Here’s a list of books, poetry, and essays that have influenced my thinking. I will update it as I keep finding more interesting works.

  • Alexander, Scott: I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup
  • Alexander, Scott: The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories
  • Asparouhova, Nadia: Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading
  • Baudelaire, Charles: Paris Spleen
  • Barker, Pat: Regeneration
  • Barr, James: A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East
  • Bisky, Jens: The Decision: Germany 1929 to 1934
  • Bland, David J.: Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation
  • Bostrom, Nick: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
  • Bulgakov, Mikhail: The Master and Margarita
  • Camus, Albert: The Stranger
  • Chen, Andrew: The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
  • Clancy, Tom: Red Storm Rising
  • Clark, Christopher: Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947
  • Davies, Jamie A.: Synthetic Biology: A Very Short Introduction
  • Ende, Michael: The Neverending Story
  • Feynmann, Richard P.: “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character
  • Fukuyama, Francis: The End of History and the Last Man
  • Fukuyama, Francis: The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
  • Ghattas, Kim: Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Rivalry that Unravelled the Middle East
  • Goodsell, David S.: The Machinery of Life
  • Grove, Andy: High Output Management
  • Guggolz, Sebastian: Read Kafka
  • Haasis, Hellmut G.: Dawn of the Republic: The German Democrats West of the Rhine, 1789–1849
  • Havel, Václav: The Power of the Powerless
  • Hawking, Stephen: A Brief History of Time
  • Helmer, Hamilton: 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
  • Hemingway, Ernest: A Moveable Feast
  • Homer: The Odyssey
  • Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go
  • Judt, Tony: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
  • Kafka, Franz: The Castle
  • Kafka, Franz: The Metamorphosis
  • Kafka, Franz: The Trial
  • Kafka, Franz: The Zürau Aphorisms
  • Klein, Ezra: Abundance
  • Kundera, Milan: A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe
  • Mann, Thomas: Death in Venice
  • Mann, Thomas: Doktor Faustus
  • Mann, Thomas: The Magic Mountain
  • Mukherjee, Siddartha: The Gene: An Intimate History
  • Münkler, Herfried: The Thirty Years War: European Catastrophe, German Trauma
  • Myers, John: The housing theory of everything
  • O’Brien, Tim: The Things They Carried
  • Orwell, George, Animal Farm
  • Power, Samantha: The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir
  • Publius: The Federalist Papers
  • Remarque, Erich Maria: All Quiet on the Western Front
  • Rilke, Rainer Maria: New Poems
  • Rimbaud, Arthur: A Season in Hell
  • Sarotte, Mary Elise: Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate
  • Slobodian, Quinn: Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
  • Smil, Vaclav: Energy and Civilization: A History
  • Stroud, Jonathan: The Bartimaeus Sequence
  • Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars
  • Symonds, Craig L.: Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay
  • Thiel, Peter: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
  • Tooze, Adam: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
  • Tooze, Adam: The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931
  • Torres, Teresa: Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value
  • Vonnegut, Kurt: Slaughterhouse-Five
  • Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse
  • Zweig, Stefan: Chess Story
  • Zweig, Stefan: The World of Yesterday