Books

Nonfiction books I've read, loved, bought to read next, or some combination of the three.

• Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, Stewart Brand (2026)
• The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025, Dwarkesh Patel with Gavin Leech (2025)
• The Origins of Efficiency, Brian Potter (2025)
• Empire of AI, Karen Hao (2025)
• Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber (2024)
• What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, Randall Munroe (2022)
• The Universe, Andrew Cohen with Brian Cox (2021)
• Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein (2020)
• Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth, Edward Tufte (2020)
• Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, Peter Godfrey-Smith (2020)
• How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, Randall Munroe (2019)
• Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, Melanie Mitchell (2019)
• History of Information Graphics, Sandra Rendgen (2019)
• Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe, Steven Strogatz (2019)
• The Planets, Andrew Cohen with Brian Cox (2019)
• Why Only Us: Language and Evolution, Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky (2016)
• Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths (2016)
• Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, Cathy O’Neil (2016)
• Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, Peter Godfrey-Smith (2016)
• The Gene: An Intimate History, Siddhartha Mukherjee (2016)
• Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman (2015)
• Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, Randall Munroe (2015)
• What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, Randall Munroe (2014)
• Knowledge Is Beautiful, David McCandless (2014)
• Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, Michael Benson (2014)
• Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander (2013)
• In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World, Ian Stewart (2012)
• The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive, Brian Christian (2011)
• The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick (2011)
• Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, Guy Deutscher (2010)
• Complexity: A Guided Tour, Melanie Mitchell (2009)
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella H. Meadows (2008)
• Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, Andy Clark (2008)
• I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter (2007)
• The Book of General Ignorance, John Lloyd and John Mitchinson (2006)
• Beautiful Evidence, Edward Tufte (2006)
• The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention, Guy Deutscher (2005)
• Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students, Ellen Lupton (2004)
• Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag (2003)
• Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition, Michael Tomasello (2003)
• The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Michael Tomasello (1999)
• The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, Brian Greene (1999)
• On Language, Noam Chomsky (1998)
• Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, Edward Tufte (1997)
• Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time, Richard Feynman (1997)
• The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn, Richard Hamming (1996)
• The Craft of Research, Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams (1995)
• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Steven Pinker (1994)
• Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher, Richard Feynman (1994)
• Culture and Imperialism, Edward W. Said (1993)
• The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch (1991)
• Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte (1990)
• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, George Lakoff (1987)
• Chaos: Making a New Science, James Gleick (1987)
• QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard Feynman (1985)
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte (1983)
• The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett (1981)
• Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980)
• Cosmos, Carl Sagan (1980)
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter (1979)
• Orientalism, Edward W. Said (1978)
• On Photography, Susan Sontag (1977)
• Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, Paul Feyerabend (1975)
• Ways of Seeing, John Berger (1972)
• Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks, Maps, Jacques Bertin (1967)
• Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Karl Popper (1963)
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn (1962)
• The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper (1959)
• The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard (1958)
• Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953)