This is a running list of the books I’ve read this year. Anything I near-universally recommend is marked with a star and I linked to any reading notes I published.
You can also find lists from 2018, 2019, and 2020 as well as an index of my reading notes.
- Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 by Max Hastings.
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
- The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
- War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk.
- The Winds of War by Herman Wouk. ★
- The Best Service Is No Service by Bill Price and David Jaffe.
- The Aeneid translated by Shadi Bartsch.
- The Intellectual Life by A.G. Sertillanges.
- Awareness by Anthony De Mello.
- Content Design by Sarah Richards.
- How to Think Strategically by Greg Githens.
- The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr.
- Nero by John F. Drinkwater.
- Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks.
- On Writing Well by William Zinsser.
- Words That Work by Frank Luntz.
- Lost Horizon by James Hilton.
- War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin.
- Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan.
- The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab.
- The Great Sea by David Abulafia.
- How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. ★
- The Beggar Queen by Lloyd Alexander.
- The Kestrel by Lloyd Alexander.
- Westmark by Lloyd Alexander.
- How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. ★
- Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh.
- Hild by Nicola Griffith.
- The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama.
- Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt.
- Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem.
- The Golden Rhinoceros by François-Xavier Fauvelle.
- Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic by Leonard Berry and Kent Seltman.
- The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa.
- The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa.
- The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson.