A living curriculum, not a checklist. Organized into paths — each one has a through-line. The goal isn’t to finish the list; it’s to always know what the next book on a path could be.
How to read this file:
- Reading now — what’s actively on the nightstand / in the ears.
- Each path has a one-line through-line and a set of candidates.
- Retired at the bottom holds everything already read (with a note on what landed).
- Fiction lives on zgware.com/reading — it’s a bedtime function, not part of the curriculum.
Reading now
- (nothing queued — pick one from The Older World to start the year)
Path 1 — The Older World (this year’s spine — the Rome/antiquity gap)
Through-line: Step outside the modern-American-industrial groove. Read narrative histories of the pre-modern world, starting with Rome, to build a longer arc in your head.
On-ramp (in order):
- The Swerve — Stephen Greenblatt (already own it. Gateway: it’s a narrative about a book hunter in 1417 finding Lucretius, not a lecture on Epicureanism. Start here.)
- SPQR — Mary Beard (best modern single-volume front door to Rome; narrative, opinionated, readable.)
- Rubicon — Tom Holland (very much in the Big Rich register — ambitious men, money, violence, a republic breaking. Your genre wearing a toga. Pick this one if Beard feels too surveyish.)
Next stops, depending on what hooks:
- Dynasty — Tom Holland (the Julio-Claudians as a crime family, if Rubicon lands.)
- The Storm Before the Storm — Mike Duncan (the generation before Caesar; audiobook-friendly, Duncan is a narrator by trade.)
- Augustus — Adrian Goldsworthy (single-man biography, the operator who built the empire — this is the Carnegie/Frick of Rome.)
- Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom — Stephen Platt (already on your list; pairs nicely here as the non-Western older-world entry. Taiping Civil War, epic and narrative.)
- A Time of Gifts — Patrick Leigh Fermor (already on your list; not antiquity, but travel across an older Europe on foot — fits the mood of stepping out of the modern groove.)
Path 2 — Builders & Operators (comfort track — run alongside the spine)
Through-line: Narrative biographies of ambitious, often ruthless people who made empires. Your comfort genre. Use this to keep momentum when the spine feels like work.
- How to Make a Few Billion Dollars — Brad Jacobs
- Enzo Ferrari — Luca Dal Monte
- Ogilvy: Confessions of an Ad Man — David Ogilvy
- The Operator (Geffen) — Tom King
- Dark Genius of Wall Street (Jay Gould) — Edward Renehan
- The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce — Tom Wolfe essay / expand to The Intel Trinity
- Softwar (Larry Ellison) — Matthew Symonds
- Masters of Doom — David Kushner
- Dealers of Lightning (Xerox PARC) — Michael Hiltzik
- Revolution in the Valley — Andy Hertzfeld
- The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt — Edmund Morris (narrative biography, very you.)
- The Dream Machine (J.C.R. Licklider) — M. Mitchell Waldrop
- My Life and Work — Henry Ford
- My Years with General Motors — Alfred P. Sloan
Path 3 — Frontiers & Commodities (the Big Rich / Dreams of El Dorado DNA)
Through-line: Wild places, extractive industries, expansionist stories. The thread you said you loved most. These are the ones where the place is almost as much a character as the people.
- Into Africa (Stanley & Livingstone) — Martin Dugard
- The Untold History of Ramen — George Solt (weirder entry, but it’s a commodity-politics book; give it a shot.)
- The Wager — David Grann (already on your list under fiction but it’s narrative non-fiction; belongs here.)
- Candidates to add: Empire of the Summer Moon (Gwynne), The River of Doubt (Millard), Destiny of the Republic (Millard), The Lost City of Z (Grann), Killers of the Flower Moon (Grann).
Path 4 — How Things Actually Get Made (your manufacturing thread, broadened)
Through-line: How industrial capability gets built — the systems, the people, the moments when a country suddenly knows how to make something it couldn’t before.
- Freedom’s Forge — Arthur Herman (start here — it’s narrative, it’s WWII industrial mobilization, it’s the gateway drug of this path.)
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb — Richard Rhodes
- Skunk Works — Ben Rich
- Where’s My Flying Car? — J. Storrs Hall
- The Machine That Changed the World — Womack/Jones/Roos
- The Rise and Fall of American Growth — Robert Gordon
- Discovery-Driven Growth — McGrath & MacMillan
- Seeing Like a State — James C. Scott (moves toward Path 5 but belongs here too — why top-down industrial plans fail.)
Path 5 — Ideas & Systems (read sparingly)
Through-line: The conceptual pile. Honest note: these are the books you’ll say you want to read and then won’t, because they lack narrative pull. Keep the path small. Read one or two a year, interleaved with the narrative paths.
- The Lessons of History — Will & Ariel Durant (short; do this one first.)
- The Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch
- The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins
- Gödel, Escher, Bach — Hofstadter (warning: this is the one you’ll never actually finish. Maybe that’s okay.)
- A Brief History of Intelligence — Max Bennett
- The Sovereign Individual — Davidson & Rees-Mogg
- Superintelligence — Nick Bostrom
- The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel (honestly a Path 2 entry in disguise — short, narrative, read on a flight.)
Path 6 — Craft & Leadership (the “vegetables” pile)
Through-line: Self-development adjacent. Keeping them visible but separate so they don’t contaminate the reading paths. Read when a specific question comes up, not as a block.
- The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
- Nonviolent Communication
- No Rules Rules (Netflix)
- Why We Sleep
- Chasing Excellence
- How to Get Rich — Felix Dennis
Parking lot (unsorted — decide later or retire)
- The Madness of Crowds
- The Lean Startup
- Stubborn Attachments — Tyler Cowen
- Uncanny Valley
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar
- What the Dormouse Said
- Mindstorms
- Showstopper
- The Big Score
- The Diamond Age (fiction — move to reading page or retire)
- Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman
- Science Mart — Mirowski
- Sources of Increased Efficiency in the DuPont Rayon Plants — Drucker
Retired (already read — what landed and why)
Loved — this is your DNA, more like these:
- The Big Rich — Bryan Burrough (Texas oil fortunes. Defines the Frontiers & Commodities path.)
- The King of Oil (Marc Rich) — Daniel Ammann (the operator archetype at global scale.)
- Dreams of El Dorado — H.W. Brands (frontier expansion, the American West as character.)
- Meet You in Hell (Carnegie & Frick) — Les Standiford (builder + commodity + ruthless partnership.)
- Napoleon: A Concise Biography — Roberts (proves you’ll read pre-modern when it’s narrative.)
- Thinking in Systems — Meadows (the rare Ideas & Systems book that actually landed.)
Read, fine:
- Factfulness — Rosling
- Generations — Jean Twenge
- Science of Cooking
- Scottish Boy (fiction)
Fiction and series reading lives at zgware.com/reading.