BOOKS & Links

A curated collection of book recommendations organized by topic, inspired by Patrick Collison's bookshelf.

1. Thinking Tools / Learning How to Learn

  1. The Lifetime Learner's Guide to Reading and Learning, Gary Hoover
  2. How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler & Charles van Doren
  3. Learning How to Learn, Barbara Oakley
  4. Mindshift, Barbara Oakley
  5. An Incomplete Education, Judy Jones
  6. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose
  7. Seeking Wisdom: from Darwin to Munger, Peter Bevelin
  8. A Handbook for New Stoics, Massimo Pigliucci
  9. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel Dennett
  10. How to Solve It, George Pólya
  11. The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts, Shane Parrish
  12. Poor Charlie's Almanack, Charlie Munger
  13. Thinking In Systems, Donella Meadows
  14. The Systems Bible, John Gall
  15. Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking, Cecilia Heyes
  16. The Model Thinker, Scott Page
  17. Investing: The Last Liberal Art, William Hagstrom
  18. Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, Richard Nisbett
  19. Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart, Gerd Gigerenzer
  20. How to Take Smart Notes, Sönke Ahrens
  21. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning How to Learn, Richard Hamming
  22. You and Your Research, Richard Hamming

2. America & Growth

  1. Americana, Bhu Srinivasan
  2. Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States, Michael Lind
  3. An Empire of Wealth, John Steele Gordon
  4. The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Robert Gordon
  5. Railroaded: The Transcontinental and the Making of Modern America, Richard White
  6. Lone Star: A History of Texas, T.R. Fehrenbach
  7. The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, Joyce Appleby
  8. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon
  9. The Noblest Triumph: Property & Prosperity Through the Ages, Tom Bethell
  10. Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth Jackson
  11. Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer
  12. American Colossus, H.W. Brands
  13. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, Colin Woodard
  14. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925, John Higham
  15. Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491, Charles C. Mann
  16. 1493, Charles C. Mann
  17. A History of America in 100 Maps, Susan Schulten
  18. Making of the American Self, Daniel Walker Howe
  19. The Liberal Tradition in America, Louis Hartz
  20. The Oxford History of the United States (series)

3. China & The New Eurasia

  1. The Qing Empire and the Opium War, Haijian Mao
  2. Red Capitalism, Fraser Howie
  3. The Wobbling Pivot, China since 1800, Pamela Kyle Crossley
  4. China's Crony Capitalism, Minxin Pei
  5. Factions and Finance in China, Victor Shih
  6. Deng Xiaoping, Ezra Vogel
  7. The Dawn of the New Eurasia, Bruno Maçães
  8. The Struggle for Taiwan, Sulmaan Wasif Khan
  9. Belt and Road, Bruno Maçães
  10. Out of the Gobi, Weijian Shan
  11. Age of Ambition, Evan Osnos
  12. A Daughter of Han, Ida Pruitt & Ning Lao T'ai-t'ai
  13. The Travels of Lao Can, Liu T'ieh-Yun
  14. God's Chinese Son, Jonathan Spence

4. The Evolution of Technology & Silicon Valley History

  1. Chip War, Chris Miller
  2. ASML's Architects, René Raaijmakers
  3. The Nature of Technology, Brian Arthur
  4. The Chip, T.R. Reid
  5. The Dream Machine, Mitchell Waldrop
  6. The Intel Trinity, Michael S. Malone
  7. How the Internet Happened, Brian McCullough
  8. Engines That Move Markets, Alasdair Nairn
  9. The Lever of Riches, Joel Mokyr
  10. Energy and Civilisation, Vaclav Smil
  11. How We Got Here, Andy Kessler
  12. Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Katie Hafner
  13. Crystal Fire, Michael Riordan
  14. The New New Thing, Michael Lewis
  15. Making Silicon Valley, Christophe Lécuyer
  16. Dealers of Lightning, Michael Hiltzik
  17. The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner
  18. The Shock of the Old, David Edgerton
  19. Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Carlota Perez
  20. The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond
  21. Founders at Work, Jessica Livingston
  22. Hooked, Nir Eyal
  23. Persuasive Technology, B.J. Fogg

5. Design of Buildings, Cities & Things

  1. Structures, Or Why Things Don't Fall Down, J.E. Gordon
  2. How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand
  3. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
  4. The Power Broker, Robert Caro
  5. The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman
  6. The City in History, Lewis Mumford
  7. Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, Alain Bertaud
  8. Human Transit, Jarrett Walker
  9. Rethinking America's Highways, Robert W. Poole
  10. The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander
  11. A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander

6. The History and Nature of the Corporation

  1. The Shareholder Value Myth, Lynn Stout
  2. The Corporation That Changed the World, Nick Robins
  3. The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, Micklethwait & Wooldridge
  4. We the Corporations, Adam Winkler
  5. Accounting for Capitalism, Caitlin Rosenthal
  6. Firm Commitment, Colin Mayer
  7. The Organisation Man, William H. Whyte
  8. Lessons from Century Club Companies, Viki TenHaken
  9. The Peter Principle, Laurence J. Peter
  10. The Gervais Principle (online essay)

7. High Quality Industry-Specific Books

  1. The Luxury Strategy, J.N. Kapferer & V. Bastien
  2. Addiction by Design, Natasha Dow Schüll
  3. Ninety Percent of Everything, Rose George
  4. Electronic Value Exchange, David L. Stearns
  5. Payments Systems in the U.S.A, Carol Coye Benson
  6. The Social Transformation of American Medicine, Paul Starr
  7. Faster, Better, Cheaper, Christoph Roser
  8. Manufacturing Processes for Design Professionals, Rob Thompson
  9. Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition, Bill Friedman
  10. Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator, Andreas Bernard
  11. Cable Cowboys, Mark Robichaux
  12. Merchants of Grain, Dan Morgan
  13. Attention Merchants, Tim Wu
  14. Junk to Gold (Copart), Willis Johnson
  15. Becoming Trader Joe, Joe Coulombe
  16. Walt Disney: The Biography, Neal Gabler
  17. Dynasties of the Sea, Lori Ann LaRocco
  18. The Operator, Tom King
  19. The Quest, Daniel Yergin
  20. Down the Asphalt Path, Clay McShane
  21. The Green and the Black, Gary Sernovitz
  22. American Icon, Bryce G. Hoffman
  23. Overhaul, Steven Rattner
  24. The Machine that Changed the World, James Womack
  25. Shoe Dog, Phil Knight
  26. One Buck at a Time, Earl Swift & Macon Brock
  27. My Father's Business, Cal Turner Jr
  28. The Meat Racket, Christopher Leonard
  29. Crisis in Bethlehem, John Strohmeyer
  30. The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder
  31. The Box, Marc Levinson
  32. The Farmer from Merna, Karl Schriftgiesser
  33. Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech, Sally Smith Hughes
  34. Preserving the Promise, Scott Dessain
  35. Devils on the Deep Blue Sea, Kristoffer Garin
  36. The Big Score, Jacquie McNish
  37. Steel: From Mine to Mill, Brooke Stoddard
  38. The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr
  39. Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide, Max Gergel
  40. Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba, Tom Gjelten
  41. Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce, Douglas Starr
  42. The King of Oil, Daniel Ammann
  43. Aerodynamic, Kevin Michaels
  44. Never Lost Again, Bill Kilday
  45. The Political Spectrum, Thomas Winslow Hazlett
  46. The Master Switch, Tim Wu
  47. The One Device, Brian Merchant
  48. Wireless Nation, James Murray
  49. The Cravath Firm & Its Predecessors, Robert T. Swaine

8. Market History

  1. The Panic of 1907, Robert Bruner
  2. Only Yesterday, the 1920s in America, Frederick Lewis Allen
  3. The Great Crash, J.K. Galbraith
  4. Since Yesterday, the 1930s in America, Frederick Lewis Allen
  5. The Go Go Years, John Brooks
  6. Barbarians at the Gate, Bryan Burrough & John Helyar
  7. Running Money, Andy Kessler
  8. Bull!, Maggie Mahar
  9. Capital Account, Marathon Asset Management ed. Edward Chancellor
  10. Mr Market Miscalculates, James Grant
  11. Decade of Delusion, Frank Martin
  12. Capital Returns, Marathon Asset Management ed. Edward Chancellor
  13. Fault Lines, Raghuram Rajan

9. The Upside of Error and Counterintuitive Wisdom

  1. Obliquity, John Kay
  2. Brilliant Blunders, Mario Livio
  3. Ignorance, Stuart Firestein
  4. Failure, Stuart Firestein
  5. The Up Side of Down, Megan McArdle
  6. Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz
  7. Happy Accidents, Morton Meyers
  8. The Logic of Failure, Dietrich Dörner
  9. Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmondson

10. History and Evolution of Science

  1. The Invention of Science, David Wootton
  2. The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800, Herbert Butterfield
  3. A Short History of Scientific Ideas to 1900, Charles Singer
  4. Truth and Beauty, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
  5. From X-Rays to Quarks, Emilio Segrè
  6. From Falling Bodies to Radio Waves, Emilio Segrè
  7. The Periodic Table: A Very Short Introduction, Eric Scerri
  8. A History of Science, John Gribbin
  9. The Search for the Elements, Isaac Asimov
  10. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn
  11. The Great Rift, Michael E. Hobart
  12. To Explain the World, Steven Weinberg
  13. Science: The Glorious Entertainment, Jacques Barzun

11. Creativity, Flow, Habits, Performance Optimization and Deep Work

  1. Deep Work, Cal Newport
  2. Peak, Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool
  3. Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
  4. Creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
  5. The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle
  6. Atomic Habits, James Clear
  7. The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin
  8. The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler
  9. Chase, Chance and Creativity, James Austin
  10. The Success Equation, Michael Mauboussin

12. Writing, Reading & Storytelling

  1. The Elements of Style, Strunk & White
  2. Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White, Mark Garvey
  3. Into the Woods: How Stories Work, John Yorke
  4. The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker
  5. How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler & Charles van Doren
  6. The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
  7. Made to Stick, Chip & Dan Heath
  8. Weekend Language, Andy Craig & Dave Yewman
  9. Save the Cat, Blake Snyder
  10. Working, Robert Caro
  11. Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
  12. The Random House Handbook, Frederick Crews
  13. Accidence Will Happen, Oliver Kamm
  14. Clear and Simple as the Truth, Thomas & Turner
  15. The Sense of Structure, George D. Gopen
  16. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, Alan Jacobs
  17. Draft No.4: On the Writing Process, John McPhee
  18. How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, Pierre Bayard
  19. How to Take Smart Notes, Sönke Ahrens

13. History of Money and Banking

  1. A Financial History of Western Europe, Charles Kindleberger
  2. Fragile by Design, Charles Calomiris & Stephen Haber
  3. Money, Whence It Came, Where It Went, J.K. Galbraith
  4. Breaking the Bank
  5. Golden Fetters, Barry Eichengreen
  6. The Origins of Value, William Goetzmann
  7. A History of Interest Rates, Homer & Sylla
  8. Paper Promises, Philip Coggan
  9. A History of Money and Banking in the United States, Murray Rothbard
  10. Lombard Street, Walter Bagehot

14. The Fed and Central Banking

  1. History of The Fed, Allan Meltzer
  2. Deliberating American Monetary Policy, Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey & Andrew Bailey
  3. The Alchemists, Neil Irwin
  4. The Man Who Knew, Sebastian Mallaby
  5. The Creature from Jekyll Island, G. Edward Griffin
  6. Greenspan's Bubbles, Bill Fleckenstein

15. Financial Bubbles, Manias and Crises

  1. Crashed, Adam Tooze
  2. Short History of Financial Euphoria, J.K. Galbraith
  3. Irrational Exuberance, Robert Shiller
  4. This Time is Different, Carmen Reinhart & Kenneth Rogoff
  5. Manias Panics and Crashes, Charles Kindleberger
  6. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay
  7. Tulipmania, Anne Goldgar
  8. Devil Take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor
  9. The Panic of 1907, Robert Bruner
  10. When Money Dies, Adam Fergusson
  11. The Great Crash, J.K. Galbraith
  12. When Genius Failed, Roger Lowenstein
  13. Famous Financial Fiascos, John Train

16. Physics & Physicists

  1. The Physicists: A Generation that Changed the World, C.P. Snow
  2. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
  3. Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field, Nancy Forbes
  4. Six Easy Pieces, Richard Feynman
  5. The Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin
  6. Physics and Beyond, Werner Heisenberg
  7. Physics for Future Presidents, Richard Muller
  8. Fundamentals of Physics, David Resnick
  9. The Laws of Thermodynamics, Peter Atkins
  10. Physics: Principles with Applications, Douglas Giancoli
  11. The Evolution of Physics, Albert Einstein
  12. The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Graham Farmelo
  13. The Last Man Who Knew Everything, David Schwartz
  14. Rutherford: Simple Genius, David Wilson
  15. The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch

17. The Atomic Bomb

  1. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
  2. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, Richard Rhodes
  3. The Physics of the Manhattan Project, B. Cameron Reed
  4. Critical Assembly, Lillian Hoddeson & Paul Henriksen
  5. Racing the Enemy, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
  6. Igniting the Light Elements, Anne Fitzpatrick
  7. Building the H-Bomb, Kenneth W. Ford
  8. U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History, Chuck Hansen
  9. Atomic Shield, Richard Hewlett
  10. The Nuclear Express, Thomas Reed & Danny Stillman
  11. Command and Control, Eric Schlosser
  12. The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller and the Superbomb, Herbert York
  13. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, Samuel Glasstone
  14. Restricted Data, Alex Wellerstein
  15. Atomic Audit, Stephen Schwartz
  16. Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons, Ward Wilson
  17. The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg
  18. Now It Can Be Told, Leslie Groves

18. History of Economic Thought

  1. The Assumptions Economists Make, Jonathan Schlefer
  2. Political Arithmetic, Robert & Enid Fogel
  3. The Company of Strangers
  4. A Brief but Affectionate History of GDP, Diane Coyle
  5. An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Murray Rothbard
  6. Never Let a Good Crisis go to Waste, Philip Mirowski
  7. History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter
  8. Growth of Economic Thought, Henry Spiegel
  9. The End of Theory, Richard Bookstaber
  10. A History of Economics, J.K. Galbraith
  11. The Worldly Philosophers, Robert Heilbroner
  12. Grand Pursuit, Sylvia Nasar

19. DNA, Life, Evolution & The Origins of Everything

  1. Editing Humanity, Kevin Davies
  2. Who We Are and How We Got Here, David Reich
  3. The Gene, Siddhartha Mukherjee
  4. Creation, Adam Rutherford
  5. The Vital Question, Nick Lane
  6. What Is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger
  7. The Origins of Life, John Maynard Smith
  8. Charles Darwin: Voyaging, Janet Browne
  9. Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Janet Browne
  10. Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett
  11. Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod
  12. The Machinery of Life, David Goodsell
  13. Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris
  14. Our Cosmic Origins, Paul Dejillas
  15. The Emergence of Life on Earth, Iris Fry
  16. You Are Here, Christopher Potter
  17. Life's Ratchet, Peter Hoffmann
  18. The Double Helix, James Watson
  19. Genome, Matt Ridley
  20. The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner
  21. Evolution Now, John Maynard Smith
  22. The Theory of Evolution, John Maynard Smith
  23. Life: An Unauthorized Biography, Richard Fortey
  24. Origin Story, David Christian
  25. The Path to the Double Helix, Robert Olby
  26. How to Make a Human Being, Christopher Potter
  27. The Molecular Biology of the Cell, Bruce Alberts et al.
  28. Mendel's Demon, Mark Ridley
  29. Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Peter Godfrey-Smith

20. Best Books About Countries and Regions

(Attributed to Marginal Revolution)

  1. The New Spaniards, John Hooper
  2. The Discovery of France, Graham Robb
  3. The German Genius, Peter Watson
  4. The Italians, Luigi Barzini
  5. The Portuguese: A Modern History, Barry Hatton
  6. Ireland: A History, Thomas Bartlett
  7. Russia and the Russians, Geoffrey Hosking
  8. The Gates of Europe
  9. The English and Their History, Robert Tombs
  10. Island People, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
  11. Hun-Sen's Cambodia, Sebastian Strangio
  12. In Spite of the Gods, Edward Luce
  13. Pakistan: A Hard Country, Anatol Lieven
  14. Crossroads: A Popular History of Singapore and Malaysia, Jim Baker
  15. Lost Japan, Alex Kerr
  16. How Asia Works, Joe Studwell
  17. A Penguin History of New Zealand, Michael King
  18. Why Switzerland?, Jonathan Steinberg
  19. Brazil: The Troubled Rise of a Global Power, Michael Reid
  20. Wax and Gold, Donald Levine
  21. Korea: The Impossible Country, Daniel Tudor
  22. Distant Neighbours, Alan Riding
  23. The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
  24. Indonesia, etc., Elizabeth Pisani
  25. Sons of the Conquerors, Hugh Pope
  26. Netherlands: The Low Sky, Han van der Horst
  27. Guyana: Wild Coast, John Gimlette
  28. The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes
  29. Forgotten Continent, Michael Reid
  30. The Debatable Land, Graham Robb
  31. In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, Michela Wrong
  32. Patriot Game, Peter Brimelow
  33. Poland: God's Playground, Norman Davies
  34. Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed, Mary Heimann
  35. China: Age of Ambition, Evan Osnos

21. Thinking, Consciousness and The Brain

  1. Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett
  2. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
  3. Mapping the Mind, Rita Carter
  4. The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux
  5. Phantoms in the Brain, V.S. Ramachandran
  6. Descartes's Error, Antonio Damasio
  7. Consciousness: An Introduction, Susan Blackmore
  8. Incognito, David Eagleman
  9. A History of the Mind, Nicholas Humphrey
  10. Evolving the Mind, A.G. Cairns-Smith
  11. Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel Dennett
  12. Think Twice, Michael Mauboussin
  13. The Tangled Wing, Melvin Konner

22. The Categorisation, Storage and Transmission of Knowledge & Information

  1. Too Much to Know, Ann Blair
  2. The Book, Keith Houston
  3. The Meaning of Everything, Simon Winchester
  4. Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, Alex Wright
  5. Cataloging the World, Alex Wright
  6. The Information, James Gleick
  7. MP3, The Meaning of a Format, Jonathan Sterne
  8. Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens, K.C. Cole
  9. Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker

23. Santa Fe & Complexity

  1. Into the Cool, Eric Schneider
  2. Evolution, Thermodynamics and Information, Jeffrey Wicken
  3. The Nature of Value, Gogerty
  4. Why Information Grows, César Hidalgo
  5. Order Out of Chaos, Ilya Prigogine
  6. The Demon in the Machine, Paul Davies
  7. Unravelling Complexity, ed. Shyam Wuppuluri & Francisco Doria
  8. The Origin of Wealth, Eric Beinhocker
  9. Hidden Order, John Holland
  10. At Home in the Universe, Stuart Kauffman
  11. Cosmic Evolution, Eric Chaisson

24. Maths, Probability, Markets and Risk

  1. Mathematics for the Nonmathematician, Morris Kline
  2. Infinite Powers, Steven Strogatz
  3. Calculus Made Easy, Silvanus Thompson
  4. The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics, Edna Kramer
  5. The Main Stream of Mathematics, Edna Kramer
  6. Men of Mathematics, E.T. Bell
  7. A Mathematician's Apology, G.H. Hardy
  8. 17 Equations That Changed the World, Ian Stewart
  9. The Calculus Story, David Acheson
  10. Against the Gods, Peter Bernstein
  11. The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, John Coates
  12. A Demon of Our Own Design, Richard Bookstaber
  13. The End of Theory, Richard Bookstaber
  14. Who Gets What, And Why, Alvin Roth

25. Beatles Books & Rock Biographies

(h/t Tyler Cowen)

  1. Tune In (All These Years, pt.1), Mark Lewisohn
  2. Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald
  3. You Never Give Me Your Money, Peter Doggett
  4. Dreaming the Beatles, Rob Sheffield
  5. The Complete Beatles Chronicle, Mark Lewisohn
  6. Bring It On Home, Mark Blake
  7. The Byrds: Timeless Flight Revisited, The Sequel, Johnny Rogan