Bookshelf: Books I've Enjoyed and Recommend
Welcome to Izzy's Bookshelf! These are my favorite books!
A collection of books I’ve enjoyed, with brief notes on each.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The funniest science fiction ever written.
The Rider
The best book about what it feels like to suffer on a bike.
The Art of Fielding
A college baseball novel about talent, pressure, and perfection.
Little Fires Everywhere
Suburbia, motherhood, and secrets in Shaker Heights.
Naked Lunch
A hallucinatory trip through addiction and control.
The Stranger
A short, strange novel about absurdity and indifference.
The Sun Also Rises
Expatriates drinking through 1920s Paris and Pamplona.
Cod
How a single species of fish shaped world history.
Sapiens
Big-picture thinking about what makes humans human.
The Bomber Mafia
The dream of precision bombing and moral complexities of WWII.
Loonshots
Why big organizations kill radical ideas.
10 Drugs
Ten medications that changed medicine and the world.
The Two Cultures
The famous lecture on the divide between literary intellectuals and scientists.
The Quants
How math geniuses took over Wall Street and nearly destroyed it.
On Character
Character = Convictions × Discipline.
The Gambling Man
The wild story of Masayoshi Son and SoftBank.
How to Build a Car
F1's most successful car designer on 36 years of motorsport.
Born to be Wired
The cable industry's most successful dealmaker.
A Place of My Own
Building a writing hut from scratch.
Gumption
Profiles of people Offerman admires.
Call Me Ted
The man who built CNN and won the America's Cup.
Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way
Ted Turner's leadership philosophy.
A Man for All Markets
The mathematician who beat the casinos and then the markets.
Thinking in Bets
Think about decisions the way poker players think about hands.
The Missing Billionaires
The Kelly Criterion and our psychological inability to follow it.
Never Split the Difference
Negotiation tactics from an FBI hostage negotiator.
The New Strategic Selling
The classic guide to complex B2B sales.
Skin in the Game
Why symmetry of risk matters.
Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails
Why standard statistics fail in the real world.
The Bed of Procrustes
Aphorisms and philosophical one-liners.
Antifragile
Things that gain from disorder.
Boomerang
How the financial crisis played out across Europe.
Venture Deals
Required reading for anyone raising money.
The Backyard Adventurer
Stories of adventure found close to home.
Where the Deer and the Antelope Play
The American landscape and our relationship with nature.
Water, Wood, and Wild Things
A year in a Japanese mountain village learning traditional crafts.
Meditations
The private journal of a Roman emperor.
On the Brevity of Life
A sharp reminder to stop postponing what matters.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Wallace's singular voice on American culture.
What to Expect When You're Expecting
The classic pregnancy guide.
Moms on Call
Sleep schedules and routines. Saved our sanity.
Peachtree Creek
Atlanta's history through the lens of a creek.
Fermat's Last Theorem
The 350-year quest to prove a margin note.
The Professor and the Madman
The unlikely friendship behind the Oxford English Dictionary.
There Is No Antimemetics Division
SCP Foundation horror about ideas that erase themselves from memory.
Reading List
Books I haven’t gotten to yet but plan to read:
The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush
Currently reading
If you have suggestions for books I might enjoy based on this list, I’d love to hear them. You can find my contact info on the about page.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
He ate SO much food! 🐛🍎
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
Then he'll want some milk! 🐭🍪
Goodnight Moon
Goodnight stars, goodnight air! 🌙⭐
Llama Llama Red Pajama
Llama llama red pajama! 🦙❤️