Books

I was a fairly avid reader at an early age. We had a good assortment of books and magazines around the house, and I loved going to the library starting when I was about 7. My early fascination was science fiction, particularly Heinlein and the Tom Swift books. This was during the "atomic age" and the launch of Sputnik, which captured most kids' imaginations. 

But then I discovered the "classics" and by 10 I had read Dickens, Dumas, Defoe, Poe, Verne, Melville, and others. We also had an ancient set of encyclopedias called The Book of Knowledge, which I devoured. Later, I became a fan of Shakespeare. So when I read, I usually assess writing and literature through these lenses. Since my career was in the technical realm, I spent most of my reading efforts not on literature, but on technical journals and magazines, but once I retired, I again started reading more diverse material. 

When e-readers became available (in my case the Kindle), reading more frequently became a habit, and found I could read much faster than with hard-copy books. I have read hundreds of books (there are currently 585 listed in our Amazon database which have been read) in various genera in the last 10 or so years. Since I am not a book reviewer, I won't tell you what to read, but I have some favorite authors and books I can recommend. Here are some of them. I have left many off the list because they just are not as good.

Fiction

• All the John LeCarre novels. Brilliant writer.

• Ian McEwan:

  • Solar

  • Atonement

  • Nutshell

  • Machines Like Me

  • Sweet Tooth

  • The Children Act

• Dave Eggars:

  • A Hologram for the King

  • The Circle

  • The Every

• Neal Stephenson:

  • Cryptonomicon

  • Termination Shock

  • Snow Crash

  • Sevenses

  • Fall

  • Readme

  • The Baroque Cycle (3 books)

  • Polostan (Vol 1)

• Amor Towles:

  • A Gentleman in Moscow

  • Table for Two

  • The Lincoln Highway

• Adam Johnson: The Orphan Master's Son

• The David Lagercrantz - the Lizbeth Salander series. I think everybody was reading these when they came out.

• Most of the Clive Cussler novels. I was a fan of his solo works and some co-written with his son. Later co-authers not so much.

• All the Doc Ford books (20+) by Randy Wayne White. Always a fan of Sanibel and Captiva Islands in Florida, it has been fun to read adventure fiction in the "Florida Man" genre set in those locales.

• Tim Dorsey - the Serge Storms series (a few dozen books); Dorsey is another author in the "Florida Man" genre - very lightweight entertainment and fast reads for filling in the blank spaces. Not great literature but great fun.

• Carl Hiasson - more Florida Man tales, mostly funny. About a dozen of these, each readable in a couple of sessions,

Non-fiction

Biographies

• Everything by Walter Isaacson - the best (and most prolific) biographer I have encountered: 

  • Leonardo Davinci

  • The Wise Men

  • Einstein

  • The Innovators

  • Kissinger

  • Elon Musk

  • Benjamin Franklin

• Ananyo Bhattacharya: The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

• John Berlau: George Washington, Entrepreneur: How Our Founding Father's Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World

• Edmund Morris: Edison

• Jon Meacham: Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

• Alan Pell Crawford: Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson

• Ben Macintyre: A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

• Graham Nash: Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life

• Paul Johnson: Churchill

• Andrew Roberts: Churchill: Walking with Destiny

History

• Winston Churchill:

  • A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (Abridged Edition by Christopher Lee)

  • The Boer War

  • The Gathering Storm

  • Triumph and Tragedy

• Erik Larson: 

  • The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

  • The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

  • Thunderstruck

  • The Devil in the White City

  • Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

• Ben Macintyre: The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

• Rick Atkinson: The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

• David Grann: Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

• Annie Jacobse: Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

• Brian Kilmeade, Don Yaeger: Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War That Changed American History

• Nathaniel Philbrick: Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution (The American Revolution Series Book 1)

• Lynne Olson: Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

• Bill Bryson: One Summer: America, 1927

• Scott Anderson: Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Science and Technology

• Chris Miller: Chip War: The Fight for the World's Critical Technology; I can't recommend this highly enough if you want to learn what is going on with the most valuable commodity in the world - semiconductor chips - and the geopolitical struggles around the technology. It is unsettling.

• Adam Fisher: Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom); this is a very interesting book, written as a set of comments on the history of startups (some successful, many failed) from the actual people involved. These are cleverly interwoven to appear as conversations, although not all are contemporaneous. 

• Garrett Hongo: The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo

• Steven E. Koonin: Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters

• Edgar H. Schein, Paul J. Kampas, Peter S. DeLisi, Michael M. Sonduck: DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation

• David A. Price: Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age

• Michael A. Hiltzik: Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

• Leslie Berlin: Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age

• Margaret O'Mara: The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

• Peter Westwick: Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft

• Michael S. Malone: The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company

• Brian Greene: The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

• Vikram Chandra: Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty

• J. Craig Venter: Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life

• Mark Denny: The Science of Navigation: From Dead Reckoning to GPS

• Jeffrey Bennett: What Is Relativity?: An Intuitive Introduction to Einstein's Ideas, and Why They Matter