Recommended Reading

Books and other recommendations for the curious mind

Non-fiction

Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History
Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
The Bible
Paul Blustein, And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out): Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina
Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World
Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down
Adda Bozeman, Politics and Culture in International History
Tom Burgis, The Looting Machine
Tim Butcher, Blood River
Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History
Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana
Confucius, The Analects
Eknath Easwaran (trans), The Bhagavad Gita
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts
David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History
Howard French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War
Richard Hall, Empires of the Monsoon
Herodotus, The Histories
Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies and Grey Eminence
Keith Johnstone, Impro
Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet and A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe
Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State
Edwin Lefèvre, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe
Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence
R.K. Narayan (trans), The Ramayana
Michael Pettis, The Volatility Machine and The Great Rebalancing
Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations
The Qur’an
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
Adam Smith, The Money Game
George Steiner, Nostalgia for the Absolute
Joe Studwell, How Asia Works
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
Barbara Tuchman, everything (particularly liked A Distant Mirror and The Proud Tower)
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
The Upanishads
M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity and The Dream Machine
Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Fiction

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way
Frans Bengtsson, The Long Ships
Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, The Ugly American
Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
James Hilton, Lost Horizon
Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey
David Ignatius, Agents of Innocence
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime
John Steinbeck, East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
James Webb, Fields of Fire and A Country Such as This
Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi

Favorite books of the year

Articles, essays, speeches, etc.

W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
John Gray, Berlin Wall anniversary: 25 years of liberal delusion
Elbert Hubbard, A Message to Garcia
George Frost Kennan, The Long Telegram
C.S. Lewis, The Inner Ring
W. Michael Reisman, Aftershocks: Reflections on the Implications of September 11
Ethan Watters, We aren’t the world

Others

Venkatesh Rao’s Ribbonfarm and Ribbonfarm Studio
The Last Psychiatrist • 🪦