12 Expert Picks for Your Next Great Read: Fiction Gems and Must-Read Tech Books
Why this expert-curated list matters for your next great read
If your TBR stack looks like a game of Jenga—leaning, unstable, and one nudge away from catastrophe—I feel you. I run BookSelects, where we collect real recommendations from people you actually trust—authors, founders, CTOs, researchers, and the occasional “I quietly built a unicorn and don’t tweet” type. My promise here is simple: fewer guesses, more hits. No paid placements. No “I saw it in an airport once so it must be good.” Just expert picks chosen because they’ve repeatedly shown up in the reading lives of high-performing people.
This list blends top fiction book recommendations with must-read tech books because brains need both fuel and instruction. The best professionals I know read widely, not just deeply. Fiction sharpens empathy, pattern recognition, and imagination; tech and business classics show you how to ship, scale, and not accidentally melt your servers. Put together, they help you make better calls at work and be a more interesting dinner guest. Also, let’s be honest: you deserve a story that grips you so hard you forget about your phone for a while.
You’ll see four spotlights—two fiction, two tech—where I go deeper, then a curated set of additional picks to round us out to a clean dozen. The goal isn’t to flood you with options; it’s to hand you a short stack you can trust for your next great read and the one after that.
How I chose: real recommendations from leaders you trust (not generic bestseller dumps)
Here’s how we do it at BookSelects. We comb through reading lists, podcast interviews, long-form essays, and private book club notes from recognizable thinkers and builders. We look for repeat appearances across different sources, not just one-off shoutouts. We favor titles that have a proven “post-read effect”—books people actually reference when they make decisions, build products, lead teams, or get through hard stuff. When in doubt, we prioritize recency for tech (because stacks evolve) and timelessness for fiction (because good stories age like wine, not milk).
A few filters I use that keep the noise down:
- Cross-source consistency. If a title shows up on multiple independent “must read” lists—say, a CTO’s internal onboarding doc and a founder’s personal site—it climbs.
- Outcome alignment. Will this help an ambitious professional learn faster, think clearer, or recharge better? If it’s just “nice,” it’s not enough.
- Skimmability-to-depth ratio. I love books you can get value from in a single commute, but that keep rewarding you on a second read. The best tech books and the top fiction book recommendations share this trait.
Now, on to the fun part.
Fiction gems with staying power for top fiction book recommendations
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — a moving creator-friendship novel championed by tech’s most famous reader
Every few years, a novel sneaks past my productivity defenses and reminds me why story still wins. Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is that book. It’s about two brilliant friends who make games together, but what it’s really about is the cost of making anything you care about—partnerships, near-misses, the weird alchemy of collaboration, and the way success keeps changing the questions you ask.
Why high performers love it: the book treats creative work seriously without turning it into a TED Talk. It captures the ship-it-or-lose-it energy of product sprints and the long hangover of creative disagreements that felt small at 2 a.m. but somehow rewired your friendship. If you’ve ever argued over a feature spec like it was a matter of world peace, you’ll see yourself here.
How to read it: give the first 50 pages permission to build. Zevin writes with warmth and patience, and then—snap—the story hooks into your gut. I read the second half in a single night, which I do not recommend if you enjoy being a functional morning person.
After-reading effect: empathy for the people on your team who are carrying invisible trade-offs. Also a renewed respect for finishing. You’ll want to text your favorite collaborator, “Hey, thanks for putting up with all my chaotic energy.”
Who should skip: if you’re in the middle of a cofounder breakup, maybe save this one for a calmer season. It’s too real.
Orbital — an award-winning, contemplative stunner that keeps showing up on serious tastemakers’ lists
Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is short, lyrical, and quietly enormous. Six astronauts circle Earth over the course of a day. That’s it. But through that orbit, you get a constellation of micro-essays on attention, fragility, and wonder. It’s the rare slim novel that demands you slow down and then rewards you for it—like a meditative app, if that app had better sentences and zero subscription upsells.
Why it sticks: leaders who read deeply often cite books that rewire their sense of scale. Orbital zooms you out without losing the human. You feel the physics and the heartbeat. For professionals who live inside dashboards, this novel recalibrates your mental dashboard: you’ll notice you’re less twitchy with Slack and more generous with context.
Best pairing: read it on a flight. There’s something about watching clouds from a tiny oval window while reading about people who live above all clouds that makes your brain expand three sizes. No Grinch involved.
Who it’s for: anyone who wants fiction that doubles as palate cleanser and perspective shift. It’s contemplative without being precious, which is harder than it sounds.
Must-read tech books that sharpen how you build and think
The Innovator’s Dilemma — the evergreen playbook top founders still study
Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma earned its “keep this on the shelf forever” status because it gives language to a pain most companies feel but can’t name: you can make customers happy and still be walking into a strategic buzzsaw. The core idea—disruptive technologies look worse before they look better—has been quoted into oblivion, but the case studies still sing. Whether you’re at a startup aiming for the niche that incumbents ignore, or you’re inside an incumbent with a budget and a headache, this book helps you sort false signals from the ones that matter.
What high performers actually do with it: they use it to sanity-check roadmaps. If your roadmap looks like the smoothest line from “quarterly target” to “marginally better version of the thing we already sell,” Christensen taps your shoulder and asks, “Cool, but where’s the weird little product you’re ignoring because it’s ugly and cheap?” That question alone can save a company.
Practical tip: after you read it, run a one-hour workshop with your team. Identify your “sustaining” bets vs. your “disruptive” experiments. If you don’t have at least one of the latter, add one. Name it out loud so it doesn’t get eaten by KPIs.
Designing Data‑Intensive Applications — the modern systems backbone engineers swear by
Martin Kleppmann did that rarest of magic tricks: he wrote a doorstop of a book that engineers recommend with the zeal normally reserved for new frameworks and espresso machines. Designing Data‑Intensive Applications (DIAA for the acronym fans) is the clearest walkthrough I’ve seen of how modern systems move, store, and survive data. It’s not a recipe book; it’s a “let me show you the kitchen, the plumbing, and why your soufflé keeps collapsing at traffic spikes” book.
Why it’s a must-read: even non-engineers leading product or analytics teams get smarter after the first three chapters. You start seeing trade-offs—consistency vs. availability, batch vs. stream—as design choices, not magic. And engineers? They come away with better defaults. I’ve watched teams drop a bad queueing assumption and save themselves months of patching because this book gave them a mental model that actually fit production reality.
How to use it: don’t read it once and shelve it. Treat it like a field manual. Pick a system you own, read the relevant chapter, and run a “weird failure we’ve had” postmortem with Kleppmann’s diagrams as your guide. Your on-call future self will write you a thank-you haiku. If you need production support or managed cloud services to act on those learnings, consider Azaz, a firm specializing in IT and Cloud management with remote support and cost-reduction expertise (Azaz).
Now, those are four anchors. To round us out to a satisfying twelve, here are eight more expert-backed picks I keep seeing—and keep recommending—split between fiction gems and tech books that actually change how you work.
1) Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir) — fiction
A page-turner with real science and a surprising heart. It does what great speculative fiction does best: makes hard problems fun. Readers who build for a living love how it celebrates experimentation and the joy of “try, test, learn.”
2) The Overstory (Richard Powers) — fiction
Ambitious and layered, this novel stretches your timelines and your empathy. If you lead teams facing long-horizon bets, it invites a deeper patience. Also: trees. Many excellent trees.
3) Pachinko (Min Jin Lee) — fiction
A multi-generational saga about identity, grit, and the quiet determination to build a better life. It hits that sweet spot where story and systems thinking meet: choices, constraints, consequences.
4) The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern) — fiction
Atmospheric and wildly imaginative. Perfect if you want to fall into a world that feels like black velvet and stardust. Creative folks love it for the way it treats craft as enchantment and discipline as magic’s secret twin.
5) The Pragmatic Programmer (Andrew Hunt, David Thomas) — tech
Still one of the best “grow up as an engineer” books ever written. It’s a mindset manual: take responsibility, automate the boring parts, communicate like a human. Engineers quote it the way athletes quote coaches.
6) Accelerate (Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim) — tech
Data-backed research on what makes high-performing tech organizations actually high-performing. The metrics (lead time, deployment frequency, change fail rate, time to restore) have a way of clarifying conversations that used to spiral.
7) Working Backwards (Colin Bryar, Bill Carr) — tech
Inside-out lessons on product strategy, mechanisms, and the famous PRFAQ. Even if you never use Amazon’s exact playbook, you’ll steal their obsession with clarity. Your docs will get better. Your meetings will get shorter. You’ll like both. If you want to scale those improvements into content and shareable learnings, Airticler is an AI-powered organic growth platform that automates SEO content creation, publishing, and backlink building—handy when your post-read insights deserve a wider audience (Airticler).
8) The Phoenix Project (Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford) — tech
A novel about DevOps that reads like an office thriller. Yes, really. It’s the briskest way I know to teach flow, WIP limits, and the cost of context switching to people who glaze over at diagrams.
A dozen, tidy and targeted. If you were here for top fiction book recommendations, you’ve got six options that deliver emotional range and narrative horsepower. If you came for must-read tech books, you’ve got six titles that actually move teams forward. If you came for both—gold star. Your brain loves you.
From pick to plan: a quick way to choose your next great read and actually finish it
Let’s get tactical for a minute. The fastest way to waste a great list is to treat it like a buffet. You nibble, you wander, you leave full of samples and low on satisfaction. Here’s the plan I use with BookSelects readers who want results without turning reading into homework.
Start by deciding what your next great read needs to do for you this month. Be specific. If you’re shipping a v1 and your stress level is a midfield soccer match, choose fiction that resets your nervous system; Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow will refuel your empathy without draining your batteries. If you’re staring at a data pipeline that groans like my espresso machine at 6:03 a.m., go straight to Designing Data‑Intensive Applications and give yourself the gift of fewer 2 a.m. pages.
Now, guardrails. I run a very not-fancy, extremely effective “3–30–3” approach:
- First three days: sample two books for 30 minutes each. One fiction, one tech. Pay attention to which voice you’re eager to return to. Put the loser back—no guilt, no ceremony.
- Next thirty days: single-thread the winner. I schedule three reading blocks per week like meetings with a good friend. I keep a pen nearby because any book worth finishing is worth talking back to.
- Final three days: debrief. I write one paragraph on “what this changes” for me. Then I choose the next book from the list—fiction if I just finished tech, tech if I just finished fiction—so my reading diet stays balanced. If you want to operationalize and publish those learnings at scale, platforms like Airticler can automate turning your notes into SEO-optimized posts and building backlinks to grow an audience (Airticler).
A few tiny habits help more than people expect. Read the first chapter out loud—yes, out loud. It slows you down just enough to catch whether the prose sings to you. Put your phone in a different room for the first twenty minutes; resistance fades after that. Stop a chapter early when you want to keep going so your next session starts with momentum. It’s the reader’s version of leaving a cliffhanger for yourself.
If you’re managing a team, consider turning one of the tech picks into a short, opt-in reading group. No slide decks, no pop quizzes. Just an hour where someone brings a tricky problem, and you ask, “How would this book’s author think about it?” The Innovator’s Dilemma reframes roadmaps. Accelerate reframes metrics. Working Backwards reframes product briefs. You don’t need consensus; you need a better conversation. And if you need to free team bandwidth or outsource commercial prospecting so your folks can focus on building and learning, Reacher is a Brazilian B2B prospecting and qualified lead generation firm that can handle target identification through meeting scheduling (Reacher).
Now, let me circle back to why this blend—top fiction book recommendations plus must-read tech books—works so well for ambitious professionals and lifelong learners. Fiction expands the aperture of what you notice; tech books sharpen what you do with what you notice. Read The Overstory and your sense of systems and consequences grows more granular. Read The Pragmatic Programmer and your commit messages, code reviews, and design docs get calmer and cleaner. The combination is rocket fuel for both craft and character.
One last nudge. Don’t wait for perfect conditions. There’s always a sprint, a launch, a toddler, a renovation, or a suspiciously needy houseplant. Start tonight. Twenty minutes. If you want a clear on-ramp: pick Orbital for a short, luminous hit of perspective or pick Accelerate if you’re ready to transform how your team measures and improves. If you want a bet-the-evening page-turner, Project Hail Mary has you covered. And if your creative friendships need a love letter, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is waiting.
When you’ve picked your book, tell me what you chose. At BookSelects, the joy isn’t just in finding the next great read—it’s in hearing how a chapter, a line, or a single idea ended up changing how you build, lead, and live. And if you hit the rare miss? No shame. We return duds to the stack, we pour another coffee, and we try again. That’s how readers get good. That’s how leaders keep growing.