26 people on their favorite reads

26 people on their favorite reads

good things to read, from people we love

Sublime

and

Sari Azout

Oct 31, 2026

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We asked 26 people we love to share the most moving thing they’ve read recently or ever. From X comments, Manga, to Subway graffiti, and of course life-altering books, the responses reminded us that not only are the people reading, they’re reading everything, everywhere, all the time.

In the words of one of our contributors, may this compendium “

[remind you]

that the internet is something

[you]

can reach out and touch.”

The Sublime Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We’ve compiled all the recommendations into one

Sublime collection

where you can read it all on our new Reader Mode setting. And if you’re more of a visual person, you can see them all in

this canvas

.

⸫

Behind the scenes: After Work, We’ll Have Each Other

by Angela Chen and Clara Collier

Read here

Recommended by

Nicole Seah

I really enjoyed this.

⸫

Intelligence Was Never the Point

by Ilia Delio

Read here

Recommended by

Packy McCormick

My mom forwarded me this essay that a friend sent her, which turned out to have been written by the recently retired Chair of the Theology Department at Villanova University (right down the street from where I grew up), Ilia Delio, about my favorite Christian philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and his ideas on consciousness as a thing that grows as matter grows more complex, at exactly the moment I needed it to unlock a big essay I needed to re-write because someone else had just published one very similar to mine. A lovely synchronicity.

⸫

The Soul of a New Machine

by Tracy Kidder

View here

Recommended by

Lucas Gelfond

My roommate

Matthew

recommended Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine last winter. I tore through it in a week and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. The book follows a scrappy research group inside the Data General Corporation, attempting to get a 32-bit minicomputer to market in the late 70s. It’s a romantic telling of an earlier culture of computing (around Route 128 in Massachusetts) that reminded me what feels so special about technology. More generally, though, it celebrates the best parts of hard work: pulling off something without enough resources and in spite of everything going wrong, working long hours with people you like and admire, accomplishing way more than you think you are capable of. Kidder won the Pulitzer for it in 1982 and it holds up phenomenally today.

⸫

Escape the Echo Chamber

by C Thi Nguyen

Read here

Recommended by

Mapu

I read this Aeon essay about echo chambers when I began writing on Substack—It truly steered the way in which I interact with the digital landscape. Especially with the current events that we have been experiencing, I’ve found myself sharing it with friends and family alike to help them navigate this with more consideration and empathy.

⸫

Madame Curie

by Eve Curie

View here

Recommended by

Dr. Gena Gorlin

Last year I read this biography of Marie Curie, written by her daughter Eve Curie. Beyond forming what felt like an intimate friendship with one of history’s most inspiring women of science, I got to bask in the vicarious maternal pride of knowing her daughter would grow up to write something as exquisite as this book I was reading.

⸫

Information Age

by Cora Lewis

View here

Recommended by

Daisy Alioto

I’m really glad I read Information Age by Cora Lewis because I think it captures the unique interiority of a thoughtful person in a very digital era.

⸫

Federer as Religious Experience

by David Foster Wallace

Read here

Recommended by

Ben Roy

Reading this essay in high school was a turning point for me in wanting to take my own writing more seriously because it was the first time I read something outside the 20th century Hemingway-and-Orwell consensus of short sentences that have a neutral point of view, and so when I got exposed to a writer that broke all the rules - DFW was longwinded and extremely voice-y and precise like he was somehow looking at the world (and in this case a tennis player) at a level of resolution that was superhuman - it broke my brain and lit me up, and I wanted to see if I could write like that too.

⸫

Getting 6 Million Views and Making Tech

Approachable with Characters

by Jess Yin

Read here

Recommended by

Los

,

danger testing

I love this. Instagram creators building interesting software have typically showcased their work with videos that start with some version of “I made a website called…” or “I made an app that does xyz…”. That format exploded as Claude ramped up UGC campaigns to tie its brand to vibecoding. However audiences have started to feel fatigue on this format of videos, and on anything including the word app. Reflecting on sitcoms, Jess points out how characters have long helped compress context and make complex ideas instantly legible. Bringing that same character compression into software content, feels like a new way to use software as storytelling. Until that format dies too.

⸫

Just Kids

by Patti Smith

View here

Recommended by

Tara Benmeleh

It explores sexuality, love without boundaries, artistic freedom, and a New York City that existed before my time but somehow makes me nostalgic for it.

⸫

The Real Heroes Are Dead

by James B. Stewart

Read here

Recommended by

Jack Raines

There’s a really

moving piece in the New Yorker

from 2002 about Wall Street security chief Rick Rescorla, who single-handedly saved countless lives by rushing back into the towers right until the towers collapsed. I re-read it every 9/11. I’m not “from” NYC, though I’ve lived here for four years, so I don’t have some of the same deep connections to victims that some of my friends from the area do, but it’s one of the most moving and humanizing stories of the tragedy that’s still online.

⸫

How to End a Story

by Helen Garner

View here

Recommended by

Michael Dempsey

Helen garner’s diaries -- mostly it’s one of the first times i read the diary format and getting to see her process her life in tidbits was eye-opening both as a writer and as a human.

⸫

What 2026 Looks Like

by Daniel Kokotajlo

Read here

Recommended by Michael Dempsey

What 2026 Looks Like -- it helped inform how I think about trying to model the world with great precision and why it’s important to do so for my work as an investor.

⸫

The Mystic Fable, Volume Two

by Michel de Certeau

View here

Recommended by

Erica Robles Anderson

These are some of the most interesting books I’ve ever read and it changed how I thought about topology, topics, and the topos. If I were trying to work on projects about language and belonging, large models and how we know what we know, or why poetics really matter when certainty is in flux and world building is underway—these are the books I’d read. They are just extraordinary keys to so much.

⸫

The Screwtape Letters

by C.S. Lewis

View here

Recommended by

Reggie James

If you want to understand the world with a robust theology, it’s important to have some kind of demonology as well. This books helps form that in a way that only Lewis can do.

⸫

Personal Renewal

by John W. Gardner

Read here

Recommended by

Jackson Dahl

Personal Renewal reminds me that there is more inside me (and you) than we can possibly imagine; that identity and meaning are not found but made by our commitments, and that the only limiting factor is courage.

⸫

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

by Philip K. Dick

View here

Recommended by

Katherine Dee

I was recently on a

podcast

, and re-read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a book I hadn’t really thought deeply about since I was a teenager. This threw me down a PKD rabbit hole. PKD and Marshall McLuhan really feel like spirit guides for our present moment.

⸫

Out of Sheer Rage

by Geoff Dyer

View here

Recommended by

Lila Shroff

Geoff Dyer’s account of trying and failing to write a book on D. H. Lawrence is exquisitely hilarious. I couldn’t stop laughing. I just went to the library and checked out every Geoff Dyer book available.

⸫

The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

View here

Recommended by

Delia Cai

The transit of Venus! I just did a

newsletter

on it lol. The most jaw-dropping prose, and an incredible test of one’s attention to detail.

⸫

“love to see a banger 5 replies deep”

View here

Recommended by

visakan veerasamy

First it made me laugh out loud, which is a tonic I’m always grateful for. 😂 But next it also reminded me of a general principle, which we might call “the double tap”. Basically, if an idea is good once, it might be even better when used again in a related context. When done properly, it shows that the idea has depth. So I actually find this short little rejoinder not just funny but inspiring; it inspires me to look for opportunities to execute similar double-taps in my own life. And hopefully me sharing this sets off something similar for you.

⸫

Bad Feminist

by Roxane Gay

View here

Recommended by

Dolly Meckler

I read it years ago, but it really shaped the way I think about the culture I consume, how much it informs who we are, and how important it is to love things while still being critical of them.

⸫

How the Light Gets In

by Pat Schneider

View here

Recommended by

Tom Critchlow

Poetry, writing, spirituality, self publishing and so much more. This was part autobiography, part writing manual and part manifesto for creativity and believing in yourself. Magical. Highly recommended.

⸫

I was in Naples (Italy, not Florida) and saw a subway station with graffiti on it which said—oddly, in English— “There’s zeal down there”, with an arrow pointing down the stairs.

—

Luke Burgis

View here

⸫

Splinters

by Leslie Jamison

View here

Recommended by

Carly Valancy

I purposely read this book slowly so I could savor it like a little treat. Reading this book made me want to write about and treasure my own life. What a gift it is to be seen in a strangers story.

⸫

(moth) in relay

by Shaheer Tarar

View here

Recommended by

Elan Ullendorff

I was honored to have been invited to judge this year’s

Tiny Awards

, and I cannot stop thinking about one of the finalists: Shaheer Tarar’s

Moth in Relay

. Delectably, the use of the word “bug” to refer to a software defect originated from a literal fucking moth that was trapped inside the Harvard Mark II computer in 1947. Moth in Relay imagines a world in which that Mother Bug is still trapped today, traveling from data center to data center looking for a way out. The project makes me feel small and inconsequential and most of all it brings me back to my senses [pauses to google “do moths have mechanoreceptors?”], reminding me that the internet is something I can reach out and touch.

⸫

Rubicon

by Tom Holland

View here

Recommended by

Anna Gát

One book I’m really glad I read — and here I will deliberately avoid going into the classics or my favorite novels, that would be too predictable — was Tom Holland’s Rubicon.

I was in the middle of moving between countries when I noticed it on someone’s kitchen counter and borrowed it. Was my first Holland read. It blew my little mind! I’d always been a history buff but this was HISTORY: war, character, politics, the ways of the world so well-written it made me sob. Tom Holland gave me back history nonfiction and sent me down an enjoyable rabbit hole I still am in. We’re just prepping for an Interintellect salon on Bronze Age Collapse with Eric Cline. Do you think that’s a coincidence…?

⸫

Tower Dungeon

by Tsutomu Nihei

View here

Recommended by

Ellis Hamburger

I recommend Tower Dungeon, a still-running manga by Tsutomu Nihei. The artwork is stunning, and a constant reminder that words and images are more powerful together. (In other words, you can’t consider your headline without your hero image!).

⸫

here

is the Sublime collection with all the recommendations… enjoy ;)

The Sublime Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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