Favorite Books

I like to read books.

My Six All-Time Favorites (as of December, 2019):

All six of these books fundamentally changed the way I think about things. They’re ordered alphabetically because I can’t really choose one over the other.

• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different by Philip Ball
• Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
• The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows

My 2019 Favorites

Of the books I read in 2019, these were my favorites (in order of when I read them):

1. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite: Not sure what to say about this other than I read it in 24 hours.
2. Educated by Tara Westover: I wrote about why I loved this book for Why is this interesting?
3. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman: A good reminder that technology doesn’t have all the answers.
4. Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi by Neal Bascomb: I only knew the most surface details about this story and this book manages to go incredibly deep while still moving quickly.
5. Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson: As a rule, I try not to read books published in the year because there are too many good books in the world to waste time on unproven ones. But this New York Times review made me give it a shot and it didn’t disappoint.
6. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot: An aside in this 2018 story about tasmanian devils dying of contagious cancer made me Google Lacks and HeLa cells add the book to my list. It’s an amazing dive into both the history of an important tool in medicine and also the family it came from.