Please Read Me!

Why make a reading list public? Does anyone really need to see this? Well, no one needs dunkaroos, but hey, what a world! Anyway, I guess it's a public accountability thing? Maybe someone out there in the ether will draw some value from this?

Also, I think information should be free. And just in case someone else might out there might stumble across it and be compelled or inspired and pick up one of these books and learn something, that'd be pretty cool, in a "original spirit of the internet before it all became about ads and eyeballs" kind of way. So, better here than in a list no one will ever see (just please, don't take this as some signal that I've published this out of some overly-heightened sense of self-importance).

What I Like

For non-fiction, I enjoy real stories about people in extraordinary circumstances. For fiction, I enjoy real stories about people in extraordinary circumstances.

I tend to enjoy financial history. One of my favorites of this genre is Tim Geithner's Stress Test. No one was closer to the epicenter of the financial crisis than Geithner. I highly recommend the audio book. I also loved Too Big to Fail and The Big Short (the book and the movie).

Another recent favorite was Red Notice, Bill Browder's personal story on building the largest investment fund in Russia, his subsequent escape from the country, and his battle to avenge his friend's death. It's real, it's brilliantly written, and it's completely fucking insane.

I love short stories.

I tend not to enjoy puffy "written" by CEO's (cough: ghost written by a struggling journalist) biographies. I do tend to enjoy books written about powerful people by real journalists. The Everything Store comes to mind, as does Nick Bilton's brilliant Hatching Twitter.

I often think Malcolm Gladwell is about 50% full of shit but I thoroughly enjoy his writing anyway.

I pretty much without even knowing what it is obsessively fucking love anything written by Michael Lewis. The man has a gift and is a national treasure. He also has an incredibly calming podcast voice.

The List

So, in no particular order, here's an ever-growing list of stuff I'm meaning to read.

  1. Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events - Robert Schiller
  2. Adaptive Markets:  Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought - Andrew W. Lo
  3. Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
  4. A Short History of Financial Euphoria - John Kenneth Galbraith
  5. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk - Peter L. Bernstein
  6. This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly - Carmen M. Reinhart, Kenneth S. Rogoff
  7. Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises - Robert Z. Aliber, Charles P. Kindleberger
  8. A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal
  9. The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History - Gregory Zuckerman
  10. Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons from Wall Street's four great bottoms - Russel Napier
  11. American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road - Nick Bilton
  12. The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal - Evan Ratliff
  13. Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons - Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Hank Paulson
  14. The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath - Ben Bernanke
  15. Essays on the Great Depression - Ben Bernanke
  16. The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It - Scott Patterson
  17. The Great Crash 1929 - John Kenneth Galbraith
  18. The Affluent Society - John Kenneth Galbraith
  19. On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System - Hank Paulson
  20. Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance - Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm
  21. Exhalation: Stories - Ted Chiang
  22. Macroeconomics - William Mitchell, L. Randall Wray, Martin Watts
  23. Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction - David Enrich
  24. Irrational Exuberance - Robert Shiller
  25. The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century - Robert Shiller
  26. The Foundations of Statistics - Leonard J. Savage
  27. The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence - Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson
  28. Mastering the Market Cycle - Howard Marks

Whatsat now? Were you wondering if this page title is a sort-of pun on the Beatles song Please Please Me. Yes, yes it is.

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