Readings

Franz Kafka · (1967) · Print · Turkish · 720 pages · ★★★★☆

Kafka's intensely personal letters to Felice Bauer reveal the tension between love, marriage, solitude, and his need to write, offering an unusually direct view into the mind behind some of his greatest works.

Rainer Maria Rilke · (2014) · Print · Turkish · 128 pages · ★★★☆☆

This selection gathers Rilke's lyrical meditations on solitude, love, mortality, art, and transcendence, tracing the evolving imagery and spiritual intensity of his major poetic collections.

Gündüz Vassaf · (2024) · Print · Turkish · 108 pages · ★★★☆☆

A reflective memoir of Istanbul's Levent neighborhood, using childhood memories, architecture, streets, residents, consumption, and urban transformation to trace broader changes in Turkish society from the 1950s onward.

Şenay Aydemir · (2025) · Print · Turkish · 245 pages · ★★★☆☆

A critical chronicle of how AKP governments reshaped Turkey's cultural sphere through censorship, market pressure, institutional control, nationalist policy, and changing interventions in cinema, theatre, television, festivals, and artistic production.

Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, Matthew Linderman · (2006) · Print · English · 194 pages · ★★★★★

37signals' manifesto on why small teams win by writing less code, ditching feature bloat, and shipping real software fast.

Byung-Chul Han · (2023) · Ebook · Turkish · 88 pages · ★★★☆☆

Han argues that our obsession with storytelling hides a deeper loss of shared narratives, showing how stories have shifted from creating meaning and community to becoming information, content, and products.

Jan Fabre · (2011) · Print · Turkish · 236 pages · ★★★★☆

Jan Fabre's raw nighttime journals capture the restless years in which he was becoming an artist, tracing his experiments, obsessions, doubts, and uncompromising drive to create.

Peter Fleming · (2015) · Print · Turkish · 215 pages · ★★★☆☆ · abandoned

An exploration of how late capitalism weaponizes the ideology of endless labor, transforming everyday life into a 24/7 factory at the expense of our well-being.

Yusuf Göz · (2009) · Ebook · Turkish · 168 pages · ★★★★☆

An insider's candid memoir chronicling the high-stakes birth of Turkey's modern financial trader generation and market dynamics throughout the turbulent economic crises of the 1990s.

Peter Frase · (2016) · Print · Turkish · 123 pages · ★★★☆☆

Uses social science fiction to map out our post-work world, exploring how automation and the climate crisis could lead to either human liberation or total dystopia.

Eric Jorgenson · (2023) · Print · Turkish · 272 pages · ★★★★☆

A curated roadmap of Balaji Srinivasan's ideas on first-principles thinking, technology frontiers, media decentralization, and building network states.

David Lynch · (2006) · Ebook · English · 192 pages · ★★☆☆☆

A series of short reflections where filmmaker David Lynch explores how Transcendental Meditation expands awareness, intuition, and the creative mind.

Domenico Starnone · (2026) · Print · Turkish · 168 pages · ★★★☆☆

A sharp Italian psychological novel dissecting marriage and repressed desire, triggered when a misdirected text message shatters a family's calm exterior.

Y. Akın Öngör · (2022) · Print · Turkish · 400 pages · ★★★☆☆

A business memoir recounting Akın Öngör's transformation of Garanti Bankası, emphasizing organizational change, teamwork, leadership succession, innovation, institutional continuity, management failures, and building systems capable of thriving after their founder leaves.

Mustafa Ergen · (2015) · Print · Turkish · 400 pages · ★★☆☆☆

A comprehensive examination of Silicon Valley's history, technological innovation, venture capital, and the economic structures that help startups emerge, secure investment, and grow.

Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Darbel, Dominique Schnapper · (2011) · Print · Turkish · 104 pages · ★★★☆☆

A sociological study of European museum audiences showing how education, class, cultural capital, and learned dispositions shape access to art, museum attendance, aesthetic confidence, and supposedly natural differences in taste.

Ali Artun · (2017) · Print · Turkish · 202 pages · ★★★★☆

A critical history of museums examining what they display, how they organize knowledge, and which regimes of power, representation, communication, modernity, and symbolic order are constructed through their collections.

Baek Se-hee · (2025) · Print · Turkish · 152 pages · ★★☆☆☆

A candid continuation of Baek Se-hee's recorded therapy conversations, exploring persistent depression, self-criticism, emotional contradiction, recovery without simple solutions, and the small everyday desires that keep despair from becoming absolute.

Baek Se-hee · (2024) · Print · Turkish · 142 pages · ★★★★☆

A memoir built from conversations between Baek Se-hee and her psychiatrist, examining chronic low-grade depression, anxiety, self-doubt, relationships, judgment, and the ordinary pleasures that coexist with psychological pain.

Dr. Seuss · (2019) · Print · Turkish · 48 pages · ★★★★★

A playful illustrated journey through ambition, uncertainty, success, loneliness, delay, and failure, encouraging readers of every age to choose their direction, accept life's difficult stretches, and continue moving forward.

Cüneyt Özdemir · (2014) · Print · Turkish · 275 pages · ★★★★☆

A war correspondent's firsthand account of traveling with American troops during the invasion of Iraq, reflecting on occupation, fear, professional ethics, competition, solidarity, and the moral contradictions of embedded journalism.

Cüneyt Özdemir · (2016) · Print · Turkish · 256 pages · ★★★☆☆

A journalist's personal account of political turmoil, migration, foreign cities, technology, war, and Turkey's fading public optimism, combining professional observations with memories of London, New York, Silicon Valley, and 2016.

Walter Benjamin · (2023) · Print · Turkish · 48 pages · ★★★☆☆

An influential essay examining how photography, film, and mass reproduction transform artistic authenticity, dissolve the work's aura, reshape collective perception, and expose art to both emancipatory and fascist political uses.

Vedat Milor, Yenal Bilgici · (2024) · Print · Turkish · 272 pages · ★★★☆☆

A wide-ranging conversation about navigating contemporary life, making choices amid uncertainty, cultivating resilience and dignity, adapting to changing professions and social norms, and preserving enjoyment, curiosity, and respect for others.

Viktor Şklovski · (2021) · Print · Turkish · 144 pages · ★★★★★

An epistolary novel shaped by unrequited love and exile, in which a writer forbidden to discuss romance turns toward literature, memory, displacement, modernity, and inventive attempts to evade emotional silence.

Aylin Balboa · (2022) · Print · Turkish · 129 pages · ★★★★★

A fragmented, intimate narrative about a woman addressing Osman while moving through separation, grief, memory, and self-repair, blending humor and vulnerability into a distinctly contemporary Turkish literary voice.

Johann Hari · (2024) · Print · Turkish · 320 pages · ★★★★☆

An investigation into the social, technological, psychological, and environmental forces eroding human attention, arguing that meaningful recovery requires collective reform alongside personal changes in habits, work, childhood, and digital life.

Irvin D. Yalom · (2017) · Print · Turkish · 440 pages · ★★★★☆

A philosophical psychotherapy novel following a dying therapist and an emotionally isolated former patient, weaving group therapy with Schopenhauer's life and ideas to explore mortality, connection, character, and meaningful change.

Aylin Seçkin · (2021) · Print · Turkish · 175 pages · ★★★☆☆

An accessible examination of how artworks acquire economic value, circulate through galleries and auctions, function as investments, and interact with collectors, institutions, financial markets, and emerging digital platforms.

Yuval Noah Harari · (2024) · Print · Turkish · 448 pages · ★★☆☆☆

A sweeping history of information networks that explores how stories, documents, bureaucracies, mass media, and artificial intelligence shape cooperation, power, truth, democracy, and humanity's capacity for self-correction.

Freedom Press · (2024) · Print · Turkish · 304 pages · ★★★☆☆

A provocative collection of essays and illustrations challenging the moral status of paid work, criticizing capitalist labor structures, and imagining societies organized around autonomy, leisure, creativity, and shared abundance.

Tom Chivers · (2023) · Print · Turkish · 304 pages · ★★☆☆☆

A journalistic exploration of artificial intelligence risk and the rationalist communities surrounding it, examining superintelligence, effective altruism, decision-making, existential threats, and competing efforts to safeguard humanity's future.

Albert Camus · (2021) · Print · Turkish · 112 pages · ★★★★★

A stark novel about an emotionally detached man whose response to death, violence, and judgment exposes social conformity, existential absurdity, alienation, and the demand that individuals perform acceptable feelings.

Marty Cagan · (2023) · Print · Turkish · 352 pages · ★★☆☆☆

A practical guide to building successful technology products through empowered teams, disciplined discovery, strong product culture, customer insight, rapid experimentation, and close collaboration among product, design, and engineering.

Mustafa Suleyman, Michael Bhaskar · (2024) · Print · Turkish · 432 pages · ★★★★☆

An insider's examination of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence and biotechnology, the prosperity and disruption they may create, and the difficult political challenge of containing powerful technologies without enabling authoritarian control.

Daron Acemoğlu, Simon Johnson · (2023) · Print · Turkish · 520 pages · ★★★★☆

A historical argument that technological progress does not automatically benefit society, showing how political power directs innovation and proposing institutions that can make productivity, opportunity, and prosperity more broadly shared.

Renata Salecl · (2016) · Print · Turkish · 144 pages · ★★☆☆☆

An analysis of how consumer capitalism turns an abundance of apparent choices into anxiety, guilt, and dissatisfaction while obscuring collective constraints and weakening possibilities for meaningful social change.

Timothy A. Pychyl · (2016) · Print · Turkish · 120 pages · ★★★☆☆

A concise psychological guide to procrastination that explains why people avoid meaningful tasks despite future costs and presents research-based strategies for regulating emotions, challenging excuses, beginning promptly, and sustaining action.

Tahsin Yücel · (2022) · Print · Turkish · 336 pages · ★★★☆☆

A satirical dystopian novel set in 2073 Istanbul, where privatized justice, rampant construction, political corruption, extreme inequality, and displaced people reveal the destructive logic of unchecked capitalism and urban ambition.

Şevket Pamuk · (2014) · Print · Turkish · 377 pages · ★★★★☆

A data-rich history tracing two centuries of economic development from the late Ottoman Empire through republican Turkey, emphasizing growth, institutions, inequality, human development, globalization, and continuity across political transformations.

Erik Jan Zürcher · (2018) · Print · Turkish · 464 pages · ★★★★★

A comprehensive history examining Turkey's political, social, and economic modernization from the late Ottoman Empire onward, emphasizing state transformation, nationalism, democratization, military intervention, and changing relations with Europe.

Cal Newport · (2019) · Print · Turkish · 224 pages · ★★★☆☆

A practical argument for cultivating sustained, distraction-free concentration, explaining why deep work creates exceptional value and offering routines, boundaries, and deliberate habits for producing demanding intellectual work more effectively.

Fırat Demirel · (2023) · Print · Turkish · 360 pages · ★★★★★

A leadership biography tracing Süreyya Ciliv's path through education, migration, Microsoft, entrepreneurship, and Turkcell, emphasizing scientific curiosity, team building, technological development, social investment, resilience, and globally ambitious management.

Svend Brinkmann · (2020) · Print · Turkish · 136 pages · ★★★★☆

A philosophical critique of modern self-improvement culture that argues for resisting constant adaptation, rejecting compulsory positivity, and preserving personal integrity through limits, meaningful commitments, and engagement with the world.

Bülent Eczacıbaşı · (2022) · Print · Turkish · 264 pages · ★★☆☆☆

Forty concise essays in which an experienced Turkish business leader reflects on leadership, ethics, decision-making, organizational culture, capitalism, motivation, and the responsibilities of companies toward society.

Erdem Aksakal · (2022) · Print · Turkish · 200 pages · ★★★☆☆

A critical account of white-collar overwork that explores corporate conformity, lost aspirations, and the emotional costs of organizing one's identity and future around an exhausting career.

Svend Brinkmann · (2023) · Print · Turkish · 108 pages · ★★★★☆

A philosophical defense of moderation and voluntary restraint, showing how accepting limits, foregoing endless opportunities, and resisting excessive consumption can support attention, responsibility, and a more meaningful life.

Adam Phillips · (2023) · Print · Turkish · 144 pages · ★★★☆☆

A psychoanalytic exploration of why people desire change, how they imagine preferred futures, and whether genuine transformation can be distinguished from socially prescribed ideals of improvement and progress.

Evrim Kuran · (2021) · Print · Turkish · 96 pages · ★★★☆☆

A research-driven account of Turkey's recent educated migration, combining survey findings and personal testimony to examine why younger people leave, how they adapt abroad, and whether they consider returning.

Y. Akın Öngör · (2020) · Print · Turkish · 176 pages · ★★★★☆

Akın Öngör reflects on leaving a powerful executive position and building a meaningful new chapter through entrepreneurship, social projects, personal interests, and life beyond corporate success.

Eric Jorgenson · (2022) · Print · Turkish · 232 pages · ★★★★★

A curated collection of Naval Ravikant's reflections on building wealth, exercising sound judgment, finding happiness, and developing a more deliberate philosophy of life.

Ursula K. Le Guin · (2018) · Print · Turkish · 148 pages · ★★★★★

Ursula K. Le Guin's interpretive presentation of the Taoist classic offers poetic reflections on simplicity, humility, nonaction, natural balance, political authority, and living attentively without forcing the world into submission.

Nihan Kaya · (2018) · Print · Turkish · 290 pages · ★★★☆☆

An exploration of childhood, parenting, emotional harm, and family relationships that challenges idealized notions of the family and encourages readers to reconsider their own upbringing.

Alper Canıgüz · (2021) · Print · Turkish · 248 pages · ★★★★☆

Alper Kamu investigates the brutal murder of a journalist at a luxury hotel while competing with a cunning young rival in a fast-moving and darkly humorous mystery.

Irvin D. Yalom · (2019) · Print · Turkish · 440 pages · ★★★★☆

A historical novel alternating between philosopher Baruch Spinoza and Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, exploring reason, freedom, identity, antisemitism, intellectual obsession, and the psychological forces behind radically opposed worldviews.

Fırat Demirel · (2018) · Print · Turkish · 320 pages · ★★★★★

An oral history of Turkey's first internet ventures, recounting how founders of Mynet, Ekşi Sözlük, Yemeksepeti, GittiGidiyor, Webrazzi, and others built digital businesses amid weak infrastructure and economic crisis.

Levent Duman · (2016) · Print · Turkish · 456 pages · ★★★★☆

A detailed political history of Hatay's annexation and subsequent nationalization, examining Turkish nationalism, language policies, ethnic classification, assimilation, migration, and efforts to reshape a diverse borderland around a homogeneous national identity.

Evrim Kuran · (2019) · Print · Turkish · 124 pages · ★★★☆☆

A research-based portrait of Generation Z in Turkey, examining the social conditions, technologies, values, anxieties, expectations, and intergenerational tensions shaping young people's identities and views of the future.

Bülent Diken · (2013) · Print · Turkish · 272 pages · ★★★★☆

A theoretical exploration of revolt, revolution, and critique as paradoxical political events, bringing competing radical traditions into conversation while examining how resistance can generate transformation or be absorbed by existing power.

Alper Canıgüz · (2013) · Print · Turkish · 221 pages · ★★★★☆

Five-year-old detective Alper Kamu investigates a child's death and an old love story in a darkly comic mystery that questions violence, justice, and human nature.

Andrew Crumey · (2011) · Print · Turkish · 312 pages · ★★★★☆

A postmodern speculative novel weaving quantum physics, parallel realities, philosophy, music, history, and literary puzzles into interlocking narratives that question identity, causality, memory, and the possibility of alternative worlds.

Alper Canıgüz · (2004) · Print · Turkish · 228 pages · ★★★★☆

Precocious five-year-old Alper Kamu investigates a neighborhood murder while observing family life, human nature, and the absurdities of the adult world with dark humor.