Jason Karlin

Off the clock

Reading

I read a lot of science fiction, history, and books about how technology, money, and power shape the world. Here's my running log.

Currently reading As a Jew — Sarah Hurwitz
2025 58 books
  • The English Assassin — Daniel Silva
  • A Murder of Quality — John Le Carré
  • Can't Stop Thinking — Nancy Colier
  • The Kill Artist — Daniel Silva
  • Call for the Dead — John Le Carré
  • Ancillary Sword — Ann Leckie
  • Rise of the Robots — Martin Ford
  • Are You Mad at Me? — Meg Josephson
  • Hidden Empire — Kevin J. Anderson
  • Save Our Souls — Matthew Pearl
  • Age of Revolutions — Fareed Zakaria
  • Autocracy Inc. — Anne Applebaum
  • The Collapsing Empire — John Scalzi
  • East West Street — Philippe Sands
  • Ancillary Justice — Ann Leckie
  • The Technological Republic — Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska
  • How Fascism Works — Jason Stanley
  • The Will to Change — Bell Hooks
  • Demon Copperhead — Barbara Kingsolver
  • Das Kapital — Karl Marx
  • Prequel — Rachel Maddow
  • The War on Warriors — Pete Hegseth
  • The Defector — Chris Hadfield
  • The Mental Load — Emma
  • Army of None — Paul Scharre
  • Burnout — Emily Nagoski
  • Picks and Shovels — Cory Doctorow
  • Field Guide to Urban Gardening — Kevin Espiritu
  • Homecoming — Rana Foroohar
  • The Performance Paradox — Eduardo Briceño
  • Mr. Churchill in the White House — Robert Schmuhl
  • The Demon of Unrest — Erik Larson
  • The Situation Room — George Stephanopoulos
  • Rabbi Outcast — Jack Ross
  • Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics — Dan Harris
  • Martyr! — Kaveh Akbar
  • The Sum of All Fears — Tom Clancy
  • Mastering Bitcoin — Andreas M. Antonopoulos
  • Going Infinite — Michael Lewis
  • 2054 — Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis
  • Arms and Influence — Thomas C. Schelling
  • Red Plenty — Francis Spufford
  • 10% Happier — Dan Harris
  • Against All Enemies — Tom Clancy
  • Nuclear War — Annie Jacobsen
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine — Rashid Khalidi
  • Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew — Emmanuel Acho and Noa Tishby
  • The Twentysomething Treatment — Meg Jay
  • Oath and Honor — Liz Cheney
  • The Book of Charlie — David Von Drehle
  • Lucy by the Sea — Elizabeth Strout
  • The Road to Freedom — Joseph E. Stiglitz
  • Educated — Tara Westover
  • The Daily Stoic — Ryan Holiday
  • Suicide of the West — Jonah Goldberg
  • A Concise Introduction to Pure Mathematics — Martin Liebeck
  • Quantum Theory, Groups and Representations: An Introduction — Peter Woit
  • Chasing Beauty — Natalie Dykstra
2024 15 books
  • Fear No Evil — Anatoly Shcharansky
  • The Idea Factory — Jon Gertner
  • Beyond This Harbor — Rose Styrow
  • So You Want to Talk About Race — Ikeoma Oluo
  • Good Vibes, Good Life — Vex King
  • The Middle Kingdoms — Martyn Rady
  • The Bezzle — Cory Doctorow
  • Killers of the Flower Moon — David Grann
  • The Age of Wood — Roland Ennos
  • The Color of Law — Richard Rothstein
  • The Guns of August — Barbara W. Tuchman
  • Real Self Care — Pooja Laksmin
  • Calling Bullshit — Carl T Bergstrom
  • The Final Day — William Forstchen
  • One Year Later — William Forstchen
2023 49 books
  • The Wretched of the Earth
  • The Return of the King
  • One Second After — William Forstchen
  • Die with Zero — Bill Perkins
  • The Fellowship of the Ring — JRR Tolkien
  • The Science of Spin — Roland Ennos
  • Instead — Maria Coffey
  • The Dissident — Paul Goldberg
  • Elon Musk — Walter Isaacson
  • The Good Enough Job — Simone Stolzoff
  • Four Battlegrounds — Paul Scharre
  • Into Thin Air — Jon Krakauer
  • Seven Days in May — Fletcher Knebel
  • Dirty Laundry — Richard Pink and Roxanne Emery
  • The Wager — David Grann
  • The Hobbit — JRR Tolkien
  • Backlash — Susan Faludi
  • Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow — Gabrielle Zevin
  • Win Every Argument — Mehdi Hasan
  • The Defining Decade — Jay Meg
  • Nihilism — Nolen Gertz
  • First Time Home Buyer — Scott Trench
  • Home Buying 101 — Jon Gorey
  • Poverty, by America — Matthew Desmond
  • How to Do Nothing — Jenny Odell
  • There Will Be Fire — Rory Carroll
  • House Hacking Strategies — Allen Daniels
  • Playing with FIRE — Scott Rieckens
  • Outliers — Malcolm Gladwell
  • Red Team Blues — Cory Doctorow
  • To the End of June — Cris Beam
  • A Death in Denmark — Amulya Malladi
  • The Founding Myth — Andrew Seidel
  • The Infinite Machine — Camila Russo
  • The Alignment Problem — Brian Christian
  • The Mystery of the Kibbutz — Ran Abramitzky
  • Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson
  • Carmageddon — Daniel Knowles
  • Less is More — Jason Hickel
  • Phishing for Phools — George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller
  • Reading the Glass — Elliot Rappaport
  • Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States — Alex Wellerstein
  • The Fire of Freedom — David S. Cecelski
  • The Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier — Joseph P. Martin
  • An Introduction to the C Programming Language and Software Design — Tim Bailey
  • SysML Distilled — Lenny Dellgattie
  • Absolution Gap — Alastair Reynolds
  • Love and Math — Edward Frenkel
  • Redemption Ark — Alastair Reynolds
2022 32 books
  • Revelation Space — Alastair Reynolds
  • The First 90 Days — Michael Watkins
  • The Art of the Possible — Daniel Jacobs
  • The Evolution of Charles Darwin — Diana Preston
  • Curious — Ian Leslie
  • Death's End — Cixin Liu
  • The Plot Against America — Philip Roth
  • The Dark Forest — Cixin Liu
  • The Crimean War — Orlando Figes
  • Three Body Problem — Cixin Liu
  • Istanbul — Thomas Madden
  • By the Rivers of Babylon — Nelson DeMille
  • The 6:20 Man — David Baldacci
  • Upgrade — Blake Crouch
  • The Toyota Way — Jeffrey K. Liker
  • River of the Gods — Candice Millard
  • Thinking in Systems — Donella H. Meadows
  • The Simple Path to Wealth — JL Collins
  • Ringworld — Larry Niven
  • Atomic Habits — James Clear
  • The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F#ck — Mark Manson
  • Measure What Matters — John Doerr
  • The Apollo Murders — Chris Hadfield
  • The Changing World Order — Ray Dalio
  • To Sleep in a Sea of Stars — Christopher Paolini
  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — Stephen R. Covey
  • How to Read Water — Tristan Gooley
  • Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir
  • The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman
  • And Soon I Heard a Roaring Wind — Bill Streever
  • Essentialism — Greg McKeown
  • Thinking Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
2021 14 books partial list
  • An Introduction to Statistical Learning — Gareth James et al.
  • Fundamentals of Astrodynamics — Roger R. Bate, Donald D. Mueller, Jeffrey White
  • Endurance — Alfred Lansing
  • 2034 — Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis
  • Hold Fast — J.H. Gelernter
  • Skunk Works — Ben R. Rich and Leo Janus
  • Good to Great — Jim Collins
  • Stop Acting Rich and Start Living like a Real Millionaire — Thomas Stanley
  • Empires of the Sky — Alexander Rose
  • Watership Down — Richard Adams
  • The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korea Nuclear Attacks Against the United States — Jeffrey Lewis
  • Footfall — Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
  • Old Man's War — John Scalzi
  • Raven Rock — Garrett M. Graff