I’ve consolidated and categorized all of my favorite books across topics including business, technology, and the military. You can view the complete list of books I’ve read on my Goodreads page along with their reviews but below are all the books that I gave at least a 4/5. You can also check out my list of books to read next and feel free to leave any recommendations in the comments section below.

 

Business

• Business Strategy
  • The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business – Clayton M. Christensen
  • The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth – Clayton M. Christensen [notes]
  • 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy – Hamilton Wright Helmer 
  • The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk – Al Ries

• Entrepreneurship
  • The 4-Hour Workweek – Timothy Ferriss
  • Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future – Peter Thiel
  • The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup – Noam Wasserman
  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers – Ben Horowitz
  • The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business – Josh Kaufman
  • Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist – Brad Feld [notes]

• Organizational Management
  • Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t – James C. Collins
  • The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations – Ori Brafman
  • How Google Works – Eric Schmidt
  • Only the Paranoid Survive. Lessons from the CEO of INTEL Corporation – Andrew Grove
  • The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be – Moises Naim
  • Measure What Matters – John Doerr [notes]

• People Management
  • Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams – Tom DeMarco [notes]
  • The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change – Camille Fournier
  • Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity – Kim Scott [notes]
  • The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You – Julie Zhuo [notes]
  • Who: The A Method for Hiring – Geoff Smart [notes]

• Product Management
  • What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services –  Anthony Ulwick
  • The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback – Dan Olsen
  • The Design of Everyday Things – Donald A. Norman 
  • Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love – Cagan, Marty
  • The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you – Rob Fitzpatrick
  • The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses – Eric Ries

• Project Management
  • Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations – Nicole Forsgren
  • The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering – Frederick P. Brooks Jr. 
  • The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management – Tom DeMarco
  • Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management – Scott Berkun [notes]

• Economics and Finance
  • Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt – Michael Lewis
  • Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More – Chris Anderson
  • The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t – Nate Silver

• Biography & Memoirs
  • Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future – Ashlee Vance
  • The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon – Brad Stone
  • Bitwise: A Life in Code – David Auerbach

 

 History

• World History
  • The Lessons of History – Will Durant [notes]
  • The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century – Thomas L. Friedman

• Philosophy & Ethics
  • Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot – Jim Stockdale
  • Principles: Life and Work – Ray Dalio [notes]
  • Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl [notes]
  • The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual – Ward Farnsworth [notes]

 

Science

• Sociology
  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari [notes]
  • 21 Lessons for the 21st Century – Yuval Noah Harari
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies – Jared Diamond
  • The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference – Malcolm Gladwell

• Political Science
  • Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific – Robert D. Kaplan
  • Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond – Robert D. Kaplan

• Human Psychology
  • Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams – Matthew Walker
  • How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie
  • Think Like a Freak – Steven D. Levitt
  • Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World – Stuart Diamond
  • Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – Malcolm Gladwell
  • Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions – Gary Klein
  • Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything – Joshua Foer
  • Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why – Laurence Gonzales
  • On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society – Dave Grossman
  • On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace – Dave Grossman
  • Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance – Angela Duckworth
  • David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants – Malcolm Gladwell
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman [notes]

 

Technology

• Cybersecurity
  • Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon – Kim Zetter
  • Cybersecurity and Cyberwar – P.W. Singer
  • The American Black Chamber – Herbert O. Yardley

• Technical References
  • Learning ROS for Robotics Programming – Second Edition – Enrique Fernandez
  • Augmented Reality with Kinect – Rui Wang

•  Computers, Technology, Engineering
  • The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution – Walter Isaacson
  • The History Of Wireless: How Creative Minds Produced Technology For The Masses – Ira Brodsky
  • Robot Futures – Illah Reza Nourbakhsh
  • Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time – Dava Sobel
  • Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century – P.W. Singer
  • Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us – Tom Vanderbilt
  • Data Science for Business: What you need to know about data mining and data-analytic thinking – Foster Provost
  • Bitwise: A Life in Code – David Auerbach

 

Fiction

• Science Fiction
  • The Martian – Andy Weir
  • Dune – Frank Herbert
  • Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
  • Starship Troopers – Robert A. Heinlein
  • Ready Player One – Ernest Cline 
  • A Deepness in the Sky – Vernor Vinge
  • Hyperion – Dan Simmons
  • The Fall of Hyperion – Dan Simmons

• Thriller & Suspense
  • Rainbow Six – Tom Clancy

• American Literature
  • Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
  • The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
  • The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
  • Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

• General Fiction
  • A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
  • Life of Pi – Yann Martel
  • The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
  • The Ugly American – William J. Lederer

• Historical Fiction
  • In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin – Erik Larson
  • Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania – Erik Larson
  • The Emperor’s General – James Webb

 

Military

• Navy & Marine Corps
  • Making the Corps – Thomas E. Ricks
  • The Warrior Ethos – Steven Pressfield
  • The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228 – Dick Couch
  • Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy – Ian W. Toll

• Biographies & Memoirs
  • The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education – Craig M. Mullaney
  • One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer – Nathaniel Fick
  • Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time – Greg Mortenson

• Insurgencies, Terrorism & Asymmetric Warfare
  • The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 – Lawrence Wright
  • ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror – Michael Weiss
  • Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia – Ahmed Rashid
  • 7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century – Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr.
  • War – Sebastian Junger
  • Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam – John A. Nagl
  • The Al Qaeda Reader: The Essential Texts of Osama Bin Laden’s Terrorist Organization – Raymond Ibrahim
  • Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of al Qa’ida since 9/11 Seth G. Jones
  • The Forever War – Dexter Filkins
  • The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century – Thomas X. Hammes
  • Black Hawk Down – Mark Bowden [notes]

• Iraq
  • Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq – Thomas E. Ricks
  • The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 – Thomas E. Ricks
  • Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War – Evan Wright

• Afghanistan
  • Roberts Ridge: A Story of Courage and Sacrifice on Takur Ghar Mountain, Afghanistan – Malcolm MacPherson
  • The Afghan Campaign – Steven Pressfield
  • Obama’s Wars – Bob Woodward

• WWII
  • With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa – Eugene B. Sledge
  • Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest – Stephen E. Ambrose

• Vietnam
  • We Were Soldiers Once… and Young: Ia Drang – The Battle that Changed the War in Vietnam – Harold G. Moore
  • The Village – Bing West
  • Platoon Leader: A Memoir of Command in Combat – James R. McDonough
  • Fields of Fire – James Webb
  • Dispatches – Michael Herr

 

Sports

• Running
  • The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It – Neal Bascomb
  • Running with the Buffaloes: A Season Inside with Mark Wetmore, Adam Goucher, and the University of Colorado Men’s Cross-Country Team Chris Lear
  • Duel in the Sun: Alberto Salazar, Dick Beardsley, and America’s Greatest Marathon – John   Brant
  • Once a Runner – John L. Parker Jr.
  • Pre: The Story of America’s Greatest Running Legend, Steve Prefontaine – Tom Jordan