Nate Meyvis

The 100 books nearest to my heart

My top 100 books

  1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
  2. Middlemarch, George Eliot
  3. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  4. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
  5. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  6. All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
  7. My Ántonia, Willa Cather
  8. My Struggle, Book VI, Karl Ove Knausgaard
  9. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
  10. The Breaks of the Game, David Halberstam
  11. Getting Things Done, David Allen
  12. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
  13. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
  14. The Dog, Joseph O’Neill
  15. Baseball By the Rules, Waggoner et al.
  16. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
  17. Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Michael Feathers
  18. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
  19. My Struggle, Book I, Karl Ove Knausgaard
  20. Expecting Better, Emily Oster
  21. The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy
  22. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
  23. Refactoring, Martin Fowler
  24. Walden, Henry David Thoreau
  25. Impossible Creatures, Katherine Rundell [notes]
  26. Friday Night Lights, Buzz Bissinger
  27. Oh, Crap!, Jamie Glowacki
  28. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  29. The Essence of Software, Daniel Jackson
  30. The Baseball 100, Joe Posnanski
  31. My Struggle, Book II, Karl Ove Knausgaard
  32. The Biggest Game in Town, Al Alvarez
  33. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
  34. No Bad Kids, Janet Lansbury
  35. Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion
  36. The Magician's Nephew, C.S. Lewis
  37. I Was Right On Time, Buck O’Neil
  38. The Cider House Rules, John Irving
  39. Effective Debugging, Diomidis Spinellis
  40. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders
  41. Suttree, Cormac McCarthy
  42. Ace on the River, Barry Greenstein
  43. Average is Over, Tyler Cowen
  44. Abe, David S. Reynolds
  45. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
  46. Hold’Em Poker For Advanced Players
  47. Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Martin Kleppmann
  48. Battle Cry of Freedom
  49. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
  50. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
  51. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
  52. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
  53. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
  54. Bringing Up Bébé, Pamela Druckerman
  55. The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
  56. My Struggle, Book III, Karl Ove Knausgaard
  57. My Losing Season, Pat Conroy
  58. Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen
  59. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
  60. We Are In a Book, Mo Willems
  61. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
  62. The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzard
  63. Open Socrates, Agnes Callard
  64. But What If We’re Wrong?, Chuck Klosterman
  65. Adam’s Task, Vicki Hearne
  66. The World According to Garp, John Irving
  67. Seven-Card Stud for Advanced Players, David Sklansky et al.
  68. The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen
  69. The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
  70. Cribsheet, Emily Oster
  71. The Art of Learning, Joshua Waitzkin
  72. The Fifties, David Halberstam
  73. The Discovery of Things, Wolfgang Mann
  74. The Pale King, David Foster Wallace
  75. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
  76. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis
  77. Stoner, John Williams
  78. The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis
  79. The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
  80. The Complacent Class, Tyler Cowen
  81. Bottom of the 33rd, Dan Barry
  82. Straight Man, Richard Russo
  83. The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie
  84. Precious Little Sleep, Alexis Dubief
  85. 1984, George Orwell
  86. Programming Pearls, Jon Bentley
  87. Danny, the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl
  88. The Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Gallwey
  89. The Upside-Down World, Benjamin Moser
  90. White Noise, Don DeLillo
  91. On the Calculation of Volume (volume 1), Solvej Balle [notes]
  92. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai [notes]
  93. Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick
  94. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
  95. Talent, Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross
  96. High-Low Split Poker for Advanced Players, Ray Zee
  97. Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes
  98. Architecture Patterns with Python, Harry Percival and Bob Gregory
  99. Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
  100. Elements of Poker, Tommy Angelo

Honorable mention (formerly on the list):

Honorable mention (never quite completed):

  1. Fluent Python, Luciano Ramalho
  2. Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
  3. The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, Bill James