Bookshelf

This page lists the books I have read and, occasionally, some reflections on what they taught me. Reading is one of my favorite ways to learn something new and see the world through other peoples’ eyes.

2024

  • Making It So by Patrick Stewart

  • The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

2023

  • Your Invisible Network: How to Create, Maintain, and Leverage the Relationships That Will Transform Your Career by Michael Urtuzuástegui Melcher

  • The Last Emperox by John Scalzi

  • The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi

  • The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

  • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  • The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee

  • The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

  • The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

  • Not Quite White by Laila Woozeer

  • Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

  • The Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown

  • Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

  • Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

  • Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. I listened to the audiobooks for all three of the books in this series, as read by Adjoa Andoh. They were so compellingly written, and Andoh’s narration was so engrossing, that as soon as I finished the first book I went back to the beginning and started it again!

  • Ace the Data Science Interview by Kevin Huo and Nick Singh

  • Modern Time Series Forecasting with Python by Manu Joseph

  • The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt

  • The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

  • The Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

2022

  • The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

  • The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke, PhD

  • System Design Interview by Alex Xu

  • Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for our Clean Energy Future by Saul Griffith

  • Superpower: One Man’s Quest to Transform American Energy by Russell Gold

  • The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

  • A Black Women’s History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross

  • Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

  • The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djeli Clark

  • Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

  • Snuff by Terry Pratchett

  • Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark

  • Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

  • Fine by Rhea Ewing

  • A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark

  • The Black God’s Drums by P. Djeli Clark

  • Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor

  • Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor

  • Network Effect by Martha Wells

  • Yes, Fear Works (But There’s a Better Way) by Bradley Hartmann and Carl Moyer

  • American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

  • Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

2021

  • Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

  • Exit Strategy by Martha Wells

  • Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

  • Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

  • The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

  • Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

  • All Systems Red by Martha Wells

  • The Irresistible Introvert by Michaela Chung

  • Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett

  • Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

  • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

  • Thud! by Terry Pratchett

  • Death’s End by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)

  • Lessons from Plants by Dr. Beronda L. Montgomery (amazing, and she is a fantastic speaker too!)

  • A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn (hugely valuable read on all of US history to a novice like me)

  • The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

  • The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (translated by Joel Martinsen)

  • A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza (So beautifully written. Each sentence was delicately crafted and the character arcs made me cry.)

  • Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay

  • 2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman and Adm. James Stavridis

  • The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)

  • The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin (Wow. Just wow. I cannot recommend this series enough.)

  • The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

  • A Promised Land by Barack Obama

  • The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (I loved this book so much that I put the sequel on reserve in the library before I even reached the end!)

Update 7 June 2020: I wanted to call myself out for having a list that is dominated by white male authors. In fact, the only books on this list that are not written by white men were given to me by a good friend of mine who is much more aware of who writes the books that she reads than I am. I am calling attention to this fact because I am going to change my reading habits to focus especially on BIPOC writers. I will be drawing heavily from books on this list and others - I am always open to recommendations.

2020

  • Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance by Mark Whitaker

  • Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  • White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

  • Wow, No Thank You: Essays by Samantha Irby

  • Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (This is one of the best books I have ever read, I would highly recommend it.)

  • Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

  • Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School edited by Kimberly D. McKee and Denise A. Delgado

  • Dune by Frank Herbert

  • Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

  • Becoming by Michelle Obama

  • So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

  • Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

  • I Will Teach You to be Rich by Ramit Sethi

  • An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Col. Chris Hadfield

  • Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

  • The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

  • Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg, PhD

  • Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham

2019

  • Failure is not an Option by Gene Krantz

  • Fields of Fire by Marko Kloos (I love space operas and Marko Kloos has a great series that he’s working on right now.)

  • Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies and Bargaining Power by Rhona Mahony (I highly recommend this book to every woman I know, especially young women who are not yet at the stage where they have to balance family and career. It was written in the 90’s, though so there are a lot of perspectives that are outdated. For instance, it is mainly written for cis, heterosexual relationships.)

  • Becoming by Michelle Obama

  • Educated by Tara Westover

  • I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb

  • The Hardware Hacker by Andrew “bunnie” Huang