida
    Lauren Groff
  16. Reflections on Silver River
    Ken I. McLeod
  17. Shantaram
    Gregory David Roberts
  18. Calypso
    David Sedaris
  19. Hold Me Tight
    Sue Johnson
  20. Shenzhen 25 Secrets - The Locals Travel Guide for Your Trip to Shenzhen
    Antonio Araujo
  21. Men Explain Things to Me
    Rebecca Solnit
  22. Small Great Things
    Jodi Picoult
  23. Unorthodox
    Deborah Feldman
  24. Tales of the Dying Earth
    Jack Vance
  25. The Violent Bear It Away
    Flannery O'Connor
  26. The Burgess Boys
    Elizabeth Strout
  27. My Name Is Lucy Barton
    Elizabeth Strout
  28. One of the Boys
    Daniel Magariel
  29. All the Pieces Matter
    Jonathan Abrams
  30. Play It as It Lays
    Joan Didion
  31. The Spaceship Next Door
    Gene Doucette
  32. The Left Hand of Darkness
    Ursula K. Le Guin
  33. Everything I Never Told You
    Celeste Ng
  34. Ready Player One
    Ernest Cline
  35. On Being a Photographer
    Bill Jay and David Hurn

2017

  1. Strange Weather in Tokyo
    Hiromi Kawakami, Allison Markin Powell (Translator)
  2. Mao II
    Don DeLillo
  3. American Witness
    RJ Smith
  4. Devotion
    Patti Smith
  5. The Unconsoled
    Kazuo Ishiguro
  6. The Nix
    Nathan Hill
  7. What Happened
    Hillary Rodham Clinton
  8. Sour Heart
    Jenny Zhang
  9. Diane Arbus
    Patricia Bosworth
  10. City of Night
    John Rechy
  11. When Women Were Birds
    Terry Tempest Williams
  12. The Rules Do Not Apply
    Ariel Levy
  13. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    Tom Wolfe
  14. Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?
    Alyssa Mastromonaco
  15. Sweet Caress
    William Boyd
  16. Gilead
    Marilynne Robinson
  17. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
    Jeanette Winterson
  18. Theft by Finding
    David Sedaris
  19. Where'd You Go, Bernadette
    Maria Semple
  20. Broken River
    J. Robert Lennon
  21. Understanding Exposure
    Bryan Peterson
  22. The Manager's Path
    Camille Fournier
  23. Don't Be a Jerk
    Brad Warner
  24. Insomniac City
    Bill Hayes

2016

  1. At the Existentialist Café
    Sarah Bakewell
  2. The Idiot
    Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  3. Kitchen Confidential
    Anthony Bourdain
  4. Today Will Be Different
    Maria Semple
  5. Tibetan Sound Healing
    Tenzin Wangyal-Rinpoche
  6. The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep
    Tenzin Wangyal, Mark Dahl (Editor)
  7. Peak
    Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool
  8. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
    Haruki Murakami and Philip Gabriel
  9. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
    Frederick Douglass
  10. Washington Square
    Henry James
  11. On Beauty
    Zadie Smith

2015

  1. The Sense of Style
    Steven Pinker
  2. White Teeth
    Zadie Smith
  3. Lives of Girls and Women
    Alice Munro
  4. Mistborn
    Brandon Sanderson
  5. Just Kids
    Patti Smith
  6. M Train
    Patti Smith
  7. The Heart Goes Last
    Margaret Atwood
  8. Fourth of July Creek
    Smith Henderson
  9. Between the World and Me
    Ta-Nehisi Coates
  10. The Power of Habit
    Charles Duhigg
  11. The Organized Mind
    Daniel J. Levitin
  12. Wolf in White Van
    John Darnielle
  13. Remote
    Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
  14. The 4-Hour Workweek
    Timothy Ferriss
  15. Lightspeed Magazine, June 2015
    Lightspeed Magazine, Seanan McGuire, John Chu, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Chaz Brenchley, Rose Lemberg, ...
  16. Getting Things Done
    David Allen
  17. Creativity, Inc.
    Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
  18. Cat's Eye
    Margaret Atwood
  19. Feminism Is for Everybody
    bell hooks
  20. The Color of Magic
    Terry Pratchett
  21. Salt Sugar Fat
    Michael Moss
  22. The Time Paradox
    Philip Zimbardo, John Boyd
  23. So Good They Can't Ignore You
    Cal Newport
  24. Genesis
    Bernard Beckett
  25. Lila
    Marilynne Robinson

2014

  1. The Name of the Wind
    Patrick Rothfuss
  2. Writing Down the Bones
    Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron
  3. The Last of the Wine
    Mary Renault
  4. This Changes Everything
    Naomi Klein
  5. Giovanni's Room
    James Baldwin
  6. The Passage
    Justin Cronin
  7. Bright Shiny Morning
    James Frey
  8. Gravity's Rainbow
    Thomas Pynchon
  9. Nicely Said
    Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee
  10. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
    Vladimir Nabokov
  11. Drown
    Junot Diaz
  12. Dance Dance Dance
    Haruki Murakami
  13. Pale Fire
    Vladimir Nabokov
  14. The Erotic Mind
    Jack Morin
  15. The Yiddish Policemen's Union
    Michael Chabon
  16. Stepping Out of Self-Deception
    Rodney Smith
  17. South of the Border, West of the Sun
    Haruki Murakami and Philip Gabriel
  18. The Book of Disquiet
    Fernando Pessoa

2013

  1. On Writing Well
    William Zinsser
  2. Evolving Dharma
    Jay Michaelson
  3. Daily Rituals
    Mason Currey
  4. Novice to Master
    Soko Morinaga and Belenda Attaway Yamakawa
  5. Manage Your Day-to-Day
    Jocelyn K. Glei, 99U
  6. The Art of Just Sitting
    John Daido Loori (Editor)
  7. Introduction to Phenomenology
    Robert Sokolowski
  8. Demon Princes
    Jack Vance

2012

  1. Quiet
    Susan Cain
  2. Cloud Atlas
    David Mitchell
  3. Wisdom Eccentrics
    Ngakpa Chögyam
  4. The Instructions
    Adam Levin
  5. Nothing Personal
    Nirmala
  6. War and Peace (Cambridge World Classics) Critical Edition
    Leo Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoi, Cambridge World Classics, Christopher Hong, Louise Maude, and Aylmer Maude
  7. Freedom
    Jonathan Franzen

2011

  1. Quintessential Dzogchen
    Tulku Rinpoche Urgyen, Marcia Binder Schmidt, and Erik Pema Kunsang
  2. The End of Your World
    Adyashanti
  3. The Power of Now
    Eckhart Tolle
  4. Food for the Heart
    Ajahn Chah, Jack Kornfield (Foreword), Ajahn Amaro (Introduction)
  5. The Jhanas
    Ajahn Brahmavamso, Robert James Toy, and Shanelle Sun

2010

  1. Naked
    David Sedaris
  2. Infinite Jest
    David Foster Wallace
  3. Zen to Done
    Leo Babauta
  4. The Corrections
    Jonathan Franzen
  5. Free Play
    Stephen Nachmanovitch
  6. The Creative Habit
    Twyla Tharp and Mark Reiter

Free Play

Stephen Nachmanovitch

My 4 highlights

  • Practice
  • The easiest way to do art is to dispense with success and failure altogether and just get on with it.
  • drops
  • The word enthusiasm is Greek for “filled with theos”—filled with God.