Current Reads

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"The Unwinding of the Miracle," Julie Yip-Williams (a death memoir); "The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life," Jean Francois-Revel and Matthieu Richard (the most intelligent discusion I have attended); "Think," Simon Blackburn (an excellent introduction to the central questions of philosophy);  "The Corrections," Jonathan Franzen (been reading it since it was published).

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Recently Read

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"You Are a Mogul," Tiffany Pham; "Measure What Matters," John Doerr (the definitive book on OKR's). "Desire: A Haunting," Molly Gaudry (a poet working in prose).

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Hope to Read Soon

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"Why Religion?" Elaine Pagels. I heard her interview on NPR. Author of the Gnostic Gospels, wise person, survor of the worst kind of losses.

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Entrepreneurship

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The Big Three: "Understanding Michael Porter," Joan Magretta; "The Innovator's Dilemma," Clayton Christensen; and "Blue Ocean Strategy," Renee Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim. Basic business strategy, disruptive innovation, entering an undiscovered market.

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"The Four Hour Workweek," Timothy Ferris. A new paradigm.

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Zen

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"The Power of Now," Eckhart Tolle; "Everyday Zen," Charlotte Beck; and "Zen in the Art of Archery," Eugen Herrigel. Three very different takes on Zen. A great foundation.

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"Zen Master Raven," Robert Baker Aitken. A masterpiece.

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Literature

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The Big Three: "The Iliad," "The Odyssey," Homer; and "The Bible." Everything else is just a variation.

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"Blood Meridian," Cormac McCarthy; "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," Milan Kundera; "1984," George Orwell; "Henderson the Rain King," Saul Bellow; "Lord of the Flies," William Golding; "Heart of Darkness," Joseph Conrad; "On the Road," Jack Kerouac.

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Poetry

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"Leaves of Grass," Walt Whitman; "The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson," "The Collected Poems of Robert Frost," "A Book of Luminous Things," Edited by Czeslaw Milosz.

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Philosophy

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"The Republic," "The Dialogues," Plato; "The Prince," Machiavelli; "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," "Beyond Good and Evil," Nietzsche; "Myth of Sisyphus," "The Stranger," Camus; "Nausea," Sartre; "Practical Ethics," Peter Singer.

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Mountaineering

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"Into Thin Air," John Krakauer; "Beyond The Mountain," Steve House; "Mt. Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing," Rene Daumel.
 

"You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know." Rene Daumel.