Books

  • A World Appears by Michael Pollan

    Pollan has a rare talent. He goes beyond journalism into something harder to name — a deep, patient synthesis of science, history, and lived experience that makes even the most tangled topics feel useful and graspable. He did it with food in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He did it with drugs. And A World Appears is him doing it with the biggest, strangest question of all: what is it actually like to have a mind?

  • The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

    Debord’s central argument is that the “spectacle” goes well beyond what most of us picture when we hear that word — the Super Bowl, the Olympics, a presidential election. He argues that any representation of the world that turns people into passive spectators qualifies.

  • Great Hiking Trails of the World by Karen Berger

    Great Hiking Trails of the World by Karen Berger is a coffee table reference book put out by Rizzoli. I’ve collected nine of these Rizzoli books now, and they’re all lovely — the kind of thing you keep on the coffee table not as decoration but because you actually flip through them.

  • Miracles & Wonder by Elaine Pagels

    Pagels is one of the original researchers of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts and a lot of the Coptic and Gnostic texts that scholars are still working through today. She’s been doing serious, primary-source work in this space for decades. I did not know she was still actively publishing so it’s genuinely impressive to see her add another strong book to an already massive bibliography.

  • A History of the World in 500 Walks by Sarah Baxter

    The premise is straightforward: if history happened in real places, you can go stand in those places. And when you do, history stops being a mental movie and starts feeling like what it actually was — real people, real terrain, probably a lot more boring and weird than your imagination gives it credit for.

  • Gospel of Thomas Edited by Stevan Davies

    I picked up the Gospel of Thomas recently while working through Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. I hadn’t read the Gospel of Thomas in a very long time, and MacCulloch’s treatment of the early church controversies reminded me just how much insight this text provides.

  • India: A Cultural Journey by Putumayo

    India: A Cultural Journey is a coffee table reference book — large-scale photography paired with written context at the opening of each chapter. It’s not a history. It’s not a travel guide. It’s more of a visual immersion into what India looks and feels like culturally.

  • Electra by Sophocles

    Electra follows the family of Agamemnon after the Battle of Troy — specifically his daughter Electra, who is consumed by grief and rage over her father’s murder and her desire for justice.

  • 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

    I picked this one up at the library with a pretty specific checklist in mind: I wanted a long novel, a Latin American novel, and something with a thread of magical realism running through it. I already love the way magical realism shows up in Haruki Murakami, and I’ve always had a soft spot for Southern Gothic — so a book that pulls both of those threads into a sweeping multigenerational epic seemed like it would check every box.

  • Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

    The Ministry for the Future is one of the better science fiction novels about climate change that I’ve read. It’s fast-paced, well-written, and grounded in realistic scenarios. The setting works. The characters work. The whole thing works.

  • The Redeemer by Jo Nesbo

    The Redeemer is not Nesbø at his absolute best, but “not his best” for Nesbø still means it’s a very good book. The plot pulls Harry Hole into the world of the Salvation Army, a contract killing, and a web of secrets that gets darker the further in you go.

  • Siblings Without Rivalry by Adele Faber

    If you’ve read How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk (also by Faber), you already know the format: real-world scenarios, illustrated examples, and a very practical, non-preachy tone. Siblings Without Rivalry follows the same approach and lands just as well.

  • Soul Boom by Rainn Wilson

    I stumbled across Rainn Wilson’s podcast Soul Boom the way I stumble across most things I didn’t know I was interested in — serendipitously. One episode led to another, and after just a few episodes I had a decent sense of what he’s been up to since The Office wrapped. The short version: he’s been on a genuine, years-long mission to make big philosophical and spiritual questions feel normal to talk about. Soul Boom is the book version of that mission.

  • Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson

    Back when I was a freshman in college, I picked up Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson (a pen name) while falling down a very specific rabbit hole — the world of 1980s South Florida hustle-culture business people. Mail order, media, direct response marketing. Not exactly the role models section of a business school syllabus. But it’s one that I picked up – and stuck with me.

  • Click by Ori Baufmann

    Click by Ori and Rom Brafman is a fun, fast little pop science book about why some relationships just…click. Why do some people go from strangers to fast friends in an afternoon while others stay awkward acquaintances for years?

  • The Natural Navigator by Tristan Gooley

    The Natural Navigator by Tristan Gooley is part of a trilogy — alongside How to Read Water and How to Read Nature — and the whole series is about learning to read the world around you rather than a screen in your hand.

  • Best American Short Stories 2015

    I picked up The Best American Short Stories 2015 at a used bookstore sale. The price was right, the premise was appealing – a curated collection of the best short fiction published that year – and I’ve always been curious about the short story as a format.

  • Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco

    I picked up Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco for the same reason I pick up most literary fiction I know nothing about — it won a pile of awards and the setting intrigued me. A murder mystery that opens in New York City and winds its way back to Manila? That sounded like exactly the kind of ambitious, globe-spanning novel I’d enjoy.

  • The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

    The Complete Stories is the only collection that includes every short story Flannery O’Connor ever wrote — including “The Geranium,” which she submitted as part of her master’s thesis at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. If you’re going to read her, this is the one to get.

  • Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson

    I don’t usually read best-selling political books of the moment. They feel too tied to whatever news cycle is happening right now, and I’d rather read something that has aged a bit.

    But it feels like we’re at a genuine inflection point in American politics. The party coalitions that formed in the late 60s and early 70s—now going on 50 years old—are breaking down.

  • Consolations by David Whyte

    Consolations is a collection of short essays and poems. Each entry is just a page or two—a few hundred words at most. But Whyte packs an incredible amount of meaning into that small space.

  • Discourses by Epictetus

    I picked up The Discourses by Epictetus from Standard Ebooks, then ended up buying the print Penguin edition as well. Stoic philosophy has had waves of popularity over the years, and I love that the most recent wave has brought a blossoming of new translations, resources, and accessible texts.

  • Useful Not True by Derek Sivers

    The core premise is straightforward: humans create stories and frameworks that aren’t literally true, but are still incredibly useful. Not useful in a “white lie” kind of way. Useful in a “this is how civilization actually functions” kind of way.

  • America’s Great Forest Trails by Tim Palmer

    I picked up America’s Great Forest Trails by Tim Palmer after seeing it on a shelf at my local bookstore. It’s a coffee table reference book highlighting America’s great forest trails—of which we have thousands and thousands of miles.

  • Deep Tech by Pablos Holman

    Deep Tech by Pablos Holman is a book by one of the most perennial hard tech entrepreneurs in America. Holman is known for his work at Blue Origin and Intellectual Ventures, and he currently runs a venture capital firm focused on what he calls “hard tech” — using technology to solve problems in the physical world rather than in the software or digital world that has been the focus of Silicon Valley for so long.

  • How To Read The Bible by Harvey Cox

    How to Read the Bible by Harvey Cox is an accessible, nuanced, and genuinely creative introduction to engaging with the best-selling and most influential single book in the world.

  • This Dark Road To Mercy by Wiley Cash

    This Dark Road to Mercy is another memorable novel from Cash. Without getting into too many spoilers, the book follows two young sisters in 1990s North Carolina who find themselves on the run with their estranged father. It’s a tense, propulsive story that weaves together themes of family, poverty, and redemption against the backdrop of Appalachian culture.

  • The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays by Albert Camus

    The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus is one of those books I’ve read a couple of times and finally just decided to own. I picked up the Vintage Books edition specifically because it includes bonus essays — particularly “Summer in Algiers” — that I think represent some of Camus’s best work.

  • Antimemetics by Nadia Asparouhova

    The core premise of antimemetics is deceptively simple: we live in an age where ideas spread faster than ever, and yet some ideas don’t spread at all. Not because they’re obscure or unimportant — but because of something specific about their nature.

    Asparouhova calls these antimemes.

  • Camping Georgia by Jimmy Jacobs

    Camping Georgia by Jimmy Jacobs is a Falcon Guide focused on finding good tent camping spots at established campgrounds throughout Georgia.

  • Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss

    I picked up Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss after getting so much value from The 4-Hour Work Week. That book did an excellent job helping me reframe and understand the world of business and productivity, so I figured this would be another solid read.

  • Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

    I picked up Oedipus Rex as part of reading through the Theban trilogy. I was browsing Standard Ebooks and the collection caught my eye. I hadn’t read it since a required literature class in college, so I figured it was time to revisit and see how it held up.

  • The First Man by Albert Camus

    The First Man is the manuscript that was found at Albert Camus’s side after his death in a car accident in 1960. It sat unpublished for decades — held back by his estate, his daughter and granddaughter — before finally being released to the public.

  • Antigone by Sophocles

    I read Antigone by Sophocles after finishing Oedipus Rex. Both are part of the Theban Trilogy, which I grabbed from Standard Ebooks.

  • Network State by Balaji Srinavasen

    The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan is a book I picked up mainly because my work is tech-adjacent, and for a while this book was everywhere among the tech elite. Even though it seemed ridiculous on the cover, I wanted to understand what my peers were paying attention to.

  • Behave by Robert Sapolsky

    I picked up Behave out of frustration. The popular discourse around brain chemistry had gotten to be too much. Dopamine…

  • The Woman Behind The New Deal by Kirstin Downey

    Perkins may have had more direct impact on the everyday lives of ordinary Americans than almost anyone else in the 20th century. The 40-hour work week. The minimum wage. Social Security. Child labor laws. Unemployment insurance. These aren’t abstractions — they are the literal architecture of how Americans work, save, retire, and survive hard times. Frances Perkins built most of that architecture.

    That was a serious underestimate.

  • Superbloom by Nicholas Carr

    Superbloom by Nicholas Carr is the latest book from the author of The Shallows and The Glass Cage. It’s about how technologies of connection tear us apart—or more precisely, how they scale up both the best and worst of human nature to unprecedented heights.

  • Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

    A Study in Scarlet is really two completely separate stories. One takes place in Victorian London with Holmes and Watson investigating a murder. The other takes place in the American West—Utah, specifically—decades earlier.

  • American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag

    I picked up American Philosophy, A Love Story after reading Kaag’s earlier book Hiking with Nietzsche and coming across several of his essays in The Atlantic. John Kaag is, in my opinion, one of the most talented working writers who also happens to be an actual practicing professor of philosophy. That combination — the rigor of the academic and the accessibility of a great essayist — makes him worth following closely.

  • Hiking with Nietzsche by John Kaag

    I picked up Hiking with Nietzsche after reading John Kaag’s book on American philosophy. He’s a fabulous writer who uses personal anecdotes to weave deeper, more modern, and more personal connections to big philosophical ideas.

  • Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

    Tobacco Road follows the desperate lives of the Lester family, poor white sharecroppers struggling to survive in Depression-era Georgia. The novel’s unflinching portrayal of poverty and moral degradation shocked readers when it was published in 1932, sparking controversy while highlighting the harsh realities of rural Southern life.

  • Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill by John Stuart Mill

    The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill is a Modern Library compendium of Mill’s most famous works—On Liberty, The Subjugation of Women, Utilitarianism, and more. I bought it years ago for a college philosophy class and ended up keeping it, not because I reference it constantly, but because rereading essays like On Liberty reminded me of something important.

  • Field Guide To The Cohutta Wilderness by Javier Velazquez

    A Field Guide to the Cohutta Wilderness by Javier Velazquez is a book I have wanted to exist in the world for so long that a couple years ago, I started sketching out whether I could write it myself. I am deeply grateful to the author for putting in the time and effort to create a proper field guide to the natural and environmental history of the Cohutta Mountains.

  • Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke

    The book argues that our brains weren’t designed for the modern world. We evolved in an environment of scarcity, where pleasure was rare and hard to come by. Now we live in what Lembke calls a “dopamine tsunami” – unlimited access to anything that feels good, all the time, right at our fingertips.

  • Ultimate Companion To Meat by Anthony Puharich

    I picked up this massive meat cookbook as part of a work project for a cooking website. I had no idea that the world of meat and meat cooking would be this in-depth and thorough. It was like going down a rabbit hole about a very specific culinary segment.

  • A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz

    A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz is a history travelogue that focuses on the nearly 300 years between Columbus’s discovery of America and the Declaration of Independence.

  • Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill

    Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill is a 1914 book on Christian mystical practice. It’s available for free on Standard Ebooks, which is one of my favorite resources on the internet for beautifully formatted public domain books.

  • The Soccer Book by DK

    The Soccer Book provides a comprehensive breakdown of the world’s most popular sport, combining technical analysis with historical context and modern gameplay evolution.

  • Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

    In 2006, before his presidential run, then-Senator Barack Obama published The Audacity of Hope. It was part of a long tradition of presidential hopefuls publishing sort of a detailed personal & policy driven vision for the country. For myself, it was the only book of this genre that I’d ever read before or since. So, of course, I think it’s far and away the best.

  • Books Read in 2025

    Everything I read in 2025! It was a weird year for book selection. It was much more of a “cluster read” than a deliberate choice. But – serendipity felt good.

  • America’s National Historic Trails by Karen Berger

    America’s National Historic Trails is a lovely coffee table book that covers some of the hidden gems of America’s recreation & preservation systems (i.e., lesser known than the National Park system or National Scenic Trails system)

  • Natural History by DK

    I absolutely love DK books. In a world of AI and infinite access to information, they are geniuses at keeping…

  • Cup of Gold by John Steinbeck

    Welsh farm boy Henry Morgan becomes notorious Caribbean pirate, only to find achieving his wildest dreams brings cruel disappointment. Excellent novel!

  • The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey

    Nixey’s “The Darkening Age” reveals how Christian zealots systematically destroyed classical civilization after gaining power – an excellent, well-researched read.

  • Heretic by Catherine Nixey

    Heretic by Catherine Nixey is about the hundreds, if not thousands, of versions of Christianity that flourished in the hundreds…

  • Books Read In 2024

    This year was a pretty random year with what I read. It was purely driven by interests at the moment rather than any plan or queue.

  • Blighted by Margaret Stagmeier

    Blighted by Margaret Stagmeier is a book about the housing crisis that plagues American cities, with a specific focus on…

  • Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

    Slow Productivity by Cal Newport challenges the frenzied pace of the modern workplace, suggesting that our relentless rush to be…

  • Loserville by Clayton Tutor

    “Loserville” by Clayton Tutor examines Atlanta’s turbulent relationship with its professional sports teams. Beginning in the 1960s, the city’s leaders used sports to redefine Atlanta’s image, but struggled with poor team performances and weak support. Despite this, sports have significantly contributed to Atlanta’s identity and development.

  • American The Beautiful? by Blythe Roberson

    “American The Beautiful? by Blythe Roberson is a travel book across America’s National Parks but falls short in style and pacing, resembling TikToks instead of traditional travel writing. Despite extensive park visits and commentary on America’s contradictions, the lack of context and background detracts from the experience, unlike works by Bill Bryson.”