Books I Like

The books I especially liked reading and the year they were read.

2023

  • Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger
    • Before Starship, before Starlink, before the Falcon Heavy and Falcon 9 and the reality of reusable rockets, there was the Falcon 1. This is a wonderful, deep-dive into the development of SpaceX's first rocket, the three failed attempts to reach orbit, and the fourth successful flight that rescued the company from impending bankruptcy to become today's leading space launch power.
  • Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past by J. Storrs Hall
  • The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space by Gerard K. O'Neill
    • O'Neill was a physicist at Princeton who started with the question: "We should ask, critically and with appeal to the numbers, whether the best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely. Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable: the best site is 'somewhere else entirely'". What followed was a detailed step-by-step plan to kickstart humanity's expansion into the Solar System - starting in cislunar space - by using the resources of the Moon and asteroids to build enormous space habitats and new industries and opportunities.
  • Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez
    • The story continues from the author's earlier, awesome space-tech novel Delta-V. Faced with the challenge of rescuing crew mates from an asteroid-mining mission gone sideways, and with little help available from a crisis-plagued Earth, our heroes must build what they need in cislunar space to help both crew and planet. An in-depth exploration of the technology to make it so, and how private space exploration can play a critical role in making a more expansive, hopeful future both on- and off-world!

2022

  • The Diabetes Code: Prevent and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally by Dr. Jason Fung
  • Space Nomads: Set a Course for Mars by Camomile Hixon
  • Apollo: The Race To The Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox
  • The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
  • Dinner On Mars: The Technologies That Will Feed the Red Planet and Transform Agriculture on Earth by Lenore Newman and Evan D.G. Fraser
  • The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist by Marcus Rediker
  • Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • This is Vegan Propaganda (And Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You) by Ed Winters

2021

  • The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield
  • A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
  • The Smallest Lights in the Universe by Sara Seager

2020

  • Greenwood by Michael Christie
  • Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins
  • The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual by Ward Farnsworth
  • Delta-V by Daniel Suarez

2019

  • Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
  • The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
  • Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir by Don Eyles
  • An Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth by Chris Hadfield
  • Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky

2018

  • The Starship and the Canoe by Kenneth Brower
  • Man's Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl
  • River of Gods by Ian McDonald
  • Blindsight by Peter Watts
  • Echopraxia by Peter Watts

2017

  • Seven Years In Tibet by Heinrich Harrer
  • Memoirs of Montparnasse by John Glassco

Tux