100 Books Worth Giving

I’ve been building a bookshelf of 100 books for the last 10 years — books that can be easily recommended — for the “My daughter, when you’ve read these you will be a woman” type recommendation.

What’s nice about this, is that when I read a book I think “makes the cut”, I then go back and read the book it’s going to replace, again. To make a decision.

A snapshot of a few from the shelf

Here’s the list at the moment, in no particular order:

1. Charlie Mike, Leonard B Scott
2. A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright
3. King Rat, James Clavell
4. The Black Swan, Nassim Nicolas Taleb
5. The Bronze Horseman, Paullina Simons
6. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, T.J. Stiles
7. Catch Me If You Can, Frank Abagnale Junior
8. Value Investing, Seth Klarman
9. A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton Malkiel
10. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Edwin Lefèvre
11. A Good Keen Man, Barry Crump
12. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
13. Cod, Mark Kurlansky
14. Salt, Mark Kurlansky
15. The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond
16. A Short History of the Twentieth Century, Geoffrey Blainey
17. Against the Gods, Peter Bernstein
18. The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson
19. Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
20. 1984, George Orwell
21. The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
22. The Saga of Recluce, L. E. Modesitt Jr.
23. Catch 22, Joseph Heller
24. When the Lion Feeds, Wilbur Smith
25. The Power of One, Bryce Courtenay
26. Birds of Prey, Wilbur Smith
27. Zero to One, Peter Thiel
28. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
29. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Ron Chernow
30. The Bourne Identity, Robert Ludlum
31. The Horse Whisperer, Nicholas Evans
32. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
33. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
34. Forrest Gump, Winston Groom
35. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
36. Heroes: A History of Hero Worship, Lucy Hughes-Hallett
37. The Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean M. Auel
38. Engineers’ Dreams, Willy Ley
39. Republic, Plato
40. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
41. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
43. The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
44. Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton
45. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
46. The Art of War, Sun Tzu
47. Power of the Sword, Wilbur Smith
48. Open Society, George Soros
49. Made in America, Sam Walton
50. Killing Floor, Lee Child
51. The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton
52. A Brief History of Economic Genius, Paul Strathern
53. Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
54. The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone
55. Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts
56. When Genius Failed, Roger Lowenstein
57. A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
58. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
59. Chickenhawk, Robert Mason
60. The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham
61. Sushi for Beginners, Marian Keyes
62. The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
63. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières
64. The Burning Shore, Wilbur Smith
65. The Eagle and the Raven, James A. Michener
66. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari
67. Cross Stitch, Diana Gabaldon
68. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
69. South, Ernest Shackleton
70. Sophie’s World, Jostein Gaarder
71. Dracula, Bram Stoker
72. If This Is a Man, Primo Levi
73. The Sleepwalkers, Arthur Koestler
74. The Weather Makers, Tim Flannery
75. Bastards I Have Met, Barry Crump
76. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
77. For Us, the Living, Robert A. Heinlein
78. Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicolas Taleb
79. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
80. A History of the World in 6 Glasses, Tom Standage
81. The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton
82. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
83. Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
84. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
85. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
86. The Martian, Andy Weir
87. How Britain Made the Modern World, Niall Ferguson
88. The Covenant, James A. Michener
89. The Swiss Family Robinson, J.D. Wyss
90. Dune, Frank Herbert
91. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
92. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
93. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
94. The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly
95. A Painted House, John Grisham
96. The Blade Itself, Joe Abercrombie
97. Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson
98. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
99. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North
100. Flash Boys, Michael Lewis

I’ll keep reading and improving this list of 100 books, and will update it here from now on.