Book Recs

I always get vaguely annoyed when someone on a podcast, Twitter, etc. recommends a book out of the blue. I find myself saying “Why am I only just now hearing about this? Why don’t you post a list, all in one place, of the books you would recommend?”

Be the change, as they say…

Here are my recommendations. I almost exclusively read non-fiction books, so that’s most of what you’ll find here. This is a work-in-progress, and as of March 2022 it’s actively incomplete. I mainly wanted a placeholder to fill out later. 🙂

Last updated: March 11, 2022

  • Battle Cry of Freedom (James McPherson) – US Civil War
  • The Storm of War (Andrew Roberts) – World War II
  • Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing (Randall Stoss) – the ’90s tech industry, written before Steve Jobs’s world-transforming return to Apple
  • The Norman Conquest (Marc Morris) – exactly what you would expect a book called The Norman Conquest to be about
  • So Good They Can’t Ignore You (Cal Newport) – career development
  • Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down (J.E. Gordon) – engineering principles
  • The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Immanuel Kant) – morality, why it’s real, and how to think about it
  • Rick Perlstein’s 4-tome collection on the history of the conservative movement – if you only have time for one, go with Nixonland
  • Two great presidential memoirs – Ulysses S. Grant, Barack Obama

You can find all the books I’ve read on Goodreads. Some other good book lists depending on interest: