To-Read Book List for 2023

As promised in my last post where I provided an overview of the 43 books I read in 2022, this post will contain the list I have curated all year round on the books I intended to pick from in 2023. Here were the ones for 2022, 2021, and 2020. I trust the audiobooks from the Naija Book Club’s subscription service to come to the rescue again.

I share these lists every year for three reasons:

1. To encourage others to read. I will not get tired of saying we need to read more as a people. Joining a book club like the Naija Book Club may not be a bad idea.
2. To provide a list for those who don’t know where to start. With 59 books, there is a lot of options.
3. To document my own personal book history. I take writing seriously because I know that a pen is many times better than the best memory.

So, here you go:

BIOGRAPHY / AUTOBIOGRAPHY / MEMOIR

1. Rebel Without a Crew, or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player by Robert Rodriguez
2. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, Edited by Alice Wong
3. Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi
4. Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
5. Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman
6. A Strenuous Life by Theodore Roosevelt
7. Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World’s Most Secretive Industry by Kit Chellel & Matthew Campbell

BUSINESS

1. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
2. Build the Damn Thing: How to Start a Successful Business If You’re Not a Rich White Guy by Kathryn Finney
3. Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind by Andy Dunn
4. Influence Empire: The Story of Tencent and China’s Tech Ambition by Lulu Chen
5. Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of General Electric by William D. Cohan
6. Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison
7. HBR at 100: The Most Influential and Innovative Articles from Harvard Business Review’s First Century by Harvard Business Review et al.
8. How to Get Your Act Together: A Judgement-Free Guide to Diversity and Inclusion for Straight White Men by Felicity Hassan and Suki Sandhu
9. Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business by Kindra Hall
10. Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. by Brené Brown

FINANCE & ECONOMICS

1. The Price of Time by Edward Chancellor
2. Slouching Towards Utopia by J. Bradford DeLong
3. Direct: The Rise of the Middleman Economy and the Power of Going to the Source by Kathryn Judge
4. The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark and Will Louch
5. Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World’s Most Secretive Industry by Kit Chellel & Matthew Campbell
6. The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

1. Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller
2. The Age of AI: And Our Human Future by Daniel Huttenlocher, Henry A. Kissinger, and Eric Schmidt
3. Bad pharmaceuticals by Ben Goldacre
4. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
5. Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince
6. The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology Is Transforming Business, Politics and Society by Azeem Azhar

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

1. Can’t hurt me By David Goggins
2. Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well by Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone
3. The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing by John Perry
4. Grief Is Love: Living with Loss by Marisa Renee Lee
5. The psychology of stupidity by Jean-Francois Marmion
6. Letters to My Son by Kent Nerburn
7. The Lost Art of Connecting: The Gather, Ask, Do Method for Building Meaningful Business Relationships by Susan McPherson
8. Point Man and Finishing Strong by Steve Farrar
9. Primal Body Primal Mind by Nora Gedguadas

PHILOSOPHY

1. Republic by Plato
2. The Wall Speaks by Jerr Rrej
3. On Photography by Susan Sontag

POLITICS

1. China Unbound: A New World Disorder by Joanna Chiu
2. How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter
3. Move: The Forces Uprooting Us and Shaping Humanity’s Destiny by Parag Khanna
4. Amnesty International and Human Rights Activism in Postwar Britain, 1945–1977 Tom Buchanan
5. Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century by Helen Thompson

FICTION

1. Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
2. Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke
3. Sorrows of Satan; or, The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire by Marie Correlli
4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
5. All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir
6. Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu
7. Aviara: Who will remember you by Othuke Ominiabohs
8. Be Head Boy by Ifeoma Chinwuba

NATIONS

1. The Long Shot: The Inside Story of the Race to Vaccinate Britain by Kate Bingham and Tim Hames
2. Butler to the World: How Britain Helps the World’s Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything by Oliver Bullough
3. Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Kuper
4. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder
5. Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard W. French
6. Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan

Do you want to join our reading club? Here.

Got books you absolutely love and would like for me to read? Please mention them in the comments.