Complete Silicon Valley Canon - Comprehensive Reading List

• Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1951) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Dune by Frank Herbert (1965) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand (1968-1972) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig (1974) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks (1975) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Power Broker by Robert Caro (1975) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976) - Amazon | Goodreads
• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander (1977) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (1977) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (1979) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Mindstorms by Seymour Papert (1980) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman (1984) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman (1985) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1985) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Big Score by Michael Malone (1985) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse (1986) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (1995) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Skunk Works by Ben Rich (1996) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Seeing Like a State by James Scott (1998) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond (1999) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Dealers of Lightning by Michael Hiltzik (1999) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg (1999) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop (2001) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris (2001) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Softwar by Matthew Symonds (2003) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Masters of Doom by David Kushner (2003) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Titan by Ron Chernow (2004) - Amazon | Goodreads
• What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff (2006) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston (2008) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows (2008) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Lean Startup by Eric Reis (2011) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Revolution in the Valley by Andy Hertzfeld (2011) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch (2012) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The PayPal Wars by Eric Jackson (2012) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Zero to One by Peter Thiel (2014) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz (2014) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary (2014) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon (2016) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance (2017) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener (2020) - Amazon | Goodreads

Books from Patrick Collison's Silicon Valley History List

• Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech by Sally Smith Hughes - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner - Amazon | Goodreads
• Computer Lib by Ted Nelson - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Chip by T.R. Reid - Amazon | Goodreads
• Something Ventured (about Tom Perkins and venture capital) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Little Kingdom by Michael Moritz - Amazon | Goodreads
• From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner - Amazon | Goodreads
• Season of the Witch by David Talbot - Amazon | Goodreads
• Making Silicon Valley by Christophe Lécuyer - Amazon | Goodreads
• Swimming Across by Andy Grove - Amazon | Goodreads

Additional Books from Previous Lists

• High Output Management by Andy Grove (1995) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Good to Great by Jim Collins (2001) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil (2005) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Master Switch by Tim Wu (2010) - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Outsiders by William Thorndike (2012) - Amazon | Goodreads
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - Amazon | Goodreads
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Martian by Andy Weir - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Player of Games by Iain Banks - Amazon | Goodreads
• Neuromancer by William Gibson - Amazon | Goodreads
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Amazon | Goodreads
• Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Amazon | Goodreads
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - Amazon | Goodreads

Alternative Canon Books (from Programmable Mutter)

Henry's Essential Eight

• Plough, Sword and Book by Ernest Gellner - Amazon | Goodreads
• Conditions of Liberty by Ernest Gellner - Amazon | Goodreads
• Justice By Means of Democracy by Danielle Allen - Amazon | Goodreads
• Red Plenty by Francis Spufford - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler - Amazon | Goodreads
• A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Ordinal Society by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert Simon - Amazon | Goodreads

From the Social Science Foo Session

• Great Transformations by Mark Blyth - Amazon | Goodreads
• Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar - Amazon | Goodreads
• Remembrance of Earth's Past (series) by Liu Cixin - Amazon | Goodreads
• Mind Over Machine by Hubert Dreyfus - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes by Stefan Eich - Amazon | Goodreads
• Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Rise and Fall of the Neo-Liberal Order by Gary Gerstle - Amazon | Goodreads
• A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway - Amazon | Goodreads
• Uncertainty by Sheila Jasanoff - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Atomic Human: What Makes Us Unique in the Age of AI by Neil Lawrence - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Mechanical Muse by Hugh Kenner - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs - Amazon | Goodreads
• Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States by Jonathan Levy - Amazon | Goodreads
• Justice Is an Option: A Democratic Theory of Finance for the Twenty-First Century by Robert Meister - Amazon | Goodreads
• VC: An American History by Tom Nicholas - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara - Amazon | Goodreads
• Governing the Commons by Lin Ostrom - Amazon | Goodreads
• More Heat Than Light by Philip Mirowski - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi - Amazon | Goodreads
• AI 2041: Ten Visions For Our Future by Chen Qiufan and Kai-Fu Lee - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson - Amazon | Goodreads
• Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson - Amazon | Goodreads
• Hard To Be a God by Strugatsky Brothers - Amazon | Goodreads
• Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain - Amazon | Goodreads
• A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Ascendancy of Finance by Joseph Vogl - Amazon | Goodreads

Technical/Programming Books

• A Discipline of Programming by Edsger Dijkstra - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer Challenge to the World by Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian - Amazon | Goodreads
• Summa Technologiae by Stanislaw Lem - Amazon | Goodreads
• Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling - Amazon | Goodreads
• Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century by Alex Steffen - Amazon | Goodreads

Additional Strugatsky Brothers

• The Beetle in the Anthill by Strugatsky Brothers - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Time Wanderers by Strugatsky Brothers - Amazon | Goodreads

Academic/Reference Books

• The Spartan Regime: Its Character, Origins, and Grand Strategy by Paul Rahe - Amazon | Goodreads
• Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt - Amazon | Goodreads
• The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives by Plutarch - Amazon | Goodreads
• Republics Ancient and Modern by Paul Rahe - Amazon | Goodreads

Blogs/Online Publications

• Paul Graham's Essays - Website
• Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen - Website | Book: Stubborn Attachments on Amazon | Goodreads
• LessWrong by Eliezer Yudkowsky et al. - Website
• Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten by Scott Alexander - Current Site | Archive
• Ribbonfarm Essays by Venkatesh Rao - Website

Essays and Articles

• "The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce" by Tom Wolfe - Stanford Archive | Esquire Original
• "Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980s" - Reaction Wheel
• "Man-Computer Symbiosis" by J.C.R. Licklider - PDF | Archive