Suggested Reading

In response to multiple requests for a holistic list, here are the books I most often refer to others.

The following lists of books are those that I highly recommend, and often find myself referring to others. As much as I hate to break books out categorically,* I’ve applied some categorization here as a map of sorts to various domains of thought that you may specifically be interested in. The exception to this is the first list, which are books that I think everyone should read as a means to understanding our world and the role we individually and collectively play in it. All links here are affiliate links, though I’d encourage you to check your local independent bookstore for these titles!

*I believe all knowledge is connected, and insights from any domain can be applied to any other. Expertise and the plague of indexicality often undermines our ability to identify novel and previously unconsidered possibilities. It’s important to apply a post-disciplinary epistemology to all learning and creative endeavors.

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General Knowledge / Emergent Contextual Awareness

• Antonio Damasio, The Strange Order of Things

• Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay

• Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

• David Graeber, Debt

• Thomas Picketty, Capital and Ideology

• Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

• Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters

• Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists

• Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend

• Fareed Zakaria, The Post American World

• Steven Sloman & Philip Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion

• Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe

• Neil deGrasse Tyson & Donald Goldsmith, Origins

• Matt Taibbi & Molly Crabapple, The Divide

• Umair Haque, Betterness

• Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

• Tim Urban, The Story of Us [web series]

Work Theory, Org Design, Value Creation

• Frederic LaLoux, Reinventing Organizations

• David Frayne, The Refusal of Work

• Andrea Komlosy, Work: The Last 1000 Years

• Richard Donkin, The History of Work

• David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

• David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

• Jeffrey Pfeffer, Dying for a Paycheck

• Aaron Dignan, Brave New Work

• Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

• William Whyte & Joseph Nocera, The Organization Man

• Amy Webb, The Signals are Talking

• Peter Thiel, Zero to One

Creativity & Design

• Scott Page, The Difference

• Elliot Samuel Paul & Scott Barry Kaufman, The Philosophy of Creativity

• Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything

• Jessica Helfand, Design: The Invention of Desire

• Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question

• Roger Martin, The Opposable Mind

• Sam Leith, Words Like Loaded Pistols

• Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

• James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

• Scott Barry Kaufman & Carolyn Gregoire, Wired to Create

• Brian McDonald, Invisible Ink

• Thomas Wendt, Design for Dasein

• Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

Philosophy & Spirituality

• Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve

• Karen Armstrong, A History of God

• Rob Bell, Love Wins

• Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

• Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath

• Merold Westphal, Suspicion & Faith

• Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

• Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought

• George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

• Umberto Eco, Semiotics & the Philosophy of Language

• John Caputo, Hermeneutics

• John Caputo, The Folly of God

• Esther Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

• Esther Meek, Loving to Know

• Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ

• Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

• Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity

• Sam Harris, Waking Up

• Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ

• Erik Wielenberg, Robust Ethics

• Steve Hagen, Buddhism Plain and Simple

• Rob Bell, What We Talk About When We Talk About God

What are your most referenced books? What should others read? Leave your suggestions in the comments!