I read dozens of books a year and have for as long as I can remember. If you ask me about most of them I will give you a blank look. That is not a knock on the books. It is how reading actually works: you run a lot of water through the filter to catch a little gold.
So this page is sorted by what stuck, not by what was good.
Quake books
Tyler Cowen's term for the small number of books that shake the ground under you. You do not put them down and think "that was well argued." You put them down and something has moved. I have six.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert Pirsig · read around 1996, just off the road
I had been travelling for about a year when I picked this up. That timing is the whole thing. You come back from eighteen months of moving and you have no vocabulary for what happened to you, and then a man writes four hundred pages about quality being the thing you cannot define but can absolutely feel, and it lands like a diagnosis.
It was, as I wrote about it later, a book that made me think and not just entertain me. I still hand it to people who have just got back from a long trip and cannot explain themselves to anyone at home.
Permission Marketing
Seth Godin · read around 1998 or 1999, while BootsnAll was forming
I found Godin through his ClickZ columns first, and I have read the daily blog ever since. The book is where the argument got its full weight: attention is earned, not taken. Reading that at roughly the moment I was starting a travel site is most of the reason BootsnAll was a forum before it was a business, and why we never bought a single interruption. When I pitched it at an early investment conference, the audience assumed it was a non-profit. That was the point, and this book is where the point came from.
That is a twenty-five year habit now, running from the ClickZ pieces through the blog he still writes every day. Three of the six books on this list are his.
Vagabonding
Rolf Potts
The best articulation anyone has managed of travel as a way of using your life rather than a break from it. Long-term travel as an act of ownership over your own time. Potts and I later co-created the Indie Travel Manifesto together, which is about the highest thing I can say about a book: it turned into a working relationship and a document that other people still use.
Stop Stealing Dreams
Seth Godin · read in New Zealand, 2011 into 2012
The one that made me angry. We were five months in New Zealand, my then-wife, my son Kai and me, which is a long time to be out of your own country and out of your own routine. Godin's argument is that the education system was built to produce compliant factory workers, and reading it from the other side of the world I recognized my own schooling immediately: I was taught to follow directions and work in a factory. Two skills that do not carry the value they used to.
It went from an interesting argument to a parenting problem in about a page. I was watching Kai learn more in five months of a different country than a year of school was going to give him, and the book put words to why. It is directly upstream of the Travel Access Project and of the thing I still believe: a year around the world costs less than a year at many US universities and teaches more. I want a round-the-world trip on every resume.
It's Your Turn
Seth Godin · read January 2015
Godin wrote a blog post asking people to buy copies and give them away. It felt like he was asking just me. I bought a hundred.
Then I did the Your Turn Challenge: seven days, one post a day, while solo-parenting three kids. I wrote at the time that I wanted to not be afraid to write and share, but that I was. That is the entire reason this website has twenty-three years of posts on it and not three. The fear did not go away. The book just made it a smaller factor than the wanting.
Essentialism
Greg McKeown · read early 2015
Subtitle: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. It described what I was already doing and gave me the words and the permission for it.
I made a dozen-plus trips to Goodwill on one rule: if I do not love this, it goes. I got to the end of that and found I do not love any thing. I love people, animals, and the world around me. The book also made saying no a discipline instead of a failure of nerve, and it flipped how I handle money: cut the thing out of your life first, and the expense follows.
The ones that are not books
Three of the biggest are traditions rather than titles, so they do not fit the list. Thich Nhat Hanh is the largest collection on my shelves and it is a practice, not reading. The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali is the thing I unconsciously measure other books against. Epictetus I have been arguing with since 2003. Those are ongoing, so they never had a single quake moment to point at.
Good books, good memories
I remember these fondly and can tell you what is in them. They sharpened something, confirmed something, or were just good company.
Building things
- The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership - Dethmer, Chapman & Klemp. The only leadership book I would compare to the Yoga Sutras.
- This Is Marketing - Seth Godin. The mature version of the 1999 idea.
- The Song of Significance - Seth Godin. On work worth doing.
- Reboot - Jerry Colonna. Radical self-inquiry, pointed at founders.
- The EOS Life - Gino Wickman. I own two copies, which tells you it gets used.
- The Goal and The Theory of Constraints - Eliyahu Goldratt. Find the bottleneck. Everything else is decoration.
- Looptail - Bruce Poon Tip. A fellow indie travel company builder, doing it on purpose.
- Principles - Ray Dalio. Systems thinking and radical transparency.
Thinking better
- Range - David Epstein. Kind environments versus wicked ones. It quietly demolishes the ten-thousand-hours rule everywhere except chess and golf, and it explains why generalists win at entrepreneurship and investing.
- The Great Mental Models, volumes 1 to 4 - Shane Parrish. I have the full set.
- Mastery - Robert Greene. The long apprenticeship.
- Hidden Potential - Adam Grant. Systems beat talent.
- The Art of Impossible - Steven Kotler. Flow and peak performance.
- Egonomics - Marcum & Smith. Ego and humility, a fight I have been having with myself for decades.
- Do What Matters Most - Rob & Steve Shallenberger.
Land and the living world
- Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer. Indigenous knowledge and science, refusing to be at odds. I have farmed regeneratively since 2005 and this is the best thing I have read about why.
- Polyface Designs - Joel Salatin & Chris Slattery. The practical companion. Fences, water, infrastructure.
- The Soul of an Octopus - Sy Montgomery. Consciousness is stranger and more widely distributed than we act like it is.
- How to Change Your Mind - Michael Pollan.
Inner work
- The Thich Nhat Hanh shelf - Anger, The Art of Communicating, Love Letter to the Earth, Your True Home, and the whole How To set. Ten-plus books. Practice, not reading.
- The Four Agreements - Don Miguel Ruiz.
- The Bhagavad Gita - Ravi Ravindra's guide. And Krishnamurti, for the same reason.
- The Great Work of Your Life - Stephen Cope. Dharma, via the Gita.
- Atlas of the Heart - Brené Brown. Language for things I could previously only point at.
- How to Be an Adult in Relationships - David Richo.
- The Last Lecture - Randy Pausch. Seventy-six minutes on mortality and priorities.
Travel and place
- Badlands - Tony Wheeler. I got to interview him about it in 2007, which was a strange full-circle moment for a kid who planned trips out of Lonely Planets.
- A Walk in the Woods, The Lost Continent, Notes from a Small Island, Shakespeare: The World as Stage - Bill Bryson. Read across the 2000s. Nobody is better company on a long flight.
- A Marriage at Sea - Sophie Elmhirst. Read 2026. A couple, a whale, a sunk boat, and a marriage under a microscope.
- Into the Minam - Skovlin & Skovlin. Read 2026. The whole human history of one Oregon watershed. Reading it changed how I look at the Gorge.
- A Summons to New Orleans - Barbara Hall. For one line I have never lost: you are in control of your life.
- The Vanishing American Adult - Ben Sasse.
- Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville.
The rest
I read these. They are on the shelf. I could not give you a paragraph on any of them at gunpoint, and putting them here is not an insult, it is just accounting. Some of them are probably better than my memory of them, which is no memory at all.
The Art of Seduction · The 50th Law (Greene) · A Second Chance (Catherine Hoke) · Stop Walking on Eggshells · Talking on Eggshells (Sam Horn) · Objects in the Mirror (Mason Krieger) · All You Can Ever Know (Nicole Chung) · The Marriage Test (Andres & Silva-Braga) · 100 to 1 in the Stock Market (Thomas Phelps) · Invest Like a Dealmaker · Casey Research's Handbook for Surviving the Coming Financial Crisis · Phenomenal (Leigh Ann Henion) · Howe: 9 Lessons Learned from My Father · The Way Forward (Yung Pueblo) · Erik Larson on Chicago
A note on honesty: this is a shelf plus a memory, and the memory is the unreliable part. If you and I have talked about a book that belongs higher up this page, tell me and I will move it. sean@keener.org.