100 Best Kindle Books of All Time

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

On Bill Gates's reading list in 2012. [source]

Robert Muchamore

A brutal, exciting, action-based sci-fi novel. Hugely popular and excellent fun. [source]

Elon Musk

Founder/SpaceX

Must admit to liking this book. Sad, romantic and beautifully named. [source]

James Comey

@johngreen You should not be. It is a great book. Was recently in Amsterdam and walked some of the scenes with your huge fan, my youngest daughter. Loved hearing from you and meeting you at Kenyon. [source]

Craig Barrett

Former CEO/Intel

This book didn’t really change my mind, but rather reinforced the concept of the power of the individual. At a time when we depend more and more on big institutions to solve our business and social problems the real solutions are crafted by individual actions and initiative. This is true in the business world, where ideas from individual researchers or entrepreneurs can create mega companies overnight, and in the social sector, where such actions as high performing charter schools run circles around a moribund K-12 education system. Best we all remember that the next meaningful advances will come from individual initiative rather than massive governmental programs. After all, Google, Facebook, Uber, microloans and countless other success stories were not products of big government. [source]

Dan Christensen

@EconTalker @cable_co1 The Martian... hey it can’t all be economics and it’s a great book [source]

Fabrice Grinda

I have lots of books to recommend, but they are not related to my career path. The only one that is remotely related is Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. That said here are books I would recommend. [source]

Catherine Mayer

Atwood takes all the hard information about gender inequality that she sees around her and then turns it up a few notches. [source]

Cliff Bleszinski

@HandmaidsOnHulu Done. Love the show, book is a classic, can't wait for season 2. [source]

Grady Booch

I read this several years ago but — much like Orwell’s 1984 — it seems particularly relevant given our current political morass. [source]

Steve Jurvetson

A gift to all of my Apple II programming buddies from high school and Dungeons & Dragons comrades. [source]

Astro Teller

So much fun. [source]

Brian Burkhart

The last novel I read was Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One: A Novel,” because my buddy Mike Maddock said, “You gotta read this book!” And I tore it up. I read the whole book in less than two days. It’s something I wish everyone, including myself, did more of. [source]

Richard Branson

Founder/Virgin Group

Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. [source]

Steve Jobs

Founder/Apple

called this book "one of his favorite" and recommended it to the hires. The book also inspired one the greatest TV ad (made by Jobs) [source]

Andra Zaharia

These books and their core ideas have stuck with me the most and continue to guide me when I hit crossroads along the way. [source]

Barack Obama

Former USA President

As 2018 draws to a close, I’m continuing a favorite tradition of mine and sharing my year-end lists. It gives me a moment to pause and reflect on the year through the books I found most thought-provoking, inspiring, or just plain loved. It also gives me a chance to highlight talented authors – some who are household names and others who you may not have heard of before. Here’s my best of 2018 list. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Tara never went to school or visited a doctor until she left home at 17. I never thought I’d relate to a story about growing up in a Mormon survivalist household, but she’s such a good writer that she got me to reflect on my own life while reading about her extreme childhood. Melinda and I loved this memoir of a young woman whose thirst for learning was so strong that she ended up getting a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. [source]

Alexander Stubb

If you read or listen to only one book this summer, this is it. Bloody brilliant! Every word, every sentence. Rarely do I go through a book with such a rollecoaster of emotion, from love to hate. Thank you for sharing @tarawestover #Educated https://t.co/GqLaqlcWMp [source]

Audrey Penn

My next one is Jane Eyre. She was orphaned and sent to a very rich aunt, who had her own very selfish children. Jane Eyre was not the perfect child and she was sent to live in a girls’ school. She made one friend, but unfortunately the little girl died, so she had to toughen up. She grew up there and learned everything she needed to know about teaching. She was a very good artist, she played a little piano, she learned French. When she got older she became the governess for a little French girl who was the ward of a man who lived in a manor. They fell in love, but it turned out that he had a wife, who was insane and lived in the attic. So Jane Eyre ran away and found out she had an uncle who had left her a great deal of money. But she couldn’t get the man out of her mind, so she went back. She found out that after she left, the man’s wife had set the place on fire. The wife had died in the fire, and it had blinded him. They were still very much in love and they married. And they lived happily ever after. [source]

John Sutherland

There is an interesting debate … that the real heroine of Jane Eyre is not the plain little governess but the mad woman in the attic, Bertha Mason [source]

Lucy Atkins

I think Charlotte Brontë’s most accomplished book is Villette. It’s probably a better book, it’s tighter and more sophisticated in some ways. But there’s something about Jane Eyre that is just deeply emotionally compelling for me. [source]

Andrei Codrescu

Vampirism is a growth industry. Dracula is bigger than Jesus now. [source]

Becky Cloonan

@Noise_Raptor Oh, thank you so much! This book was such a delight, and such a challenge! Dracula is one of my favorites- funny enough I'd jump at the chance to do this again XD [source]

Claire Jarvis

Dracula is very explicit. That’s what’s so surprising about it. [source]

Amy Chua

Marmee is a character that really resonates for me. She’s obviously not Chinese, but she believes that integrity and hard work are the most important things in life. She holds her daughters to very high standards. She doesn’t sugarcoat much. She also reveals to her rebellious daughter Jo, the star of the book and a character loosely modeled on Louisa May Alcott herself, that she had a bad temper too when she was younger. That’s exactly what I did with my own daughter Louisa…….The kinds of mistakes that Marmee allows her daughters to make are very similar to the kinds of mistakes that I allow my daughters to make. [source]

Anne Thériault

@mmarmoset I love that book so much, and then I got to see Patty Smith perform the year I read it, and she made a Little Women reference during the show, and my heart overflowed [source]

Jay Kleinberg

Nancy Drew is another series which follows in those footsteps. The book is all led by her. I think if one looks in the magazine literature it would be hard to find a similar character at that time. These were stories initially published in a magazine and then bound together as a book. [source]

Marko Rakar

Basically, first of all, I am a huge fan of science fiction and fantasy books and I grew up with Douglas Adams and Arthur C Clarke. For me, this is the best of Gaiman’s books and I’ve got all of them. It’s set in the present time and talks about settlers who have settled a continent and have brought their gods with them. So, if you are Swedish and you cherish Nordic gods and move to the US, the gods go with you and the more you believe in them the stronger they are. But if fewer people start believing in them then they get weaker and eventually they become mortal and die. So, it’s about all these forgotten gods. It’s a horror story in which nobody dies. It’s a metaphor for our society – if you replace gods with values then you get the same thing. [source]

Ricky Whittle

Nobody can break my family.I’m proud to be apart of this diverse cast & crew who are working their butts off to deliver a fantastic season 3 continuing to tell Shadows story and the awesome characters he meets along the way as in @neilhimself incredible book #readit #details🤔 https://t.co/PahPC9j3HB [source]

Scott Johnson

American Gods by Neil Gaiman. This is a brilliant thought experiment about what happens to a god when its believers stop believing. My preferred edition is the 10th Anniversary release with expanded text. [source]

Simon Sinek

Author

Leaders needn’t be the loudest. Leadership is not about theater. It’s not about dominance. It is about putting the lives of others before any other priority. In Quiet, Cain affirms to a good many of us who are introverts by nature that we needn’t try to be extroverts if we want to lead. Simply being ourselves is more important — and more effective. [source]

Danielle Morrill

Co-founder/Mattermark

Anyway, maybe you’re like me and figuring this out for yourself. It’s a good book for introverts and for those who love them [source]

James Altucher

Founder/StockPickr

Probably half the world is introverts. Maybe more. It’s not an easy life to live. I sometimes have that feeling in a room full of people, “uh-oh. I just shut down. I can’t talk anymore and there’s a lock on my mouth and this crowd threw away the key.” Do you ever get that feeling? Please? I hope you do. Let’s try to lock eyes at the party. “Quiet” shows the reader how to unlock the secret powers that probably half the world needs to unlock. [source]

Chelsea Handler

I don't know if I have to expound on why I love this book, but everyone should read this author, and this was the first one of his works I read. So, it's like a first boyfriend. Or my first Cabbage Patch Kid. [source]

Marvin Liao

Partner/500 Startups

My list would be (besides the ones I mentioned in answer to the previous question) both business & Fiction/Sci-Fi and ones I personally found helpful to myself. The business books explain just exactly how business, work & investing are in reality & how to think properly & differentiate yourself. On the non-business side, a mix of History & classic fiction to understand people, philosophy to make sense of life and Science fiction to picture what the future could be like (not always utopian). [source]

Audrey Russo

Question: What books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path? Answer: Anything by Peter Senge. The Hard Thing About Hard Things – Ben Horowitz Once you are Lucky, Twice you are good – Sara Lacey Revolutionary Wealth – Alvin Toffler Black Swan – Taleb Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, by Ellen Pao. Creative Class – Richard Florida Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull & Amy Wallace Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis American Government 101: From the Continental Congress to the Iowa Caucus, Everything You Need to Know About US Politics – Kathleen Spears The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Any book by Herman Hesse The Art of War by Sun Tzu. [source]

Andra Zaharia

A copy from 1903 of this book is my most prized possession. [source]

Eric Berkowitz

The Picture of Dorian Gray is now a part of the canon that no one would admit to not having read. Most of us have read it and delighted in its witticisms. It’s hard to imagine, but when Dorian Gray was first published, the book was not well received at all. It was totally panned. It was held against him as being an example of an effete character. It was being serialised by Lippincott’s Magazine, and the serialisation of the novel stopped when it became too inflammatory. [source]

Marc Montagne

My favorite fiction book is the The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I'm a huge Oscar Wilde fan, he has one of the brightest minds and the Picture is a masterpiece and his unique novel. I consider that you should only read books that you would consider reading again at some point while still enjoying the same pleasure. The Picture is definitely one of those. [source]

Chris Albon

@WaltHickey I don’t really read fiction and randomly found that book, amazing. [source]

Matt Schlicht

@teej_m Read it. Love it. So amazing. Waiting for the last book and fear it may never come. [source]

Barack Obama

Former USA President

When he got to high school, the president said, his tastes changed and he learned to enjoy classics like “Of Mice and Men” and “The Great Gatsby.” [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Melinda and I really like this book. When we were first dating, she had a green light that she would turn on when her office was empty and it made sense for me to come over. [source]

Marvin Liao

Partner/500 Startups

For Non-Business, I'd have to say Dune (Herbert), Emergency (Strauss), The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) or Flint (L'Amour). I re-read these books every year because they are just so well written & great stories that I get new perspective & details every time I read them. [source]

A.J. Jacobs

Great writer. [source]

Carl Zimmer

Yes. This is a fascinating book on so many different levels. It is really compelling as the story of the author trying to uncover the history of the woman from whom all these cells came. [source]

Amelia Boone

Remains one my favorites to this day. [source]

Antonio Villaraigosa

As mayor of a large metropolis, the living conditions of our residents are always present in my mind. Every decision I make, I try to evaluate if it will help improve the quality of life of every Angeleno. But Dickens really dissects both the aristocrats and the revolutionaries, to show that change is never easy. As progressives, we value government’s role and power to improve our cities and communities, but at the same time we must never forget that the ends never justify the means. And that the majority cannot deprive the minority of their inalienable rights that come with a democracy. [source]

May Witwit

I started a paper about the historical reality in this book. And as I studied it more deeply I got depressed because the things that were happening were similar to Iraq. How the mob could be turned against people by devious minds. They just killed people without even knowing them. The people who were killed were probably very good people, you never know. You just can’t kill haphazardly, heads rolling everywhere for nothing. There must be a way to check these things [source]

Michael Arrington

Founder/TechCrunch

Shelley wrote this book as a teenager, and most of us read it in high school. Often credited as the first science fiction novel. You can read just about any political viewpoint you want into the book, and there are strong undertones that technology isn’t all good. But what I get out of it is the creativeness that can come with solitude, and how new technology can be misunderstood, even perhaps by the creator (see Twitter). Key thing to remember: Frankenstein is the name of the scientist/creator, not the Monster. Everybody forgets that. [source]

Adam Roberts

Brian Aldiss has famously argued that science fiction starts with Mary Shelley’s novel, and many people have agreed with him. [source]

Adam Roberts

Brian Aldiss has famously argued that science fiction starts with Mary Shelley’s novel, and many people have agreed with him. [source]

Mark Zuckerberg

Founder/Facebook

Oh, it’s not a favorite book or anything like that, I just added it because I liked it. I don’t think there’s any real significance to the fact that it’s listed there and other books aren’t. [source]

Timothy Ferriss

Author & Entrepreneur

At one point, this was the only book listed on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page. If it’s good enough to be the sole selection of the founder of Facebook, maybe there’s something to it. The plot: In anticipation of another attack from a hostile alien race, the search for a brilliant military strategist has led to Ender Wiggin. In space combat school, Ender stands out, demonstrating exceptional leadership and unconventional strategy. But it is lonely at the top for Ender, as he struggles with relentless pressure from his instructors. Through Ender’s journey, you’ll learn how to capitalize on your strengths and those of your teammates, as well as exploit your adversaries’ weaknesses. Ender is a futuristic Level 5 Leader we can all learn from. [source]

Travis Kalanick

About a kid who is trained by the military to play video games … But he realizes at the end that the video games he was playing were an actual war. [source]

Claire Jarvis

Wuthering Heights is a strange novel in a lot of ways. It’s a standalone—there’s not really another book like it. [source]

John Sutherland

The Brontës had this idea of a Samson figure. Rochester, like Samson, has to be mutilated before he can be domesticated. What is interesting about Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, is that he isn’t. He remains this superman. He is greater than a human being. He is named after two elemental things, the heath and the cliff. We never know what his first name is. [source]

Rachel Hickman

In Wuthering Heights once again it’s the landscape that underlines the choices the characters must make. Cathy must choose between the grand house in the lush valley: protected, comfortable and tame; or the wild, exhilarating bleakness of Wuthering Heights. [source]

Asher Wolf

@trib I love that book. So much. [source]

Zoe Keating

For a while in 2015 I lost the ability to read (PTSD, I’m told) and “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” and Eli Brown’s “Cinnamon & Gunpowder” were the first books I was able to understand and enjoy. @neilhimself’s book in particular was like a hand pulling me up. https://t.co/foEbRxYbuj [source]

Richard Branson

Founder/Virgin Group

Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. [source]

Cressida Cowell

The Hobbit is such a richly imagined fantasy that, especially as a child, you can live in it. It is so completely immersive. [source]

Lev Grossman

First up, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, by JRR Tolkien. But you knew I was going to say that. This one book, which was published in 1937, defined so many variables for the fantasy tradition that are still in place today. Tolkien’s extraordinary achievement was to recover the epic landscapes of Anglo-Saxon myth, bring them back to life, and then to take us through them on foot, so we could see the details up close, at human scale. The Hobbit is both mythic and relatable at the same time – The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik recently called it “an arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and The Wind in the Willows”, and I think that’s entirely fair. Though I would give more credit to the bass register of Tolkien’s imagination, its abyssal depths. Mole never delved as deep as the Mines of Moria. [source]

Christian B Miller

Vividly illustrates two ideas about character. The first is that our characters can change over time, the second is that role models can be powerful sources of character change. [source]

David Bellos

Because it’s so huge and so capacious and contains so many different stories and takes on the world, you can make anything out of Les Misérables. [source]

Reid Hoffman

CEO/LinkedIn

Reid read Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu as a boy, which informed his strategic thinking. [source]

Evan Spiegel

After meeting Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel immediately bought every Snapchat employee a copy of 'The Art Of War'. [source]

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Astrophysicist, Author & Science Communicator

Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on planet? … The Art of War (Sun Tsu) to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art. If you read all of the above works you will glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world. [source]

Clare Morpurgo

The book is about a girl coming to live in England from India. She is a sickly child who had a pretty awful early childhood in India. [source]

M G Leonard

The redemptive power of the natural world and gardening was something that struck a chord with me. [source]

Jamie Grayson

Holy shit there’s no way this book is that old because that really ages me but I COMPLETELY agree. This book is a masterpiece and a must-read. Lessons about being human are in there and those are important right now. https://t.co/fF1spEFrUH [source]

Rae Earl

It is a tremendously powerful study of PTSD, a mental health issue that isn’t talked about enough [source]

Richard Speight Jr.

A pal for 30 years, @StephenChbosky ‘s first book #ThePerksofBeingaWallflower had a MASSIVE impact on me & countless others. Then came his great movies. Now..THE NEXT BOOK! Be like me & buy it THE DAY it comes out. (Then harass him until he agrees to put me in the movie! 🎥 🤠) https://t.co/02bMKPgF9A [source]

Elon Musk

Founder/SpaceX

Brilliant. The author advocates placing limits on machine intelligence. [source]

Jeff Bezos

Founder/Amazon

I’m a big science-fiction fan. I love this book. [source]

Adam Savage

If you haven't read it, just go read it. It is amazing! [source]

Cat Williams-Treloar

I loved the Hugh Howey "Silo" trilogy. An epic science fiction story about the above ground world coming to an end and the remaining society living underground in Wool Silos. Makes me shiver thinking about what could happen in the future. It's an intense set. [source]

Damien Mulley

I'm expecting to not be able to tell what happens next as I like surprises. [source]

Alfred A. Knopf

“What sets Station Eleven apart from so many other recent dystopian novels is the warmness of @EmilyMandel's writing, the lived-in details of each of these characters’ lives… It’s the kind of book that stays with you.” —@TomiObaro https://t.co/tWakW2L6Tq [source]

Holly Brockwell

@nmsonline @katebevan Great book though 🤷‍♀️ [source]

Yuval Noah Harari

Historian

The most prophetic book of the 20th century. Today many people would easily mistake it for a utopia. [source]

Andra Zaharia

These books and their core ideas have stuck with me the most and continue to guide me when I hit crossroads along the way. [source]

Catherine Mayer

It shows the ways in which technology, our need for certain creature comforts and consumer culture can be used to manipulate us. [source]

Ashley C. Ford

@ALNL I love this book [source]

Laura Wood

A powerful and moving story about identical twins trying to find their individual identities outside of their own powerful relationship. [source]

Ben Domenech

@SohrabAhmari @li88yinc @jgcrum @BlueBoxDave @InezFeltscher @JarrettStepman Maybe the best book ever written. [source]

Esther Perel

You can reread the Russians. They are timeless. [source]

Irvine Welsh

It is not a crime book in the way that we understand crime fiction today. Instead it is like an existential psychological thriller. [source]

Barack Obama

Former USA President

During a trip to a public library in Washington’s Anacostia neighborhood in 2015, Obama shared some of his childhood favorites with a group of young students. He also read (and acted out) Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak to kids at the White House in 2014. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak [source]

Richard Branson

Founder/Virgin Group

Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. [source]

Michael Morpurgo

This is the first book that I ever read on my own and I take great pleasure and pride in that. It was the first book where I really identified strongly with the boy Jim in it. He was about the same age as I was when I began reading it. [source]

Andrei Maylunas

One doesn’t have to invent the bicycle, there is one: it’s War and Peace. It’s about how Russia won the Napoleonic wars, and moved into the first row of nations who dealt with European history. It’s set during the peak of Russian culture, the age of Pushkin, who created the modern Russian language. It’s the peak…The only thing I would recommend to modern readers is to skip all those parts – which are completely separate from the other parts of the book – where Tolstoy is philosophising about the role of the individual in history. It’s maybe 15 per cent of the book, in separate chapters, and I would definitely recommend to skip those because they are not interesting today. [source]

Cécile Fabre

One of the key questions that Tolstoy asks in the appendix is the central question of War and Peace: how can we explain the fact that, on orders, millions of people go out and kill one another, when they know that killing another human being is morally wrong? [source]

Kate McLoughlin

Tolstoy didn’t fight in the Napoleonic wars, but he did fight in the Crimean war, so he drew on his experiences in that when he wrote War and Peace. [source]

Adam Lawrence

It's just the best. [source]

Antonio Villaraigosa

Even though I know we’ve made great strides in America, and have come from the reality of Maycomb, we still suffer today from the lingering effects of the bigotry of that era. At the same time, it’s a lesson in standing tall in the face of tremendously hostile circumstances. [source]

Clive Stafford Smith

The book touches on so many issues and deals with so many prejudices – prejudices towards the mentally ill, racial stuff. It’s a book that was way ahead of its time in many ways. It’s also a wonderfully written book – a joy to read. [source]

Robert McCrum

You’ve got to have Jane Austen. [source]

Stella Tillyard

Emma is the Regency novel in the sense that it was written and published during the Regency. I think the feel of much of Jane Austen is really in the late 1790s – the beginning of the French Wars. Jane Austen wasn’t writing about politics. She is famously someone who writes about what she knows. Her world is essentially a provincial world of manners. [source]

Ryan Holiday

Author

I thought I’d read this book before but clearly they gave me some sort of children’s version. Because the one I’d read as a kid wasn’t a 1,200 page epic of some of the most brilliant, beautiful and complicated storytelling ever put to paper. What a book! When I typed out my notes (and quotes) after finishing this book, it ran some 3,000 words. I was riveted from cover to cover. I enjoyed all the stuff I missed as a kid: the Counts struggle with his faith in light of what was done to him, the Hundred Days of Napoleon’s return, his rants against technology, the criticism of newspapers, the influence of ancient philosophy, ultimately, a warning against being consumed by revenge. Please—if you’re going on a long trip or looking to check out of modern events for a while—get this book. I recommend the Penguin Classics edition. [source]

Chris Kutarna

The Count of Monte Cristo it is about revenge and the cost of revenge. Being careful what you wish for. The other theme is about riches and wealth and what is truly valuable. [source]

Sol Orwell

I have to go with Count of Monte Cristo. An unparalleled revenge story. [source]

Whitney Cummings

Whitney Cummings recommended this book on the podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show". [source]

Vlad Tenev

When I was in sixth grade I remember being very upset by the ending of this book. [source]

Heather Brooke

I picked Animal Farm because it is an allegory about power and its seductive and corruptive influence on people regardless of their initial good intentions. [source]

Richard Branson

Founder/Virgin Group

Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. [source]

Marvin Liao

Partner/500 Startups

My list would be (besides the ones I mentioned in answer to the previous question) both business & Fiction/Sci-Fi and ones I personally found helpful to myself. The business books explain just exactly how business, work & investing are in reality & how to think properly & differentiate yourself. On the non-business side, a mix of History & classic fiction to understand people, philosophy to make sense of life and Science fiction to picture what the future could be like (not always utopian). [source]

Audrey Russo

So many novels; Lord of the Flies, Great Gatsby, Great Expectations; all the Nancy Drew books; Catcher in the Rye, Books written by Zora Neale Hurston; Pat Conroy – all because of the view about different people who endure despite adversity while kindling the hearts of the human spirit. [source]

Bernard Tan

I’m also a Murakami and Vonnegut fan, Kafka on the Shore, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, Slaughterhouse-Five, etc. Now that I look at the books listed, they seem to carry an existential theme. I guess I like to understand humanity and human behaviour ultimately to better understand myself. I find reading a means to connect with people who may have lived before my time, or in a distant country, that I may never have had the chance to connect with in real life. As three-dimensional humans, we are all made up of so many faces and emotional layers that we find it hard to dissect them all, and when we find writers who can explain these thought processes in a way that’s tangible and digestible, there’s this incredibly comforting eureka moment of feeling understood. [source]

Carlos Eire

Even though he is no philosopher Vonnegut is still able to ask the questions that all of us think about – how time affects our lives. [source]

Dan Christensen

@MetaHumean Love that book. [source]

Andra Zaharia

I’ve gone through quite a few experiences brought on or shaped by what I’ve learned from books. … a more frivolous example is The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying. I read this one when moving apartments a few years ago and it made me throw or give away ⅓ of my stuff. The result: freeing up space, both physical and mental, and acquiring some home organizing skills that have stuck with me ever since. My home is tidier and my mind is clearer because of this book. [source]

Annie Loves Covfefe

@Benny29143790 @Thereal_ssteele Oh how I love Kondo cleaning. Her first book is fantastic too!! [source]

Benjamin Spall

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo … I started reading on vacation. I interviewed Marie for my own book and while the translation is somewhat quirky in places, her book is worth the hype. [source]

Adam Roberts

It is a short novel, almost a novella, but it is smoothly and evocatively written, and it manages to open a chink in the reader’s mind that gives a her dizzying, thrilling glimpse down the vertiginous perspectives of long time. My favourite moment comes near the end, after the time traveller has left the Eloi and Morlocks behind him (as it were) and travelled more than 30 million years into the far distant future. He finds himself on a desolate beach, seemingly lifeless but for green slime on the rocks, the sun grown to massive proportions, and witnesses an eclipse [source]

Adam Roberts

It is a short novel, almost a novella, but it is smoothly and evocatively written, and it manages to open a chink in the reader’s mind that gives a her dizzying, thrilling glimpse down the vertiginous perspectives of long time. My favourite moment comes near the end, after the time traveller has left the Eloi and Morlocks behind him (as it were) and travelled more than 30 million years into the far distant future. He finds himself on a desolate beach, seemingly lifeless but for green slime on the rocks, the sun grown to massive proportions, and witnesses an eclipse [source]

Roger Luckhurst

It invents the idea of far-future visions that science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke have constantly tried to achieve. [source]

Daniel Mendelsohn

I don’t want to know what Achilles did in bed, frankly. If you want to play with the big boys, fine, but don’t turn The Iliad into a Twilight novel. [source]

Lucy Coats

I loved the richness of the language, the descriptions. She really made me feel I was in ancient Greece — the smells, the whole environment. [source]

Elon Musk

Founder/SpaceX

I guess when I was around 12 or 15... I had an existential crisis, and I was reading various books on trying to figure out the meaning of life and what does it all mean? It all seemed quite meaningless and then we happened to have some books by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in the house, which you should not read at age 14 (laughter). It is bad, it’s really negative. So then I read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy which is quite positive I think and it highlighted an important point which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask. Then whatever the question is that most approximates: what’s the meaning of life? That’s the question we can ultimately get closer to understanding. And so I thought to the degree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge, then that would be a good thing. [source]

Richard Branson

Founder/Virgin Group

Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. [source]

Michael Arrington

Founder/TechCrunch

Not sure what you’ll learn from HHGTTG, but it’s one of the funniest series of books of all time and if you haven’t read it you pretty much have to. It’s actually a five book series that’s called a trilogy, and if Adams hadn’t died of a heart attack at age 49 in 2001 there would have likely been more books written. HHGTTG and the WWII epic Catch-22 are among my favorite books when contemplating the meaninglessness and hilarity of life (HHGTTG begins with the Earth being destroyed to to make way for a hyperspatial express route). Like Dune, skip the movie, it doesn’t do the books justice. [source]