My favorite books
A growing list of my favorite books
Philosophy
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca) by Seneca
The Gospel in Brief by Leo Tolstoy
A Confession by Leo Tolstoy
The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
Discourses by Epictetus
On the Shortness of Life by Seneca
Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
Lessons From an American Stoic: How Emerson Can Change Your Life by Mark Matousek
The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain De Botton
How to be Perfect by Michael Schur
The Art of Living by Epictetus
Enchiridion by Epictetus
A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy
Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday
The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday
How to be Content by Horace
That One Should Disdain Hardships by Musonius Rufus
The Second Mountain by David Brooks
The Road to Character by David Brooks
Inner Engineering by Sadhguru
Rules for a Knight by Ethan Hawke
The Daily Dad by Ryan Holiday
How to Be a Stoic by Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca
How To Do the Right Thing by Seneca
The Daily Henry David Thoreau by Henry David Thoreau
Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper
Right Thing, Right Now by Ryan Holiday
Creativity & Writing
Several Short Sentences on Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg
The Daily Pressfield by Steven Pressfield
On Writing by C.S. Lewis
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
Show Your Work by Austin Kleon
Keep Going by Austin Kleon
Write for Your Life by Anna Quindlen
You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) by Jeff Goins
Real Artists Don’t Starve by Jeff Goins
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Perennial Sellers by Ryan Holiday
Everybody Writes by Ann Handley
The Art of Thinking by Ernest Dimnet
Do the Work by Steven Pressfield
The Authentic Swing by Steven Pressfield
The Practice by Seth Godin
Working by Robert A. Caro
First We Read, Then We Write by Robert D. Richardson
How To Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy
100 Ways to Improve Your Writing by Gary Provost
The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
What It Is by Lynda Barry
The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr
Creativity Sucks by Phil Hanson
Writing on Empty by Natalie Goldberg
Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan
Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills
Memoirs
The Choice by Dr. Edith Eva Eger
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For by Henry David Thoreau
Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard Feynman
Open by Andre Agassi
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris
A Life in Parts by Bryan Cranston
When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead by Jerry Weintraub and Rich Cohen
High School by Tegan and Sara Quin
This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff
In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger
Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi
No Cure for Being Human by Kate Bowler
Life
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller
Feynman’s Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow
Mastery by Robert Green
Excellent Advice for Living by Kevin Kelly
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
How to Think More Effectively by The School of Life & Alain de Botton
The Art of Clear Thinking by Hasard Lee
Biographies
Buddha by Karen Armstrong
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
Truman by David McCullough
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
Cyrus the Great by Xenophon
The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man by David Von Drehle
William Blake vs. The World by John Higgs
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
John Adams by David McCullough
The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon
Finance
The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
Financial Freedom by Grant Sabatier
Fiction
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Letters From a Self-Made Merchant To His Son by George Horace
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Sports
The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
The Perfect Pass by S. C. Gwynne
When the Game Was War by Rich Cohen
Narrative Nonfiction
Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson
The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Dead Wake by Erik Larson
Endurance by Alfred Lansing
Going Infinite by Michael Lewis
The Art Thief by Michael Finkel
The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel
His Majesty’s Airship by S. C. Gwynne
Tunnel 29 by Helena Merriman
Furious Hours by Casey Cep
In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick
The Night of the Grizzlies by Jack Olsen