The following is an incomplete list, in no particular order, of books that have shaped my mind over the years:
Administrative Behavior by Herbert A. Simon
Models of My Life by Herbert A. Simon
If I read a book and it makes my whole body feel so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
— Emily Dickinson
View with a Grain of Sand by Wislawa Szymborska
Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
A Mencken Chrestomathy by H. L. Mencken
Development Projects Observed by Albert O. Hirschman
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman
The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
Passion and Craft by Michael Szenberg (Ed.)
The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams (1945–1957)
On Chinese Gardens by Chen Congzhou
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu
The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell
Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
— Bertrand Russell
River Town by Peter Hessler
Proper Doctoring by David Mendel
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Sonnets from the Portuguese and Other Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and
to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly… On this sandy and false foundation we scheme
for social improvement and dress our political platforms…
— John Maynard Keynes
The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Joseph A. Schumpeter
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out
in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom
of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
— Jack London
The Reckoning by David Halberstam
The Plague by Albert Camus
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman
Pioneer by Hugh Hawkins
The Making of Modern Medicine by Michael Bliss
Love Poems by Pablo Neruda
The Sirens’ Song by Maurice Blanchot