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
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity
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 • 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
Benjamín Labatut • When We Cease to Understand the World and The MANIAC
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 • 🪦