50 Great Reads: Dan Sullivan’s Reading List

Dan Sullivan has been a great reader for much of his life—from poring over The Encyclopedia Britannica in the town library as a child, to studying The Great Books Of The World at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, to the many, many books he’s discovered or been introduced to in the years since.

As a conceptual thinker himself, he is fascinated by new ideas and ways of thinking. Over the years, he has compiled his own library of non-fiction authors and books that he’s read many times over. Here are his 50 favorites, some published as early as the 1960s, others recently published.

Enjoy!

1. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez
2. The Technological System by Jacques Ellul
3. The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon
4. Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
5. Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott
6. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
7. The Cave and the Light by Arthur Herman
8. Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford
9. Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart
10. The Idea Of Decline In Western History by Edward Herman
11. Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm
12. The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil
13. The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom
14. The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality by Ludwig von Mises
15. Occidentalism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit
16. Life At The Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple
17. Ideas by Peter Watson
18. The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney
19. The Road To Serfdom by F.A. Hayek
20. Abundance by Peter Diamandis
21. The Modern Mind by Peter Watson
22. The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
23. The Fatal Conceit by F.A. Hayek
24. A New Kind Of Science by Stephen Wolfram
25. Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl
26. The Open Society And Its Enemies by Karl Popper
27. The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschal
28. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter
29. The God Of The Machine by Isabel Paterson
30. The Bourgeois Virtues by Deirdre McCloskey
31. Anti-Americanism by Jean-Francois Revel
32. The House of Intellect by Jacques Barzun
33. The Intellectuals & The Masses by John Carey
34. The Tyranny Of Experts by William Easterly
35. Why Not Capitalism? by Jason Brennan
36. The Revolt Of The Elites by Christopher Lasch
37. Out Of Control by Kevin Kelly
38. The Culture Of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch
39. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom
40. The American Religion by Harold Bloom
41. American Exceptionalism by Seymour Martin Lipset
42. Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell
43. Inventing Freedom by Daniel Hannan
44. The Age Of Discontinuity by Peter Drucker
45. The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge
46. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes
47. Knowledge and Power by George Gilder
48. Big Gods by Ara Norenzayan
49. The Righteous Mind by Johathan Haidt
50. The Quest by Daniel Yergin