January 1, 2026 · 20 min readCopy link

reading

Things on my reading list

This is a pretty comprehensive look at the books that I want to read at some point, along with some reasons.

I caveat all of this by saying- the most rewarding of these books tend to be the one I revisit. Quantity is not quality, but I needed a place to put this list!

Here are all the books from your list, organized by the specific nature of your curiosity.

§Table of Contents

• The Mechanics of Winning, Domination & Retaining Control
• Serial Success: "How do they keep doing it?"
• Investing, Finance, & Market Mechanics
• Avoiding Disaster, Failure, & Bubbles
• Secrets, Hidden History & "Inside Baseball"
• Building, Engineering, & Tech History
• Dynasties, Families & Long-Term Power
• Personal Optimization: Mindset, Focus, & Skill
• History, Rulers, & Empires
• Business Biographies & Corporate Origins
• Philosophy, Culture, & The Human Condition
• Classic Thought, Literature & Arts

§The Mechanics of Winning, Domination & Retaining Control

• Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson – how did Dyson retain so much control and be capital efficient? How did he learn to experiment?
• Cattle King – how did he dominate an industry that was around forever?
• Limping on Water – why did Capital Cities win?
• One Win and Nine Losses – why is this one of the only new Japanese brands that became international?
• The Fastest Tortoise – how do you come into a new industry and dominate?
• American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company – one of the only auto companies who never went broke
• Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? – a true corporate turnaround with a colossal
• Michele Ferrero – how did he retain control for so long?
• Leonardo Del Vecchio – why did they dominate this field—despite there being competition that had consolidated for hundreds of years?
• Juan March – spanned a wide range of industries and political offices... I wonder how he did it
• Hidden Champions of the Twenty-First Century – how can you build a medium-size company and still have outstanding metrics without taking on a bunch of financing?
• Strategy by B.H. Liddell Hart – fighting without the upper hand
• Xiaomi’s Entrepreneurship – why did they win the market? So much competition and they didn't seem to have a lot of connections
• The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger – creating a new technology in an old market and dominating. Also questions about why this was not invented before!
• I Love Capitalism! – how did he do it?
• The Reckoning by David Halberstam – Ford vs. Nissan and the prequel to American Icon — why did American auto decline while Japanese makers ascended?

§Serial Success: "How do they keep doing it?"

• Howard Jonas books – how does he keep doing it in industry after industry?
• Richard Branson books – how does he keep doing it in industry after industry?
• Wayne Huizenga books – how does he keep doing it in industry after industry?
• Peter Munk – one of the guys who can repeat success
• Capital Account by Edward Chancellor – read all his books, but why did he not blow up?
• Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw – he didn't work as much as he could have—why did he still outpace everybody else?

§Investing, Finance, & Market Mechanics

• A Zebra in Lion Country – what is the inside baseball of investing in Africa?
• Market Wizards – who are some of the best investors I have not heard of?
• Against the Gods – how has risk-taking evolved over time? What is the best way to take risk?
• Fortune's Formula – position sizing is important yet underdiscussed
• The Alpha Masters – how do they think about position sizing?
• The Kelly Capital Growth Investment Criterion: Theory and Practice – the most popular betting criteria, and why sometimes it's not ideal
• Masterclass with Super-Investors – who are the leading investors from India, and how does their market change things?
• Benjamin Graham on Investing – what else did he say that I don't know about?
• Special Situations Investing by Brian J. Stark – how can I improve my special situations pattern matching?
• Big Deal: The Battle for Control of America's Leading Corporations – what can I learn about mergers and what is always true vs. temporarily true?
• Deal Feelings – what is it like to have your company acquired? How can I be more empathetic?
• Nothing Down: How to Buy Real Estate with Little or No Money Down – unique financing strategies in a finance-heavy industry
• When Money Was in Fashion: Henry Goldman, Goldman Sachs, and the Founding of Wall Street – how did they incentivize their people and make sure they didn't take hefty losses?
• The Zurich Axioms – how do the best bankers in the world do it?
• The Match King – inside ball on Swedish investing
• Money Masters of Our Time by John Train – more on Buffett
• The Way It Was: An Oral History of Finance 1967-1987 – what was it like to invest through that stretch, in the words of the people who lived it?
• The Deals of Warren Buffett – what can we learn about the control ones that he had a hand in?
• Financier: The Biography of André Meyer – can I see why this led to the Washington Post?
• What It Takes by Stephen Schwarzman – what is the origin of the asset management industry?
• M&A Titans – The Pioneers Who Shaped Wall Street's Mergers and Acquisitions Industry
• Den of Thieves – why do people do stupid things like inside trade?
• The Rise of Carry – are we in decaying growth?
• Venture Deals by Brad Feld – what are the actual mechanics of venture capital deals?
• The Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin – the real history behind the Federal Reserve
• the protestant ethic and the Spirit of capitalism- a classic, apparently

§Avoiding Disaster, Failure, & Bubbles

• All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster – could this failure have been avoided? What is the cultural significance?
• Philipp Brothers: The Rise and Fall of a Trading Giant – why did this fail?
• Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron – one of the corporate blunders in my lifetime
• Towers of Debt – why did they fall? How come they didn't protect themselves well enough from debt?
• When Money Dies – are we in parallel with our inflation? What is different?
• Boo Hoo: A Dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe – what was it really like in the dot-com bubble?
• Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan – how can I see and protect myself against catastrophes?
• Risk Game: Self Portrait of an Entrepreneur – why did he not blow up?
• Trimming the Fat by Robert J. Crutchfield – how can you deal with turmoil in a leaning organization?
• From Dawn to Decadence – how empires fall
• The Last Eunuch of China – what was the fall of the Chinese empire like?
• The Campaigns of Napoleon – what were his failures and why did he fail? How often did he overextend?
• The Bugatti Story – why did they not outcompete Ferrari?
• The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam – how the smartest people in the room collectively got Vietnam catastrophically wrong — decision-making failure at the top

§Secrets, Hidden History & "Inside Baseball"

• Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future – Elon didn't want this to come out. One of the great companies of our time
• Storeulv: An Autobiography – ruthless businessman who didn't want this to be published
• Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes – why did Hughes not want this published?
• The World Is What It Is – why did he not want this published?
• The Diary of a Forty-Niner – why did they destroy nearly all the copies?
• Secret History by Procopius – what secrets did he tell?
• Records of the Grand Historian – what was the historical Chinese empire like from inside the court?
• Out of the Desert: My Journey From Nomadic Bedouin to the Heart of Global Oil – what do the insides of this regime look like, and how close are their ties to money?
• Martini Wonderland – what was Sidney Frank really like and why did he succeed after shooting himself in the foot hundreds of times?
• The ITT Wars: An Insider's View of Hostile Takeovers – what were the early days of hostile takeovers like?
• Santa Monica Letters to Partners – what is some pattern recognition I can gain?
• Boone – what is different than my perception about him?
• Who Is Michael Ovitz? – how does Ovitz view himself compared to what I know?
• Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richards J. Heuer Jr. – how does the CIA think about cognitive biases and analytical thinking?
• Inside the Aquarium by Viktor Suvorov – what was it really like inside Soviet military intelligence?

§Building, Engineering, & Tech History

• Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT – what learnings can we get from growing fast + new system + trying not to break things
• The Machine That Changed the World – lean production—can we use this in the software sense?
• How to Build a Car by Adrian Newey – what are the seemingly minor or inconsequential decisions that had to be made to accommodate supercars?
• Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World – what is precision engineering and how does it work?
• Designing Visual Interfaces – how can I learn to be a better designer?
• The Making of Prince of Persia – early software development
• The Soul of a New Machine – important bit of computing history
• IBM's Early Computers – how did IBM transition from tabulating machines to dominating early computing?
• Computer Associates’ Drive Wins Respect But Few Friends – what did they do and why?
• In the Company of Giants – what was mid-stage computing like as an industry, and what patterns emerge? Which of these companies died? And why?
• GEISCO to Test NEC’s First High-End CPU in U.S. – early computing history
• The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly – technological forces that will change everything over the next decades
• The Timeless Way of Building – how can you plan for grandeur yet disaster avoidance?
• Shoe Dog – bootstrapped success
• You Don't Know Jack... or Jerry – how did their company evolve at different growth stages?
• The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood – what is entertainment like to invest in?
• The Barry Diller Story – why did he go into financing rather than anything else in entertainment? Why is entertainment a good business?
• How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery by Edward Winkleman – the actual business mechanics of running a gallery
• What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub – where do Silicon Valley's big ideas actually come from?

§Dynasties, Families & Long-Term Power

• The Davis Dynasty – how was the investing prowess able to be passed on generation after generation and be repeatable?
• The Warburgs – how did they keep everything in the family for so long?
• Partners in Banking (Brown Brothers Harriman) – how did they last so long?
• Kochland – how did the Koch brothers rise so quickly? How did they work together as family without blowing up?
• The Marmon Group – why did Marmon do so well, and how did the brothers work together?
• Nature's Metropolis - how can we make cities and institutions last longer?
• Porsche: Cars Make Money – how did family dynamics affect the outcome of this company?
• The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. – why did they last so long?
• Wallenberg: The Family That Shaped Sweden's Economy – Swedish barons
• Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty – dynasty of power brokers
• The Patriarch – founder of a political dynasty
• House of Morgan – an American banking dynasty
• The World We Have Lost – how were family relations in the medieval period?
• The Powers That Be by David Halberstam – CBS, Time, the LA Times, and the Washington Post as media dynasties — pairs with the Capital Cities thread and André Meyer's role at the Post

§Personal Optimization: Mindset, Focus, & Skill

• Feeling Good by David Burns – some mind-bending tricks to be happy
• Learned Optimism – removing pity and helplessness from my system
• How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything – how can I have a better attitude?
• The Power of Focusing – how can I improve my ability to focus?
• Learn Faster, Perform Better – how to practice to make perfect
• Thinking in Systems – problem solving
• Get the Truth – how can I better interrogate and ask questions?
• Negotiation Genius – apparently one of the only good negotiation books
• Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre – how can I be better on my feet?
• The Education of a Bodybuilder – how can a bodybuilder maximize their time, WHILE having to do things like naturally rest? What can I take from this?
• Why Marriages Succeed or Fail – what are some common pitfalls I would expect myself to fall into?
• Range by David Epstein – how can a generalist do very well when we know specialization is a master key?
• The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence – what am I doing wrong, in terms of being polite?
• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingram – a pragmatic, no-nonsense guide to meditation and awakening
• The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa – a systematic, stage-by-stage map for meditation practice
• Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg – how can I sharpen my writing?

§History, Rulers, & Empires

• Caesar: Life of a Colossus – it's Caesar, I want to know everything
• The Twelve Caesars – the ones who didn't get assassinated, why?
• Einhard: The Life of Charlemagne – what else can we learn from and about Charlemagne?
• Napoleon: A Life – one of the greatest generals ever, started at a young age
• The Mind of Napoleon – how did Napoleon write? How did he improve over time?
• How China works - why did china rise and what are it's implications for today?
• Crassus: The First Tycoon – Rome's richest man
• Endurance by Alfred Lansing – why did men go with him?
• A Time for Reflection – which institutions did he favor the most?
• Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman – what was his life like in politics compared to finance?
• Botswana History – they rose up out of poverty and should have stayed in there forever. Yet they persisted. How?
• City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism – why did Dubai turn to capitalism? Are they a bit more hybrid now?
• Riches Among the Ruins – what was Russia like post-Soviet fall?
• Mémoires of the Duc de Saint-Simon – what was early court life like in France?
• Mémoires of Cardinal de Retz – what was it like to have power struggles back then?
• The Journal of Jean Héroard – what is it like to be raised as a young king?
• Andrew Roberts Biographies – lots of political biographies here
• Democracy in America and Two Early Essays – how does this relate to French philosophy at the time?
• The Southern Backcountry During the American Revolution – is this what I would expect? Is the culture the same?
• Nuts and Bolts of the Past: A History of American Technology, 1776-1860 – early American history
• Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire – of course
• Medieval Technology and Social Change – name something cooler, and I'm wondering what parallels there are to today
• The Map That Changed the World – our geography has determined a lot of what has happened in the preceding centuries, and understanding its origins may explain a lot
• Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe by Chateaubriand – what was it like to live through the French Revolution and Napoleonic era?
• Napoleon: A Concise Biography by David A. Bell – a different lens on Napoleon
• The Autobiography of Charles Darwin – the mind behind natural selection, in his own words
• The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade – a sweeping secular history of civilization—what patterns hold across all of it?

§Business Biographies & Corporate Origins

• John D.: The Founding Father of the Rockefellers – the most revealing bio of him yet
• Henry Villard and the Northern Pacific – why did he not die and his railroad live on unlike others?
• Memoirs of Henry Villard, Journalist and Financier – how did he run his companies?
• Villard: The Life and Times of an American Titan
• The Life and Work of Sir William Van Horne by Walter Vaughan – how did he build the Canadian Pacific Railway against impossible odds?
• Junk to Gold – why do they remain in power today?
• The Predators' Ball – classic story
• Barbarians at the Gate – I heard it was a classic
• Storming the Magic Kingdom – how did Rainwater bring this together?
• Dark Genius of Wall Street – absolute hated robber baron
• Tiny Rowland: A Rebel Tycoon – The Observer owner
• When Money Is King – how did he do it?
• Kidman: The Forgotten King – a fantastic Australian entrepreneur
• George Soros: A Life in Full – fascinating character
• Net Worth: John Risley – I don't know his story well enough
• Den Fujita: The Japanese Who Changed the World – what were the tensions with riding the McDonald's wave?
• Men and Rubber: The Story of Business by Harvey S. Firestone – why did he do the franchise model?
• Neckermann – one of the original mail-order businesses
• The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger – spanned multiple industries and made money in all of them, in a period where keeping your money was difficult to do
• The Merchant of Prato – one of the original holding companies
• Distant Force – how did Teledyne create value on the operating level?
• Dream Big (Sonho Grande): How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira Acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz
• Chapters In My Life by Frederick Taylor Gates – Rockefeller's chief adviser—what was it like to operate at that level?

§Philosophy, Culture, & The Human Condition

• Adventures of a Bystander – what makes people curious?
• Man and His Symbols
• Phenomenology of Perception – how do we perceive?
• Trauma: A Genealogy – how trauma passes and manifests itself in people
• Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? – what were the troubles a Black man had coming up in the business?
• The Theory of the Leisure Class – a social theory which may align with my philosophy
• Radical Markets – what does it look like if we bring parts of our system to the extreme?
• Post-Capitalist Desire – where does desire come from?
• Girard's seminal books (Violence and the Sacred, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel) – the source of the mimetic theory behind Wanting- worth going straight to the origin
• Simulacra and Simulation – what is real?
• The Art of Logic in an Illogical World
• Dialectic of Enlightenment – does this philosophy hold today?
• Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States – why did the corporation happen?
• Made in the USA by Vaclav Smil – is it a good thing American manufacturing is dying? What can we learn from this?
• The Rise and Fall of Alexandria – was Alexandria as important as we believe?
• The Right Stuff – the second NASA peak
• The Fugger Newsletters – how has writing evolved?
• Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson – how do metaphors shape the way we think and perceive?
• Perfect Brilliant Stillness by David Carse – a radical perspective on non-duality and the nature of self
• The End of Your World by Adyashanti – how do you tell a genuine awakening from spiritual bypassing?
• Nihilism by Seraphim Rose – an Orthodox Christian diagnosis of the modern condition
• Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks – what can altered perception teach us about how the mind works?

§Classic Thought, Literature & Arts

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius – classical Stoic work
• On the Shortness of Life by Seneca – classical Stoic work
• Confessions by Augustine of Hippo – classical Christian work
• City of God by Augustine of Hippo – classical Christian work
• Autobiography of a Yogi – what did Steve Jobs get from this?
• Bonifacius: An Essay to Do Good – Ben Franklin's inspiration
• Michel de Montaigne – one of the first essayists
• Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas – a masterclass in narrative
• Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas – why posthumous?
• Brideshead Revisited
• The Razor's Edge – trying to find meaning post the Great War
• The Myth of Sisyphus – absurdism
• Brunelleschi's Dome – one of the greatest true patrons of arts
• The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects – I want to learn more about art history
• The Art Dealers by Laura de Coppet
• Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United States
• Duveen: A Life in Art
• The Girl with the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market
• Julian Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery
• Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli
• Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present – an emotional exhibition
• The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini – what insights into life did he have?
• Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein – I know little about his life
• The Supper of the Lamb – what does Justin see in this book?
• Becoming C. S. Lewis – fantastic writer, I want to know more
• C. S. Lewis: A Life – fantastic writer, I want to know more
• The Stranger by Albert Camus – the companion to The Myth of Sisyphus—absurdism in fiction
• The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall – an encyclopedic tour of ancient wisdom traditions
• Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton – the foundation of modern physics—what was his actual reasoning?
• Reflections by Simone Weil – spiritual and philosophical meditations from one of the great mystic thinkers
• The Mystery of Providence by John Flavel – classic Puritan theology on divine sovereignty
• KLF: The Manual by Bill Drummond & Jimmy Cauty – a gonzo guide to the music industry's hidden mechanics
• The Spectrum of Ecstasy
• Shock Amazement / Roaring Silence
• The Mahabharata

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