The Tech Canon - What Are People in Silicon Valley Reading These Days

People still read books in Silicon Valley - really!

Many of the people I enjoy hanging out with still constantly give me recommendations, like a crypto founder who recently told me he wanted to haunt the future like a self-replicating Von Neumann probe, and then recommended Taylor’s Bobiverse series of books, starting with “We are Legion (We are Bob)” as a fun bedtime read.

But is there a tech canon?

Patrick Collision recently kicked off a discussion on X, and Tanner Greer wrote more about the books that were recommended. More recently, some of the NVIDIA and OpenAI books may make this list, but it’s TBD (eg. The NVIDIA Way, The Thinking Machine, The Optimist, Empire of AI).

Here is my slightly edited version of the list, based on conversations with many people in SF and around the Bay Area:

• Asimov (1940, 1951, 1955), Robot Series, Foundation, and End of Eternity (the last was gifted to me as a bachelor party present)

• Rand (1943, 1957), Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged (often people like one and dislike the other)

• Deutsch (2012), The Beginning of Infinity

• Brand (1968-1972), The Whole Earth Catalog

• Brooks (1975), The Mythical Man-Month

• Pirsig (1974), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

• Caro (1975), The Power Broker

• Dawkins (1976), The Selfish Gene

• Alexander (1977), A Pattern Language

• Card (1977), Ender’s Game

• Hoftstader (1979), Gödel, Escher, Bach

• Papert (1980), Mindstorms

• Wolfe (1983), “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce”

• Ableson and Sussman (1984), Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

• Feynman (1961-64, 1985), Feynman Lectures on Physics, Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!

• Penrose (2007), Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Law of the Universe

• Rhodes (1985), The Making of the Atomic Bomb

• Carse (1986), Finite and Infinite Games

• Stephenson (1992-2015), Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, Anathem, Seveneves.

• Rich (1996), Skunk Works

• Graham (1998-2024), Essays

• Scott (1998), Seeing Like a State

• Raymond (1999), The Cathedral and the Bazaar

• Hiltzik (1999), Dealers of Lightning

• Davidson and Rees-Mogg (1999), The Sovereign Individual

• Waldrop (2001), The Dream Machine

• Morris (2001), The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

• Symonds (2003), Softwar

• Kushner (2003), Masters of Doom

• Cowen (2003-2025), Marginal Revolution

• Chernow (2004), Titan (sometimes Hamilton or Washington)

• Markoff (2006), What the Dormouse Said

• Livingston (2008), Founders at Work

• Meadows (2008), Thinking in Systems

• Reis (2011), The Lean Startup

• Herztfeld (2011), Revolution in the Valley

• Jackson (2012), The PayPal Wars

• Alexander (2013-2025), Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten

• Bostrom (2014), Superintelligence

• Thiel (2014), Zero to One

• Horowitz (2014), The Hard Thing about Hard Things

• Gordon (2016), The Rise and Fall of American Growth

• Vance (2017), Elon Musk

• Isaacson (2005-2023), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Einstein: His Life and Universe, Steve Jobs, Leonardo Da Vinci, The Code Breaker, Elon Musk.

• Grove (1995), High Output Management (Worth reading with Schmidt’s “Trillion Dollar Coach.”)

• Kurzweil (2005), The Singularity is Near (or the new one, “The Singularity is Nearer”)

• Thorndike (2012), The Outsiders

• J.R.R. Tolkien (1954–1955), Lord of the Rings

• Douglas Adams (1979), Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

• Andy Weir (2011), The Martian

• Iain Banks (1988), The Player of Games (sometimes Consider Phlebas)

• William Gibson (1984), Neuromancer

• Daniel Kahneman (2011), Thinking Fast and Slow

• Taleb (2012), Anti-Fragile

• Hargittai (2006), The Martians of Science

• Wensberg (1987), Land’s Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It

• Watts (2001), The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life

• Hamming (2020 reprint), The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

• Aurelius (c.180), Meditations

• Seneca (c.65), Letters from a Stoic

• Epictetus (c.108), Discourses

• Eswaran (2009), Upanishads

• Callenbach (1975), Ecotopia

• Munger (2005/23), Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

• Bennett (2023), A Brief History of Intelligence

• Gertner (2012), The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

• Hiktzik (1999), Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

• Macrae (1992), John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More (I recommend reading this with “The Neumann Compendium” edited by F. Brody and Tibor Vamos)

• Catmull (2023), Creativity, Inc (Expanded Edition)

• Westfall (1981), Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton

• Mahon and Forbes (2014), Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics (Read with Cropper’s “Great Physicists”).

• Watts (2006), Blindsight

• Simmons (1989), Hyperion

• Minsky (1986), The Society of Mind

• Borges (1944), Ficciones

• Tufte (1983), The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

• Csikszentmihalyi (1990), Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

• Ferguson (2008), The Ascent of Money