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
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 • 🪦