One thing i like to do in the new year is look back on the books i read (and listened to) for the last year and see when they meant to me.   

so here they are.  books in orange are the ones that really meant a lot to me and i would suggest:

• The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad by Fareed Zakaria.
• Lucky or Smart? : Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life by BO PEABODY
• The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki
• The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror by Bernard Lewis
• Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
• The Making of Modern Economics by Mark Skousen
• The Moral Animal : Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
• Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman
• The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World by James Shreeve
• Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald
• A World Lit Only by Fire : The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance – Portrait of an Age by William Manchester
• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
• Anecdotal by J. Brooks Dann
• The Virtual Handshake by David Teten and Scott Allen
• Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
• The World Is Flat : A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Friedman
• Trading Up: The New American Luxury – by Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske
• The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror by Natan Sharansky
• All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin
• Crimes Against Logic by Jamie Whyte
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat : And Other Clinical Tales
  by Oliver Sacks
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
• Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
• Call of the Mall : The Geography of Shopping by Paco Underhill
• Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis
• The World’s Banker : A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by by Sebastian Mallaby
• Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris
• Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
• On Dialogue by David Bohm
• PayPal Wars by Eric Jackson
• Ugly Americans by Ben Mezrich
• Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile
• Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain’s Potential by Richard M. Restak
• The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey
• The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard Feynman
• Theodore Roosevelt on Leadership : Executive Lessons from the Bully Pulpit by James Strock

that’s 38 books: read 17 and listened to 21.   of those, i would highly recommend 10 of them.