Bookshelf

Books I have read and kept thinking about. Drag the shelf or use the arrows to browse, click a spine, then inspect a book to flip it over.

The books on this shelf

  • The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Edmond Dantès is betrayed by his friends and imprisoned without cause, then returns with a fortune to settle every account. The definitive novel of patience and revenge.
  • The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Rousseau asks what could ever make political authority legitimate.
  • The Fall by Albert Camus. In an Amsterdam bar a once celebrated Parisian lawyer confesses his life story. Camus on judgment, hypocrisy and the fall from innocence.
  • The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli. An unsentimental manual on acquiring and holding power, written for rulers who cannot afford illusions.
  • Reductionism in Art and Brain Science by Eric Kandel. Kandel bridges abstract art and neuroscience, showing how reduction in both reveals the way we see and feel.
  • Zero to One by Peter Thiel. Thiel argues that real progress comes from creating something genuinely new rather than competing, going from zero to one.
  • The Iliad by Homer. The rage of Achilles and the war at Troy, in Robert Fagles' translation. The oldest war story in the western canon and still among the truest.
  • The Cultural Revolution by Frank Dikötter. A people's history of Mao's decade of upheaval, drawn from party archives and the accounts of those who lived it.
  • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Anna's affair with Vronsky set against Levin's search for a life worth living. Tolstoy's great novel of love, family and consequence.
  • Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Pip rises from the marshes to London on a stranger's money. Dickens on class, longing and the cost of becoming a gentleman.
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Seven generations of the Buendía family rise and fall in Macondo. García Márquez's masterpiece of magical realism and the loneliness of time.
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Dorian keeps his youth while his portrait bears every sin. Wilde's only novel, on beauty, vanity and the price of a soul.