What I'm reading
to think better.

Where to begin?

Reading now

Four Thousand Weeks

Oliver Burkeman

Time and limits for a new role — the parent book to Meditations for Mortals.

The Art of Noticing

Rob Walker

131 ways to pay attention — your attention POV turned into a daily practice.

Storyworthy

Matthew Dicks

The five-second moment — a weapon for hooks, thumbnails, and essays.

Range

David Epstein

Finance journo to YouTube producer to Head of Social. You are the thesis.

The Creative Act

Rick Rubin

Creativity as a way of being. Gorgeous, and rocket fuel for writing.

Made to Stick

Chip Heath

The stickiness canon you somehow haven't read yet.

Status and Culture

W. David Marx

Why people share — sharpens your attention and sameness POVs.

Bird by Bird

Anne Lamott

The emotional truth of writing. Sits right beside your shelf.

The Cold Start Problem

Andrew Chen

Network effects — on-point for Every's products and your growth remit.

Lessons in Chemistry

Bonnie Garmus

A woman, science, and a cooking show that's really about defiance.

As a new employee at an AI-native company, I wanted to learn the basics.

Reading now

Empire of AI

Karen Hao

Finish it. Your real anchor — reported, sceptical, your lane.

Co-Intelligence

Ethan Mollick

The deliberate optimist counterweight to Hao.

The Coming Wave

Mustafa Suleyman

The best big-picture case for containment.

The Alignment Problem

Brian Christian

How AI fails, written for non-engineers.

Atlas of AI

Kate Crawford

The labour and materials behind the magic — your people-over-AI POV.

AI Superpowers

Kai-Fu Lee

US vs China, read from exactly where you sit.

Chip War

Chris Miller

Semiconductors as a thriller. High Asia relevance.

Genius Makers

Cade Metz

The humans behind deep learning. Narrative nonfiction done right.

Reading now

The Worlds I See

Fei-Fei Li

Immigrant-scientist memoir. Doubles as diaspora.

Filterworld

Kyle Chayka

Algorithmic flattening of taste — bullseye on sameness vs specificity.

Important for today's digital age.

The Attention Merchants

Tim Wu

The history of selling eyeballs, posters to TikTok.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman

Written about TV, reads like it's about your feed.

Hit Makers

Derek Thompson

"Most advanced yet acceptable" — it'll change how you package.

The Content Trap

Bharat Anand

Media economics: why connections beat content. Built for Every.

Trust Me, I'm Lying

Ryan Holiday

How media gets gamed. Dark, useful.

The Revolt of the Public

Martin Gurri

Why authority collapsed online.

Influence

Robert B. Cialdini

The persuasion bedrock — six principles.

Contagious

Jonah Berger

STEPPS — the theory under your Ali-channel instincts.

Hooked

Nir Eyal

Habit loops: why people reopen a newsletter.

Dopamine Nation

Anna Lembke

Pairs with your DOSE Effect read — the compulsion side of attention.

Beyond Steven Pinker.

On Writing

Stephen King

The craft book, full stop.

On Writing Well

William Zinsser

Clarity in nonfiction; the cut-everything discipline.

Draft No. 4

John McPhee

Structure as the writer's real problem.

The Situation and the Story

Vivian Gornick

Personal-essay craft — made for your Substack.

The War of Art

Steven Pressfield

Resistance, the inner enemy. Short, punchy.

Save the Cat!

Blake Snyder

Story beats that map straight onto video scripts.

Daily Rituals

Mason Currey

How 161 creatives actually structured their days.

Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke

The why of making anything at all.

Photography, design, and aesthetics. For someone who shoots film, paints, and has font opinions (Claude is really salty about this one).

On Photography

Susan Sontag

Not how to shoot — what it means to take a picture.

Camera Lucida

Roland Barthes

Photography, grief, and the image that pierces you.

Ways of Seeing

John Berger

Short, revolutionary; how looking is constructed.

Thinking with Type

Ellen Lupton

Mandatory for someone with font opinions.

Just My Type

Simon Garfield

The fun, story-driven typography read.

The Shape of Design

Frank Chimero

Design philosophy that reads like poetry. Free online.

The Design of Everyday Things

Don Norman

Why good design disappears.

Wabi-Sabi

Leonard Koren

The aesthetics of imperfection. Short, beautiful.

Joyful

Ingrid Fetell Lee

The science of why colour and form spark joy.

The Story of Art

E.H. Gombrich

You paint — here's the one-volume backbone.

The main course. Your shelf is mostly narrative, so this gets real weight.

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell

Nested structure, time, interconnection.

Free Food for Millionaires

Min Jin Lee

Before Pachinko — class, ambition, Korean-American New York.

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

The quietest, most devastating book about what makes us human.

The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro

Duty, regret, the stories we tell ourselves.

Exhalation

Ted Chiang

You read Ken Liu — tech with a soul.

Severance

Ling Ma

Millennial work, media, and apocalypse satire.

The Vanishing Half

Brit Bennett

Identity and passing, across two lives.

Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi

A generational sweep in Pachinko's key.

The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Dual identity, dark and brilliant. Pulitzer.

The Vegetarian

Han Kang

One refusal unravels a family — conformity as horror.

Convenience Store Woman

Sayaka Murata

Short, sharp; your sameness POV in fiction.

Normal People

Sally Rooney

Intimacy at the level of the sentence.

The Overstory

Richard Powers

Trees, connection, what endures. Pulitzer.

Interior Chinatown

Charles Yu

Identity and media satire — your lens exactly.

Indonesian, lived in Hong Kong, working with foreigners — books that live where you do.

The Culture Map

Erin Meyer

Your literal working life, mapped.

Minor Feelings

Cathy Park Hong

An Asian-American reckoning, in essays.

Stay True

Hua Hsu

Friendship and identity. Pulitzer-winning memoir.

The Best We Could Do

Thi Bui

A graphic memoir of refuge and motherhood — for your eye, too.

Beautiful Country

Qian Julie Wang

An undocumented childhood, luminous.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Jeanette Winterson

Becoming a writer against the odds.

The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan

Mothers, daughters, two countries.

The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri

Names, belonging, the second generation.

Time, meaning, and attention. Sharpening your existence-justification POV.

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl

Purpose, timeless.

Being Mortal

Atul Gawande

How medicine fails the end of life — and what a good one looks like.

How to Do Nothing

Jenny Odell

Resisting the attention economy — your number-one POV.

Stolen Focus

Johann Hari

Why attention broke, and who broke it.

Wintering

Katherine May

Rest, retreat, seasons of the self. Antidote to a fast new role.

Die with Zero

Bill Perkins

Life energy over money. Pairs with The Art of Spending Money.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Becky Chambers

Purpose and tea. Gentle, profound, short.

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

The original note-to-self.

On the Shortness of Life

Seneca

Two thousand years before Four Thousand Weeks — same gut-punch.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Eric Jorgenson

Wealth and happiness frameworks. Free online.

For someone who cooks Indonesian food and makes things with her hands.

Crying in H Mart

Michelle Zauner

Food, grief, identity. Beautiful.

Kitchen Confidential

Anthony Bourdain

Creativity, chaos, kitchens.

Taste: My Life Through Food

Stanley Tucci

You'll cook after every chapter.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

Samin Nosrat

The why of cooking, for someone who already does.

Heat

Bill Buford

A writer apprentices himself to a kitchen.

Cooked

Michael Pollan

Cooking as transformation, element by element.

Coconut & Sambal

Coconut & Sambal

Lara Lee

Indonesian home cooking and stories. Your heritage on the page.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender

Food and feeling, in fiction.

Past the 101 you've already read — strategy with a pulse.

Good Strategy Bad Strategy

Richard P. Rumelt

What strategy actually is, minus the buzzwords.

Obviously Awesome

April Dunford

Positioning Every's products for different rooms.

Working Backwards

Colin Bryar

Amazon's press-release-first; content to product flywheel.

The Mom Test

Rob Fitzpatrick

Learning what your audience wants without leading them.

Shoe Dog

Phil Knight

The best business memoir ever. Reads like a novel.

Thinking in Bets

Annie Duke

Your finance brain, sharpened for A/B testing.

7 Powers

Hamilton Helmer

The seven durable moats. The strategy book founders keep.

Reading now

Building a StoryBrand

Donald Miller

Make the audience the hero — Every's messaging.

Historical context on tech and AI — the parables and the people, so the headlines make sense.

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

The original "we built something we can't control." Every AI debate is a footnote to it.

The Machine Stops

The Machine Stops

E.M. Forster

A 1909 short story that predicted the feed, remote work, and our dependence.

R.U.R.

Karel Čapek

The 1920 play that coined "robot" — and went straight to the uprising.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick

Empathy as the line between human and machine. Blade Runner's source.

Neuromancer

William Gibson

Coined "cyberspace"; invented how we still picture the net.

Understanding Media

Marshall McLuhan

"The medium is the message" — he saw your whole job coming.

The Soul of a New Machine

Tracy Kidder

Pulitzer account of building a computer, and the human cost of it.

The Innovators

Walter Isaacson

The relay race from Ada Lovelace to Google.

The Master Switch

Tim Wu

How every information empire rises, closes, and falls.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Douglas R. Hofstadter

Minds, machines, and strange loops — the playful giant under modern AI.

Because a good list keeps a few surprises.

The Anthropology of Turquoise

Ellen Meloy

Colour, perception, the desert. For your eye.

H Is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald

Grief, falconry, and prose that stops you.

The Art of Gathering

Priya Parker

How to bring people together — including your Every events.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Rebecca Solnit

Essays on the unknown. A writer's book.