Looking for your next book? These 9 authors have reading recommendations for you

What's the hardest part of reading? More often than not, it comes down to choosing a good book. “The embarrassment of choice”, as we say in French: faced with an infinity of options, it becomes very difficult to make a decision. That's why recommendations are so useful.

And who better to recommend books than people who, you know, write books? With that in mind, TechCrunch+ reached out to a handful of authors whose work is closely tied to technology and startups. We asked them a simple question: "What book have you read this summer that you think others might enjoy?" »

We received a response from:

Adam DuVander, author of "Technical Content Strategy Decoded" Phil Rosen, author of "Life Between Moments: New York Stories" Adi Polak, author of "Scaling Machine Learning with Spark: Distributed ML with MLlib, TensorFlow and PyTorch" Andrew Lee Miller, author of “The Startup Growth Book: 50+ Proven Ways to Scale Your Business Without a Marketing Budget” David Kadavy, author of “Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters” Sarah E. Brown, author of "Lead Upwards: How Startups Can Impact New Businesses, Build Amazing Careers, and Inspire Great Teams" Zeke Faux, author of “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall” David Spinks, author of “The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community Your Competitive Advantage” Purna Virji, author of "High Impact Content Marketing: Strategies to Make Your Content Intentional, Engaging and Effective"

From fiction to practical guides, from very recent books to centenarians, here is their selection.

Answers have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

Adam DuVander

After a recent book explaining why generic marketing approaches don't work on software developers, developer marketer Adam DuVander is now back with " Technical Content Strategy Decoded", a more concrete sequel explaining what companies should and shouldn't do.

Book Recommendation: "The War of Art: Overcome Odds and Win Your Inner Creative Battles", by Steven Pressfield

I reread “La Guerre de l’Art” this summer. Again. I come back to this book because it describes the life of anyone who creates anything – and that's most of us. Our biggest obstacle is not ourselves. Pressfield gives us a scapegoat in the resistance and a plan of action to transcend its grip.

Phil Rosen

Phil Rosen is a journalist and author of two books, Anywhere But Home: Life Abroad as Told by a Travel Blogger" and "Life Between Moments: New York Stories", a collection of 12 short stories about the Big Apple.

Book Recommendation: Forever: A Novel, by Pete Hamill

This is a brilliant novel about an Irish immigrant who arrives in New York in the 1700s and is quickly granted immortality on one condition: he can never leave Manhattan.

It's a beautiful and tragic story that is actually a Manhattan story...