Why reading?
I tell my students: if you read one book a week for fifty years, you will finish only about 2,600 books in a whole lifetime — and there are magnitudes more stunning books than that. So start now, and never stop. (My own aim sits far higher: at well over a book a week, sustained for decades, the goalposts keep moving — which is exactly the point.)
Reading widely and continuously is rare. It is also a quiet competitive advantage, and it tells you a great deal about a person to know what they have chosen to fill their mind with. This page is an honest, living map of mine.
“What a person reads over a lifetime is a portrait of who they are becoming.”
Browse the full library & timeline →How my interests evolved
Each band is a field; its thickness is how much of my reading it made up that year, placed by publication (which, for all but the classics, is close to when I read it). The timeline runs from 1989; the handful of older classics I came to later live in the library, not here. Watch interests emerge, widen, and hold.
The climb
Every dated book in my reading window, accumulating year by year. The dashed line is 2,600 — the lifetime figure I give my students — not a ceiling but a marker I crossed the pace of long ago, and I am still climbing.
The shape of my reading
Every field, sized by how many books it holds. The footprint of a mind.
The books that shaped me most
Hand-picked across every field — the ones that genuinely changed how I think.
Most-read thinkers
The authors I keep returning to — my intellectual companions.
The through-lines
Four threads run through it all.
Human flourishing is the spine — positive psychology, wellbeing and happiness, read continuously for over twenty years and still my largest field.
The mind and how it learns — neuroscience, creativity and thinking, and the science of teaching and learning — is where flourishing meets my life's work as an educator.
Growth in practice — personal development, leadership and performance — turns the science into how people actually change.
Meaning — philosophy, relationships and the spiritual life — holds the rest together.
Footnote: this maps my personal reading for growth and understanding. It does not include the academic handbooks and technical manuals I have studied, the wider work-related reading of a scholarly career, or the 100+ Bible-study and spiritual-growth titles that form a continuous discipline of their own — all of which fill my personal on- and offline libraries besides. Book links are title searches: the vast majority land on the right edition, but a few may point elsewhere — treat them as a starting point.