Books

A compact list of all the books I've read since 2020. Click in for more information and my thoughts.

See: expanded list, favourites/strongest recommendations, just Murakami books.

• Liberation Day by George Saunders (strong rec)
• Tenth of December by George Saunders (strong rec)
• Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco by Gary Kamiya
• Going Infinite by Michael Lewis
• The AI Con by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna
• Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu, translated by Joel Martinsen
• Major Labels by Kelefa Sanneh
• Artifices by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley
• Sea Of Hooks by Lindsay Hill
• A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, translated by Henning Koch (strong rec)
• Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton
• The Witch of Prague by J.M. Sidorvia (strong rec)
• Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (strong rec)
• Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
• The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie
• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (strong rec)
• The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver, Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks
• A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (strong rec)
• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley
• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (strong rec)
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck (strong rec)
• Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
• Katabasis by R. F. Kuang
• How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang
• Digital Culture Shock by Katharina Reinecke (strong rec)
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz
• Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
• It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken
• Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (strong rec)
• Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri
• No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by J. S. Bernstein
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (strong rec)
• Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (strong rec)
• The End of Everything by Katie Mack
• The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley
• Mina's Matchbox by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder
• Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (strong rec)
• Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
• Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence by R. F. Kuang
• Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder
• Marcovaldo by Italino Calvino, translated by William Weaver
• If on a winter's night a traveler by Italino Calvino, translated by William Weaver (strong rec)
• The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu, Elizabeth Hanlon, Zac Haluza, Adam Lanphier, Holger Nahm
• Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
• The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder (strong rec)
• Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang (strong rec)
• Someone Who Will Love You In All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg
• Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine (strong rec)
• Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble
• Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (strong rec)
• Slaying Goliath by Diane Ravitch
• Upgrade by Blake Crouch
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
• Music Is History by Questlove and Ben Greenman
• The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (strong rec)
• Jim Crow's Children by Peter Irons
• The Curator by Owen King
• Floating City by Sudhir Venkatesh
• Illiterate America by Jonathan Kozol
• Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap by Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar
• Words on the Move by John McWhorter
• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
• The Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol (strong rec)
• God Help the Child by Toni Morrison
• Beyond Measure by James Vincent
• Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons by Ben Bernake, Timothy Geithner, and Henry Paulson
• Home by Toni Morrison
• Brotopia by Emily Chang (strong rec)
• Circe by Madeline Miller
• Letters to a Young Teacher by Jonathan Kozol
• A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty, translated by Steven Rendell (strong rec)
• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver
• What If? 2 by Randall Munroe (strong rec)
• The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú
• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
• Bad Samaritans by Ha-Joon Chang (strong rec)
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
• Failure to Disrupt by Justin Reich (strong rec)
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, translated by Clifford E. Landers
• A Happy Death by Albert Camus, translated by Richard Howard
• The Diving Pool by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder
• Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (strong rec)
• God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian by Kurt Vonnegut
• Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
• Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles
• Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
• Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney
• Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft
• Normal People by Sally Rooney
• Severance by Ling Ma (strong rec)
• The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Recursion by Blake Crouch (strong rec)
• A Pale View of the Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Martian by Andy Weir (strong rec)
• The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (strong rec)
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (strong rec)
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
• Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber (strong rec)
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
• Building For Everyone by Annie Jean-Baptiste
• the phone booth at the edge of the world by Laura Imai Messina, translated by Lucy Rand
• Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
• Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (strong rec)
• The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov
• Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, John Higgins (strong rec)
• Foundation by Isaac Asimov
• A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe
• How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
• The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock (strong rec)
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (strong rec)
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Devils in Daylight by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, translated by J. Keith Vincent
• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Death's End by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu
• The Trial by Franz Kafka, translated by Breon Mitchell
• The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, translated by Joel Martinsen
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa
• The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder (strong rec)
• Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (strong rec)
• First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel
• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu (strong rec)
• Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino, translated by Rebecca Copeland
• Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch (strong rec)
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (strong rec)
• The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel
• Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum
• Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes
• Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil
• Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit by Joshua Foa Dienstag
• Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (strong rec)
• The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami, translated by Ted Goossen
• Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen
• Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami, translated by Ted Goossen
• Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami, translated by Ted Goossen
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• After Dark by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin
• Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami, translated by Alfred Birnbaum
• After the Quake by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin
• Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel
• South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel
• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, translated by Alfred Birnbaum
• Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen
• A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami, translated by Alfred Birnbaum
• Death at an Early Age by Jonathan Kozol (strong rec)
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos
• Poor Economics by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo (strong rec)
• The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel
• 1984 by George Orwell
• What Money Can't Buy by Michael J. Sandel
• Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (strong rec)
• Narrative Economics by Robert J. Shiller
• The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami, translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin (strong rec)
• Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin
• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
• Good Economics for Hard Times by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
• The Stranger by Albert Camus, translated by Matthew Ward
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel
• how to by Randall Munroe
• Open Borders by Bryan Caplan
• Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel