Reading List

This is a list of some writing I’ve found particularly good, both on the utilitarian and literary sides of things. I’ve definitely missed some of my favorites; this skews towards books I’ve read recently and ones I’ve found myself thinking back to.

Books that I liked but that weren’t one of my absolute favorites, or that I didn’t have much to say about, are listed without comments.

If you see a lot of books you like on this list and think of others I should check out, I always appreciate a recommendation.

Books on Business, Entrepreneurship, Economics, and Finance

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell: I took a few classes in economics in high school and college, but this book taught me more about what economics actually has to teach us about the world than all of those classes put together.
The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks: The best book on investing I’ve read. From the perspective of a value investor working hard to outperform the market, but has many valuable lessons that generalize to other investment approaches and outside of investing entirely.
The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America: I had absorbed a sense of respect for Warren Buffett before reading this book, and had meant to read some of his famous annual reports, but never knew where to start. Here, Lawrence Cunningham did a great job excerpting Buffett’s writings in a way that packs a LOT of insight into a pretty short book and gives a sampler of Buffett’s intellectual range. I learned a lot from this book, and now appreciate just how much Warren Buffett’s record is no accident.
The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco: Seems like a trashy self-help book on first glance but is actually a very clear-eyed view on how making money works. I got a lot out of this book as an engineer-turned-startup-founder.
Clay Christensen‘s body of work is a classic; he coined the idea of disruptive innovation among many others. I can recommend The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution (though I still haven’t finished the latter), and I also enjoyed a collection of his HBR articles called The Clayton M. Christensen Reader.
I also got a lot out of reading selections from Michael Porter‘s work, including this article.
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight – the origin story of Nike, warts and all.
That Will Never Work by Marc Randolph: From the cofounder of Netflix. In the mold of, and as good as, Shoe Dog, but for the tech industry.
How to Castrate a Bull by Dave Hitz – Another view of tech entrepreneurship from the inside. Also a great and insightful read.
The Soul of a New Machine: This book is a journalist’s account of the development process of a new minicomputer at one of the major players in that space some 30 years ago. A super interesting read: some things have changed completely since then, and others haven’t changed at all!
Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson is a great summary of how the world of venture capital works. Secrets of Sand Hill Road is another good book in the same genre.
The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby is an excellent history of the venture industry in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, and looks under the hood of how venture partnerships work in a way that no other book I’ve read has. This should be required reading for entrepreneurs.
The Luxury Strategy by Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien: A book on how to build and sustain luxury brands – and more generally, a very interesting read on how marketing and product development interact with human psychology.
A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs, edited by Trenholme J. Griffin: A well-curated selection of startup advice, but the author’s commentary is skippable.
The Mom Test: The Bible of customer interviews, and more generally an excellent primer in how to frame your own psychology to avoid being misled by wishful thinking.
Zero to One by Peter Thiel: Deserves its popularity.
Principles by Ray Dalio. An interesting manual on company building.
Finding Fertile Ground by Scott Shane. Slightly tedious but worth reading for would-be entrepreneurs – this is a very good breakdown of how to think about how and where opportunities to build new companies emerge.
7 Powers: Another excellent book for thinking about strategy. Pairs well with “Finding Fertile Ground” – this one’s about how to make sure the company you build can defend its margins long-term. Skip the math if you’re not in academia.
Influence by Robert Cialdini. I find a lot of academic psychology to be of questionable value, but this book is a notable exception. An incredible summary of what kinds of things (fear of missing out, social proof, etc.) actually make people act.
Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs by Berman & Knight is a great primer on corporate finance and accounting for who need to understand the concepts on a high level.
Why Stocks Go Up and Down: A great more detailed primer on the financial metrics that investors care about – implicitly a lesson in accounting as well.
Irrational Exuberance by Robert Shiller: Packed with insights on how markets behave irrationally, as well as finance and economics more broadly – highly recommended if you don’t already have a strong understanding of the field.
Pioneering Portfolio Management by David Swensen: a really good intro to how a top asset manager thinks – useful to understand how a crucial layer of the world’s finance stack (i.e. asset management) works, and to get a feel for how a master of his field thought about investing and forging long-term business relationships more generally.
How I Went from Failure to Success in Selling by Frank Bettger: 100 years old and has stood the test of time. A great book to understand what sales is and how to do it well.
The Founder’s Dilemmas is an excellent take on the human dynamics of startups. I was very glad I read it before starting a company.
Trust Me, I’m Lying: A peek under the covers of the PR industry. Pairs well with Paul Graham’s essay The Submarine.
Charlie Munger is a great source of wisdom about life and business. I can especially recommend his talk about the psychology of human misjudgment.
Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy: Even though it’s decades-old, this look into one of the all-time masters of advertising has lots of things to learn from, and it’s also full of wisdom about how to build and run a truly high-performance organization.
The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto: A book on developmental economics that’s explores the underpinnings and history of financial markets, property rights, and law in a very interesting way.

Periodicals, blogs, and newsletters

Paul Graham’s essays. I can’t recommend them highly enough.
The Economist magazine is a great source for good and broad, if shallow, coverage of almost anything happening in the world. I was a subscriber for more than a decade.
The Money Stuff newsletter from Matt Levine is both insightful and hilarious.
Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten newsletter (and its predecessor Slate Star Codex) has a lot of high-quality content with a genuinely contrarian perspective.
Benedict Evans is consistently excellent; he has a newsletter and writes elsewhere too.
The Marginal Revolution blog has interesting perspectives on diverse subjects.
Sam Altman also has some excellent essays.
Marc Andereesen – He took his blog down but some highlights are archived here.
Elad Gil’s blog is consistently insightful: another one of my favorites.
José Ancer runs a website that is full of good sense at Silicon Hills Lawyer.
I’ve enjoyed a number of pieces from Jerry Neumann’s Reaction Wheel blog.
A lot of the content on SaaStr is great – see the Best Of.
Most YC content is extremely good; I especially like the Dalton and Michael videos.

Non-business nonfiction

Here are a few of my favorites from outside of the world of business.

The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro – not just the best biographies I’ve ever read; also the best books I’ve read on how power actually works, and how political careers are built. The Power Broker, being a single book, is a great place to start for the Caro-curious. The Years of LBJ, which consists of four (and hopefully eventually five) volumes, is equally high-quality but even more detailed, and presents a remarkably unvarnished and informative view of the life and career of one of the most influential people of the 20th century, and the times he lived in. Caro’s book about his writing process, Working, is also a very interesting read.
George Orwell’s essays are probably the best of all time in the English language.
The Red Queen and The Selfish Gene gave me quite a bit of insight into the workings of evolution and the implications for the way people are.
Man’s Search for Meaning has changed the lives of many readers for the better, and I count myself among them.
Deep Work by Cal Newport: An unparalleled primer on productivity for workers in high-focus fields. Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You is another gem from Newport; one of the best career books I’ve ever read. (Develop a “passion” rather than looking for it!)
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is a well-deserved classic.
The Box: A surprisingly entertaining account of the container revolution in shipping.
The Emperor of All Maladies: An excellent history of cancer.
Endurance: An account of Shackleton’s voyage, and a lesson in leadership.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: As advertised, a lesson in the banality of evil. This book changed my view of the world significantly.
Iron Coffins: A page-turning account of the submarine war in the Atlantic from the German perspective, and a lesson in competence and leadership.
In Cold Blood: Some of the best long-form journalism I’ve ever read.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by Joan Didion.
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life: A great adventure story.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman: An ode to the joys of science, and of keeping technical work fun.
Seven Years in Tibet: A German mountaineer and POW escapes from a prison camp in India during WW2 and spends years of his life in still-independent Tibet. A great true story.
McDonald’s: Behind the Arches. The building of the biggest restaurant chain ever.
The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
The Inner Game of Tennis – not just for tennis, a short and worthwhile read
The Biggest Bluff – Very well-written, both a great story and a well-thought-out take on social science and its applicability in the real world.
The Prize: A good history of the oil industry. I wish it had been shorter, but it was good enough that I read most of it.
How to Prevent a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates – by far the best take on climate issues, and what to do about them, that I’ve read.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini – The astonishing and braggadocious memoirs of one of the great artists of Renaissance Italy, who was also a notorious murderer – interesting both from the point of view of Cellini’s experience of his life and world, as well as for getting a sense of the mentality of a very different era through a narrative that feels surprisingly modern.
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason Stearns
The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 by Geoffrey Parker
The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer
Life with Father by Clarence Day
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough – a great story about the birth of aviation and a very special family.
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi: a touching memoir in a very unique form – a series of memories, with a couple of short stories thrown in for good measure, by an Italian chemist and writer who, among other trials in an eventful life, survived the Holocaust.
The Good War, an Oral History of WW2: Interviews with all kinds of people who lived through the war.
Two Years Before the Mast: A really great account of sailing as a merchant mariner by an author on leave from Harvard in the 1830s.
Titan by Ron Chernow, a biography of John Rockefeller.
My Confession by Samuel Chamberlain: a consistently entertaining memoir of the author’s time before, during, and after his service as a cavalryman in the Mexican-American War, and an interesting window into that time. Pairs well with Two Years Before the Mast. The end of this book was the inspiration for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian — with alarmingly little embellishment added by McCarthy.
The Son also Rises by Gregory Clark — turns out class is transmitted from generation to generation far more than other studies have suggested, when you look at class markers of rare last names over multiple centuries.
How the War was Won by Phillips O’Brien – a logistical/economic view of how WW2 was dominated by air and sea power, through which the US and UK gradually crushed the Axis powers. Very interesting and convincing.
Late Admissions by Glenn Loury – an unusually candid and pretty riveting memoir. Not many memoirs have this much to be this candid about. From the NYT review: ‘Glenn C. Loury’s new book, “Late Admissions,” is unlike any economist’s memoir I have ever read. Most don’t mention picking up streetwalkers. Or smoking crack in a faculty office at Harvard’s Kennedy School — or in an airplane at 30,000 feet. Or stealing a car. Or having sex on a beach in Israel with a mistress and attracting the attention of the Israel Defense Forces. Or later being arrested and charged with assaulting her. Or cuckolding a best friend.’ And it goes on!
The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945: A fascinating look at the home front and what being a German under the Nazi regime was like.
Life Among The Savages by Shirley Jackson – super well-written and funny memoir of domestic life by someone better known for dark fiction.
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain – a really interesting window into how devastating the war years of 1914-8, and the periods before and after, were like for that generation in England.
My Mother’s Sabbath Days by Chaim Grade – a very well-written memoir of the Jewish community in Vilna before the Holocaust, the author’s flight across Soviet Russia and his eventual return to the ruins of the community he grew up in. Super haunting.

Fiction

Cormac McCarthy: The Border Trilogy, especially The Crossing, has been something I’ve found myself thinking back to and quoting more than any other book. Blood Meridian is another classic. Skip The Passenger, and I also wasn’t as big of a fan of Suttree as of his later work.
War and Peace: Lives up to its reputation.
A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin – among my all-time favorite books.
The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson is a new favorite. See also Michael Chabon’s review.
Ernest Hemingway is another favorite. Two of my favorites from him are “The Sun Also Rises” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (both of which I’ve read multiple times).
East of Eden by Steinbeck is a powerful story and Biblical exegesis. Another one of my all-time favorites. Steinbeck’s other work is consistently very good as well.
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald is one of the most unusual and beautiful books I’ve ever read. The translator deserves great credit for capturing the tone of this book.
Stefan Zweig is a writer unjustly forgotten by history. His “The World of Yesterday” (a nonfiction work) is such an evocative portrait of pre-WW1 Europe than it permanently changed the way I perceive Western history. His “The Post-Office Girl” is an understated and excellent novella.
Stoner by John Williams is another underappreciated classic. A view into the inner life of a quiet man, it expresses unspoken struggles common, I’m sure, to many of us.
Charles Bukowski is another inimitable voice. His Post Office is excellent.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an excellent story and a quiet but firm indictment of communism.
The Crucible: An all-too-human story and a reminder of our tendency to hunt down and destroy the lives of imagined internal enemies. Relevant to this day.
I, Claudius is historical fiction at its finest. Graves was a classicist and used his knowledge to paint Roman society as realistically as possible. The sequel (Claudius the God) is also very good.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North: A well-crafted story largely set in the Burmese prison camps of WW2. Also made me a big fan of Tennyson and his poem “Ulysses” in particular.
The Naked and the Dead: Another WW2 story set in the Pacific, a very good novel.
The Things They Carried is an excellent book about war and its ugliness.
All Quiet on the Western Front: Another reminder of the ugliness, and the banality of the ugliness, of war.
All the Light We Cannot See: Another beautiful book set in and around WW2.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: A classic coming-of-age story.
Bonfire of the Vanities is a modern classic and a great send-up of a society that’s still recognizable in our country today.
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard – technically nonfiction, but reads like a novel. In a similar style to Proust but more modern and I found it much more engaging. Knausgaard is very good at seeing and depicting both himself and others with both the most extreme candor and the most penetrating insight in a way that I don’t believe any other writer has ever pulled off.
Men at War is a collection of short stories curated by Ernest Hemingway. Almost all of them are very good. I find myself thinking back to the story “Buchmendel” by Stefan Zweig particularly often.
All the King’s Men is a very good novel, and incidentally an interesting peek into the world of politics (although The Power Broker is a much more detailed, and real, way to get a sense of what the world of politics is like.)
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth: a novel set in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire that I find myself thinking back to often.
The Martian and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir: really fun sci-fi.
The Odyssey: A great story and a fascinating look at what being human was like a very long time ago.