Books I've read

For the past few years I’ve been posting to this site each year the list of books I read that year, “ranked” from 1-5 stars. This page is, more or less, the combination of those lists (plus, eventually, and to the extent I can remember them, the books I read before I started compiling these lists). I'll continue to do the end-of-year posts, but this page will be updated with new books as I finish them.

★★★★★

• Synchronicity: The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect by Paul Halpern
• Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control by Stephen Kinzer
• In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World by Ian Stewart
• Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson
• East West Street: On the Origins of 'Genocide' and 'Crimes Against Humanity’ by Philippe Sands
• One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon by Charles Fishman
• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
• Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld
• Patek Philippe: The Authorized Biography by Nicholas Foulkes
• Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins by Annie Jacobsen
• Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution by Rebecca Stott
• Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shalin
• The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins
• Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson
• The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick
• Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory by Edward Larson
• The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
• Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane
• Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
• How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
• The Most Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for my father…and finding the Zodiac Killer by Gary Stewart
• Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
• The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers by Tom Standage
• The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot
• Dennis Nilsen by Russ Coffey
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• Green River, Running Red: The Real Story of the Green River Killer—America’s Deadliest Serial Murderer by Ann Rule
• The Wristwatch Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Mechanical Wristwatches by Ryan Schmidt
• The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman
• 1924: The Year That Made Hitler by Peter Ranges
• Hitler: A Biography by Ian Kershaw
• The Michigan Murders: The True story of the Ypsilanti Ripper’s reign of terror by Edward Keyes
• Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler
• A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination by Philip Shenon
• Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder
• The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton by Jefferson Morley
• The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack
• The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos by Leonard Mlodinow
• How to Find Zodiac by Jarett Kobek
• Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V. S. Ramachandran

★★★★☆

• What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics” by Adam Becker
• QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman
• The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku
• Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects by Chad Orzel
• Quantum Physics: What Everyone Needs to Know by Michael Raymer
• The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous
• A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage
• Time Travel: A History by James Gleick
• Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime by Sean Carroll
• Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel by Michio Kaku
• The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli’s
• The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal. by Evan Ratliff
• Siege: Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• Where Angels Tread Lightly: The Assassination of President Kennedy Volume 1 by John Newman
• Countdown to Darkness: The Assassination of President Kennedy Volume 2 by John Newman
• Into the Storm: The Assassination of President Kennedy Volume 3 by John Newman
• The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
• Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
• The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris
• One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson
• God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens
• A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance—Portrait of an Age by William Manchester
• Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case by James DiEugenio
• Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin
• The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ by Roger Stone
• A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn
• Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune by Bill Dedman
• Society without God by Phil Zuckerman
• Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain
• John Adams by David McCullough
• Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them) by Bart D. Ehrman
• The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal by Jared Diamond
• Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States by Bill Bryson
• Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave by Adam Alter
• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
• Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi
• The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Daniel Lieberman
• Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade
• The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer
• The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning by Daniel Bor
• Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins by Ian Tattersall
• The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer
• The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer
• A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley by Neal Thompson
• Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith by J. Anderson Thomson
• Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner
• Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson
• The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes
• The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans
• In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
• The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
• Forged: Writing in the Name of God–Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are by Bart D. Erhman
• Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame by Christopher Boehm
• LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination by Phillip F. Nelson
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
• A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann
• The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean Carroll
• Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
• Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age by Steven Johnson
• Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick
• Howard Hughes: The Untold Story by Peter Brown
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
• The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout
• Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters; The Definitive Biography of the First American Billionaire by Richard Hack
• The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean
• Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne
• Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped By the Greatest Land Sale in History by Andro Linklater
• Zodiac: The shocking true story of the hunt for the nation’s most elusive serial killer by Robert Graysmith
• Free Will by Sam Harris
• The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the CIA by Antonio J. Mendez
• Droidmaker: George Lucas And the Digital Revolution by Michael Rubin
• Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser
• The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True by Richard Dawkins
• Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt
• Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
• Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power by Alexandra Robbins
• Citizen Hughes : The Power, the Money and the Madness by Michael Drosnin
• Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher by Richard Feynman
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard Feynman
• Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years by Russ Baker
• Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden—from 9/11 to Abbottabad by Peter L. Bergen
• The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst by David Nasaw
• The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science by Douglas Starr
• The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
• The Magician and the Cardsharp: The Search for America’s Greatest Sleight-of-Hand Artist by Karl Johnson
• How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson
• Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky
• The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience by Kent Kiehl
• Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
• The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark by Meryl Gordon
• Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States by Bill Bryson
• Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson
• In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson
• Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes by Noah Dietrich
• Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
• Next to Hughes: Behind the Power and Tragic Downfall of Howard Hughes by His Closest Advisor by Robert Maheu
• The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky
• Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky
• Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock
• Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession by Dave Jamieson
• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch
• Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies by Andreas M. Antonopoulos
• Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything by Stephen Levy
• Becoming Steve Jobs: How a Reckless Upstart Became a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender
• Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation by Bill Nye
• The Gunman and His Mother: Lee Harvey Oswald, Marguerite Oswald, and the Making of an Assassin by Steven Beschloss
• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom
• Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson
• The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House by Kate Andersen Brower
• The Secret Agent: In Search of America's Greatest World War II Spy by Stephan Talty
• A Killer in the Family by Peter Range
• MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson by Steve Knopper
• Murder In The Family by Burl Barer
• Before the Big Bang by John Gribbin
• The Voyeur’s Motel by Gay Talese
• Ted Bundy: The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule
• Jerry Brudos: Lust Killer by Ann Rule
• Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will by Geoff Colvin
• The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross
• Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
• Lust Murder: A look at sexually-driven slayings by Chelsea Hoffman
• The I-5 Killer (Randall Woodfield) by Ann Rule
• Fiend: The Shocking True Story Of Americas Youngest Serial Killer by Harold Schechter
• Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door by Roy Wenzl
• Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Martinez
• The Quantum Mystery by John Gribbin
• A Taste For Murder by Burl Barer
• The Killing Season by Alex French
• The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History by Kevin Sullivan
• Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer by Katherine Ramsland
• DEVIL IN THE DARKNESS: The True Story of Serial Killer Israel Keyes by J.T. Hunter
• The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination by Lamar Waldron
• Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance
• Depraved: The Shocking True Story of America’s First Serial Killer by Harold Schecter
• Oxygen: The molecule that made the world by Nick Lane
• The Evolution of Money by David Orrel
• Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein
• Monster by Steven Jackson
• Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary Trump
• A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America by Philip Rucker’s and Carol Leonnig
• Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies by Nik Bhatia
• Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy
• A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species by Rob Dunn
• Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Serhii Plokhy
• Architects of Intelligence: The truth about AI from the people building it by Martin Ford
• The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll
• Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking
• The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World by Sean Carroll
• Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions by Sabine Hossenfelder
• JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass
• The Brain: The Story of You by David Eagleman
• Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe by John Hands
• Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America by Will Sommer
• Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by Brian Greene
• A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll
• Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli
• The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics by Roger Penrose
• The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh
• Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright
• Antimatter by Frank Close
• The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl

★★★☆☆

• CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files by Jefferson Morley
• Outgrowing God by Richard Dawkins
• America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation by Joshua Kendall
• Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson
• The Measure of Madness: Inside the Disturbed and Disturbing Criminal Mind by Katherine Ramslund
• The Invention of Religion by Alexander Drake
• The Dawn of Human Culture by Richard G. Klein
• Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham
• The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond
• Hitch-22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens
• The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
• Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
• The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris
• The Devil in the White City: A Saga of Magic and Murder at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
• Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
• At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
• The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another by Ainissa Ramirez
• Programming Bitcoin: Learn How to Program Bitcoin from Scratch by Jimmy Song
• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes by Adam Rutherford
• The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon Kindle by Brad Stone
• The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos
• The Creativity Code: Art and Innovation in the Age of AI by Marcus Du Sautoy
• 1776 by David McCullough
• A Short History of Progress by Robert Wright
• The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria
• The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution by Eugene V. Koonin
• The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
• The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
• A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz
• The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures by Nicholas Wade
• The Invention of God: The Natural Origins of Mythology and Religion by Bill Lauritzen
• Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines by Richard A. Muller
• The Evolution of God by Robert Wright
• Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity are Revolutionizing our View of Human Nature by Douglas T. Kenrick
• God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales by Penn Jillette
• The Measure of Madness: Inside the Disturbed and Disturbing Criminal Mind by Cheryl Paradis
• How to Count (Programming for Mere Mortals) by Steven Frank
• Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson
• Howard Hughes: Power, Paranoia & Palace Intrigue by Geoff Schumacher
• The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars by Paul Collins
• Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
• Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness by Donald Barlett and James Steele
• Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence by Bill James
• The Great Age of Discovery, Volume 1: Columbus, Magellan, and the Early Explorations by Paul Herrmann
• Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman
• Lying by Sam Harris
• An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage
• Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade by Walter Kirn
• The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World’s Most Terrifying Murderers by Harold Schechter
• Columbus: the Accidental Hero by Kevin Jackson
• Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma by David Boyle
• End of the Innocence 1964-1965: The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair by Lawrence Samuel
• Chasing the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell
• Hidden History: An Exposé of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics by Donald Jeffries
• God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction by Dan Barker
• Christopher Wilder: The True Story of The Beauty Queen Killer by Jack Rosewood
• Blind Rage: A True Story of Sin, Sex, and Murder in a Small Arkansas Town by Anita Paddock
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Fred & Rose West: Britain’s Most Infamous Couple Killers by Ryan Green
• Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier
• John Christie: The True Story of The Rillington Place Strangler by Jack Rosewood
• JFK: An American Coup D’etat: The Truth Behind the Kennedy Assassination by Colonel John Hughes-Wilson
• Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK by Gerald Posner
• Hangman: Life and Crimes of Serial Killer & Police Officer Gerard Schaefer by Michael Newton
• Jeffrey Dahmer: A Terrifying True Story of Rape, Murder & Cannibalism by Jack Rosewood
• Reichstag Fire: The Case Against the Nazi Conspiracy by Sven Kellerhoff
• Coral Castle: The Mystery of Ed Leedskalnin and His American Stonehenge by Jack Heffron
• Fleshing Out Skull & Bones: Investigations into America's Most Powerful Secret Society by Kris Millegan
• The Roswell UFO Conspiracy: Exposing A Shocking And Sinister Secret by Nick Redfern
• H. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil by Adam Selzer
• The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir by John Bolton
• Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House by Cliff Sims
• House of Horrors: The Shocking True Story of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Strangler by Robert Sberna
• Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• The Future of Work: Robots, AI, and Automation by Darrell West
• The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time by Julian Barbour
• The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War, and the Evolution of Us by Adam Rutherford
• The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley
• The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly
• Gravity: From Falling Apples to Supermassive Black Holes by Nicholas Mee
• Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything by Michio Kaku
• The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tom Howard

★★☆☆☆

• Occult America: White House Seances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz
• Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical by Gregory Chaitin
• Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization by Parag and Ayesha Khanna
• The Basement: True Story of Serial Killer Gary Heidnik by RJ Parker
• Jeffrey Dahmer by Margaret Simpson