Alex Dean

There's nothing quite like a book that changes how you see the world. There's nothing quite like perceiving life through some unspoken lens, and then having some elegant idea change that perception. Books like that are the stuff of magic.

The purpose of this page is to serve as a resource for others hoping to be transformed. For each year, I selected the top five books that have influenced me the most. While my selections are susceptible to my inherent biases of what is important, as well as my prevailing interests and attitudes of the time, I hope this page will be useful for others willing to indulge their curiosities to the furthest extent.

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2024

1. The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop
2. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
3. The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
4. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
5. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

2023

1. Organizing Genius by Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman
2. Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar
3. The Canceling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott
4. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
5. Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar

2022

1. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
2. The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
3. American Pharaoh by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
4. Pacific by Simon Winchester
5. Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv

2021

1. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
2. This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends by Nicole Perlroth
3. The Second Founding by Eric Foner
4. The Price of Peace by Zachary D. Carter
5. The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian

2020

1. The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
2. Conditional Citizens by Laila Lalami
3. A Promised Land by Barack Obama
4. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
5. Politics Is For Power by Eitan Hersh

2019

1. Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
2. Incognito by David Eagleman
3. Range by David Epstein
4. Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
5. Make It Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel

2018

1. So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport
2. How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
3. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. Othello by William Shakespeare