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2019 Reading List
I started this reading project in 2017 by reading only books suggested in Tim Ferriss’ book Tools of Titans. In 2018, half of my books were those suggested by guests of the Tim Ferriss Show podcast. Now, I’m not consulting that list of suggested books but pull from a variety of sources. Click any of the books below to see who recommended them and my reason for reading the book. There is a comments section for each book. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Final Rankings
I kept a running ranking as I read each of the 52 books from the 2019 Books of Titans reading list. Here is my final list. This is the list in order of most to least-enjoyable to me. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the overall quality of the book or its importance. Rather, these are the books that moved me, challenged me, or created great joy in me as I read them.
| # | Book | Author |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Gulag Archipeligo | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |
| 2 | Mere Christianity | C.S. Lewis |
| 3 | Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass | Frederick Douglass |
| 4 | Einstein | Walter Issacson |
| 5 | Educated | Tara Westover |
| 6 | All the King’s Men | Robert Penn |
| 7 | Killing Commendatore | Haruki Murakami |
| 8 | Factfulness | Hans Rosling |
| 9 | Can’t Hurt Me | David Goggins |
| 10 | Guantanamo Diary | Momamedou Ould Slahi |
| 11 | The Monk of Mokha | Dave Eggers |
| 12 | The Widow of the South | Robert Hicks |
| 13 | Franklin: Tennessee’s Handsomest Town | James A. Crutchfield, Robert Holladay |
| 14 | Devil in the White City | Erik Larson |
| 15 | Small Fry | Lisa Brennan-Jobs |
| 16 | The Art of X-Ray Reading | Roy Peter Clark |
| 17 | AI Superpowers | Kai-Fu Lee |
| 18 | Skin in the Game | Nassim Taleb |
| 19 | The Coddling of the American Mind | Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt |
| 20 | In Xanadu | William Dalrymple |
| 21 | The Prophets | Abraham Heschel |
| 22 | Building a Story Brand | Donald Miller |
| 23 | Don Quixote | Miguel De Cervantes |
| 24 | Never Split the Difference | Chris Voss |
| 25 | The Lessons of History | Will & Ariel Durant |
| 26 | Endure | Alex Hutchinson |
| 27 | Splendor of God | Honoré Willsie Morrow |
| 28 | Musicophilia | Oliver Sacks |
| 29 | Warnings Unheeded | Andy Brown |
| 30 | Murder on the Orient Express | Agatha Christie |
| 31 | 21 Lessons for the 21st Century | Yuval Noah Harari |
| 32 | How to Lead When You’re Not in Charge | Clay Scroggins |
| 33 | What Every Body Is Saying | Joe Navarro |
| 34 | The President is Missing | Bill Clinton and James Patterson |
| 35 | This is Marketing | Seth Godin |
| 36 | A Higher World (1707 – 1815) | Michael Fry |
| 37 | The Union (Treaty of 1707) | Michael Fry |
| 38 | A New Race of Men (1815 – 1914) | Michael Fry |
| 39 | The Half-Drowned King | Linnea Hartsuyker |
| 40 | Faust | Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe |
| 41 | Lords of the Desert | James Barr |
| 42 | Phantases | George MacDonald |
| 43 | Sog | John L. Plaster |
| 44 | City of Thieves | David Benioff |
| 45 | The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei | John Stevens |
| 46 | The Fifth Risk | Michael Lewis |
| 47 | Fit for Life | Harvey Diamond |
| 48 | Non-Obvious 2019 | Rohit Bhargava |
| 49 | The Hero with a Thousand Faces | Joseph Campbell |
| 50 | Man in the Mirror | Patrick Morley |
| 51 | Finding Franklin | Katie Shands |
| 52 | Twilight | William Gay |