Bolt’s reading month: team’s must-reads

At Bolt, we love challenges — especially ones promoting our employees’ physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. As part of this, we designated 1 month for a reading challenge.

As the temperatures drop and the days grow shorter, there’s no better time to curl up with a good old book, reader, or audiobook — whatever you prefer!

Check out our team’s favourite must-reads.

Self-help and personal development

• “The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control” by Walter Mischel.
• “Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams” by Matthew Walker.
• “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell.
• “Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day” by Jay Shetty.
• “Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win” by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.
• “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox.
• “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” by James Clear.
• “The 12 Week Year” by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington.
• “Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know” by Adam Grant.
• “Ego Is the Enemy” by Ryan Holiday.
• “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
• “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ” by Daniel Goleman.
• “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think” by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund.
• “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie.
• “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment” by Cass R. Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, and Olivier Sibony.
• “How to Survive the End of the World” by Aaron Gillies.
• “Women Who Run With The Wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.
• “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman.
• “Open Up: Why Talking About Money Will Change Your Life” by Alex Holder.
• “Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action” by Simon Sinek.
• “Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know” by Malcolm Gladwell.
• “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” by Dan Ariely.
• “Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life” by Marshall B. Rosenberg.
• “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents” by Lindsay C. Gibson.
• “Let Me Tell You a Story: A New Approach to Healing through the Art of Storytelling” by Jorge Bucay.
• “You Are Not a Rock: A Step-by-Step Guide to Better Mental Health” by Mark Freeman.
• “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” by Robert M. Sapolsky.
• “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell.
• “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change” by Stephen R. Covey.

Fiction

• “The Hobbit” by J. R. R. Tolkien.
• “The Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien.
• “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig.
• Series of the “Earthsea” by Ursula K. Le Guin.
• “The Night Circus” by Erin Morgenstern.
• “The Nevernight Chronicle” by Jay Kristoff.
• “The Godfather” by Mario Puzo.
• “Once upon a time in Hollywood” by Quentin Tarantino.
• “The Last Cato” by Matilde Asensi.
• “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini.
• “The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri.
• “The Terror” by Dan Simmons.
• The “Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes” by Neil Gaiman – Sandman.
• “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand.
• “The Philadelphian” by Richard Powell.
• The Brentford Trilogy by Robert Rankin.
• “Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernardine Evaristo.
• “The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories” by Anthony Marra.
• “The Tool & the Butterflies” by Dmitry Lipskerov.
• “Men without Women” by Haruki Murakami.

Novels

• “Tender is the Night” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
• “A Time to Love and a Time to Die” by Erich Maria Remarque.
• “A Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemingway.
• “Half of a Yellow Sun” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
• “10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World” by Elif Shafak.
• “The Kindly Ones” by Jonathan Littell.
• “We, the Drowned” by Carsten Jensen.
• “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes. 
• “The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly” by Sun-Mi Hwang.
• “Shalimar the Clown” by Salman Rushdie.
• “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie.
• “The Enchantress of Florence” by Salman Rushdie.
• “Baltasar and Blimunda” by José Saramago.
• “Blindness” by José Saramago.
• “An Artist of the Floating World” by Kazuo Ishiguro.
• “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro.
• “Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk.
• “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy.
• “The Screwtape Letters” by C. S. Lewis.
• “The Silence of the Lambs” by Thomas Harris.
• “Misery” by Stephen King.
• “A Man Called Ove” by Fredrik Backman.
• “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara.
• “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles.

Sci-fi

• “Foundation” by Isaac Asimov.
• “Foundation and Empire” by Isaac Asimov.
• “Second Foundation” by Isaac Asimov.
• “The Three-Body Problem” by Liu Cixin.
• “Dune” by Frank Herbert.
• “Children of Dune” by Frank Herbert.
• “Dark Matter” by Blake Crouch.
• “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro.
• “The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect” by Roger Williams.
• “Who Fears Death” by Nnedi Okorafor.
• “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir.
• “The Martian” by Andy Weir.
• “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card.
• “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams. 
• “Time Shelter” by Georgi Gospodinov.
• “1984” by George Orwell.
• “The Expanse” series by James S.A. Corey.

Science and History

• “The Brain: The Story of You” by David Eagleman.
• “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need” by Bill Gates.
• “Human Kind: A Hopeful History” by Rutger Bergman.
• “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari.
• “Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions” by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths.
• “The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect” by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie.
• “Body by Science: A Research-Based Program for Strength Training, Body Building, and Complete Fitness in 12 Minutes a Week” by John Little and Doug McGuff.
• “The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization” by Peter Zeihan. 
• “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius.
• “Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming”, edited by Paul Hawken.
• “Energy and Civilization: A History” by Vaclav Smil.
• “The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World” by Vincent Bevins.
• “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu. 
• “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
• “Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality” by Max Tegmark.
• “The Secret Network of Nature: The Delicate Balance of All Living Things” by Peter Wohlleben.
• “From Beirut to Jerusalem” by Thomas L. Friedman.
• “The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power” by Sean McMeekin.
• “From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia” by Pankaj Mishra.
• “Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph” by T.E Lawrence. 
• “Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe” by Kapka Kasabova.
• “To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace” by Kapka Kasabova.
• “Fermat’s Last Theorem” by Simon Singh.
• “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” by Max Tegmark and Rob Shapiro.
• “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking.
• “Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions” by Sabine Hossenfelder.
• “Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius” by Niccolò Machiavelli.
• “Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook” by Edward N. Luttwak.
• “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes.
• “Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King”  by Lloyd Bradley.
• “Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold” by Stephen Fry.
• “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” by Michael J. Sandel.
• “The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival” by John Vaillant.

Biography 

• “The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company” by Robert Iger.
• “Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike” by Phil Knight.
• “Open” by Andre Agassi.
• “Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood”  by Trevor Noah.
• “Educated” by Tara Westover.
• “The Choice: Embrace the Possible” by Edith Eger. 
• “The Road to Sparta: Reliving the Ancient Battle and Epic Run That Inspired the World’s Greatest Foot Race” by Dean Karnazes.
• “Greenlights” by Matthew McConaughey.
• “Permanent Record” by Edward Snowden.
• “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor E. Frankl.
• “The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga” by Sylvain Tesson.
• “The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European” by Stefan Zweig.
• “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” by John Perkins.
• “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” by Robert A. Caro.

Business and Technology

• “Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data” by Carissa Véliz.
• “Deep Learning with Python” by François Chollet.
• Start-up Nation: “The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer.
• “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future” by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters.
• “The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers” by Ben Horowitz. 

We hope this extensive list gives you the perfect reading inspiration for the sweater-weather season and beyond! 

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