The books I’ve liked since the time I started college. I try to excerpt the ones I like best.

What should I read next? Email me: danwyd@g

• Stendhal, The Red and the Black
  • Best translation is the one by Robert M. Adams. Burton Raffel translation is good too.
• Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
• Melville, Moby-Dick
• Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture
• Wharton, The House of Mirth
• Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty
• Ross, The Rest is Noise
  • Runs through the personalities of the 20th century. My favorite book on music.
• Epstein, Simple Rules for a Complex World
• Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis
• Thiel & Masters, CS 183 notes & Zero to One (related essay)
  • If you must pick one, read the lecture notes. The radicalism of the ideas were mainstreamed for the book.
• Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior, The Strategy of Conflict
• Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
• Laozi, Dao De Jing
• Mann, 1491
• Cowen, Discover Your Inner Economist
• Mallaby, More Money Than God
• Gertner, The Idea Factory
  • History of the place that labs that developed radar, transistors, satellites, cell phone telephony, and more.
• Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman
• Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma
• Ridley, The Rational Optimist
  • A wonderful book about the scientific achievements that’s given us better nutrition, longer lifespans, and easier access to energy, etc.
• Plato, Dialogues
  • In particular Crito and Phaedo.
• Cowen, The Great Stagnation & Average is Over
• Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities
• Fontane, Effi Briest (trans. Ritchie Robertson)
  • There’s so much nuance; the most exciting plot detail isn’t even described, only discussed afterwards.
• Balzac, Cousin Bette
• Ford, Lights in the Tunnel
• Zweig, Beware of Pity
• Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism
  • Details the rise of the American libertarian movement. Serious study, but the personalities are so crazy that it’s fun to read.
• Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
• Frank, The Economic Naturalist
  • Short stories about the economic way of thinking.
• Isaacson, Steve Jobs
• Shakespeare: Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Othello
• Packer, The Unwinding
• Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
• Rand, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead
• Duffy, The World as I Found It
  • A novel about the interactions of Russell, Wittgenstein, and G.E. Moore. Very fun.
• Kafka, The Castle, The Metamorphosis, assorted short stories
• Williams, Stoner
• Harford, The Undercover Economist
  • Best parts were the sections about price discrimination.
• Nabokov, Lolita
• Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter
• Zola, Germinal
• Taleb, The Black Swan
• Landsburg, The Armchair Economist
• Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
• Wharton, The Age of Innocence
• Haidt, The Righteous Mind
  • Kevin Simler put it best: “How humans actually, empirically, think about morality.”
• Cowen & Grandin, Thinking Differently
• Baker, Days of Fire
• Lewis, The Big Short
• Arrison, 100 Plus
• Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Monroe: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship
• McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues & Bourgeois Dignity
  • First 50 pages of the Apology in Virtues is most worth reading.
• McArdle, The Up Side of Down
• Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
• Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Knausgaard, Min Kamp Vol. 1
  • Uncomfortable, mesmerizing.
• Lewis, Liar’s Poker (Excerpts)
• Wapshott, Keynes Hayek
• Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers
  • The first economics-y book I read; I spent two years of undergrad wondering when we were going to cover Thorstein Veblen.
• Thaler & Sunstein, Nudge
  • Super well argued, I couldn’t continue to be a knee-jerk skeptic.
• St. Aubyn, Patrick Melrose series
• When I was little I read most of the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. I really liked them, but haven’t picked any of them up again.

(Chronological from here…)

• Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
  • A lot of science wrapped in a thrilling story.
• Cumings, The Korean War
• Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
• Cowen, An Economist Gets Lunch
• Cirincione, Bomb Scare
• Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon
• Lewis, Boomerang
  • More fun than The Big Short, not quite as good as Liar’s Poker.
• Roberts, The Storm of War
• Flynn, Gone Girl
• Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
  • Translated by Ralph Manheim, try to go see it in original German.
• Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World
• Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. Stephen Mitchell
• Wolfe, The Right Stuff (related essay)
• Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
• Judt, Memory Chalet
  • Excellent essays on growing up in ’50s/’60s Europe.
• Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. J.E. Woods
  • First 150 pages or so are boring, but it picks up. The ruminations on death/dying make it worth it.
• Glass, Music Without Words: A Memoir (related essay)
• Sebald, Austerlitz
• Stephenson, The Diamond Age
  • Far better I feel than Snow Crash
• Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory (related essay)
• George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping
  • I love ships and ships love me back. This is pretty much the perfect nonfiction book: many, many interesting facts weaved into a narrative story; and it’s slim, and doesn’t go overboard with too much detail.
• Benford, The Wonderful Future that Never Was (related essay)
• Watson, The German Genius (related essay)
• Wharton, Ethan Frome
• The Box, Marc Levinson (I now work at a company that arranges for air and ocean freight)
• PKD, The Man in the High Castle
• Scurlock, King Larry: The Life and Ruins of a Billionaire Genius
• Parsons, The British Imperial Century
• Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945
  • The war from the perspective of the German population. One interesting fact: A quarter of Goebbel’s budget was spent on theatre, which was about as much as he spent on propaganda, and more than twice as much on film.
• Pomeranz and Topik, The World That Trade Created
• Chang, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
• Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat
  • A remarkable book; this is how you write about opera.
• Yip & McKern, China’s Next Strategic Advantage: From Imitation to Innovation
• Vance, Elon Musk
• Tombs, The English And Their History (related essay)
• DeWitt, Lightning Rods
• Herman, To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World
• Liu, The Three Body Problem (related essay)
• Liu, The Dark Forest
• Foldenyi, Melancholy (related essay)
• Liu, Death’s End
• Kroeber, China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know
• Shepherd, Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich
• Gewirtz, Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China
• Brown, CEO China: The Rise of Xi Jinping
• Studwell, How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region
• McPhee, La Place de la Concorde Suisse
• Cowen, The Complacent Class (related essay)
• Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives
• Smil, Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing
  • Sometimes polemical, but still a good overview of the dominance and decline of the American industrial base
• Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871
• Avent, The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century
• Miodownik, Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape our Man-Made World
  • A wonderful, short book on materials: steel, paper, glass, plastics, etc.
• Stephenson, Seveneves
• Longerich, Goebbels
• Stephenson, Snow Crash
• Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves
• Ge Fei, The Invisibility Cloak
• Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China
• Haskel & Westlake, Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
• Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom
  • A history that reads almost like a novel
• Cartledge, A System Apart: Hong Kong’s Political Economy from 1997 Until Now
• Mann, Buddenbrooks
  • Much easier to get through than Der Zauberberg
  • A very Chinese novel… shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in four generations
• Lewis, The Tang Dynasty
  • What’s important about Tang? Drainage projects in the south (Jiangnan and Lingnan), making it the permanent economic center of the empire; institutionalization of the Sui Codes; breaking of the aristocratic families.
• Bernhard, The Loser
• Hanson, The Second World Wars
  • At some point one should decide to stop reading about this topic. This superb book is about it for me.
• Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.: Tales
• Shakespeare, King Lear
  • The heaps of suffering make it feel a little bit ridiculous by the end. Otherwise, it is very good.
• Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing
  • Worth reading for the Stephenson fan. And which geek wouldn’t be?
• Johnstone, We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs And The Forging Of The Electronic Age
  • The book does not live up to its fantastic title. Heaps of facts, but not really conceptually-driven, and I did not find that I was able to drew many broader lessons.
• Kuhn, The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China
• Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties
  • The best in the HUP History of Imperial China series; most analytically-driven, a focus on the right topics, and most cleverly written. It’s helpful to learn the impact of the Little Ice Age on the Ming.
• Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays
  • Very good reflections on Chinese aesthetics, with a focus on painting and calligraphy
• Rowe, China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing
• Lee, Pachinko
• Cao, Dream of the Red Chamber
• Sigmund, Exact Thinking in Demented Times
  • An excellent book about some extraordinary people. It’s as demented as advertised.
• Ball, The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
  • I thought this was quite bad, so I’m encouraging you to skip it
• Mikitani and Mikitani, The Power to Compete
  • My favorite genre of book: A realization that economic growth has been way too slow, and constructive proposals to accelerate it
• Pierenkemper and Tilly, The German Economy During the Nineteenth Century
• Lewis, The Money Culture
• Field, A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth
  • Highly technical book, excellent reading on technology developments
• Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
• Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China
• Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
• Porter, Takeuchi, & Sakakibara, Can Japan Compete?
  • Evaluation of Japanese industrial policy
• Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China
• Naipaul, An Area of Darkness
• Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
• Baldwin, The Great Convergence,
• Heilmann, The Red Swan
• Dyson, Disturbing the Universe
• Spence, The Search for Modern China
• Simmons, Hyperion
  • Absorbing story, but it also makes me see why science fiction has a bad name in so many circles
• Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947
  • Ultimately a disappointment, with too much of a focus on political personalities. I am still desperate to read a good history of Germany, with a focus on economic growth rather than individual leaders.
• Khakpour, Sick: A Memoir
• Liu, Invisible Planets
• PKD, Ubik
• Williams, On Opera
• Döblin, Bright Magic Stories
• O’Donnell, Wong, and Bach, Learning from Shenzhen
• Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
• Ferrante, The Story of a New Name
• Koss, Where the Party Rules
• Luce, In Spite of the Gods
• Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
• Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child
• Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
• Can, Love in the New Millenium
• PKD, Valis
• Shan, Out of Gobi
• PKD, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
• Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
  • A fantastic history
• Pamuk, My Name is Red
• PKD, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
• Hager, The Alchemy of Air
• Yan, Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers
• Kater, Culture in Nazi Germany
  • Michael Kater watched a lot of movies and read many contemporary books to tell us about the cultural policies and outputs of the Third Reich
• PKD, A Scanner Darkly
• St Aubyn, Dunford
  • It’s fun to read St Aubyn’s accounts of how really rich people can be really mean to each other, but it’s fine to stop with the Patrick Melrose series, which are hard to surpass, and which indeed Dunford fails to surpass
• Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
• Thackray et al., Moore’s Law
  • A biography of Gordon Moore, much of it skippable, but there’s a good history of the development of Shockley, Fairchild, Intel, and thus Silicon Valley
• Stapledon, Last and First Men & Star Maker
  • A Hegelian presents two astonishing science fiction novels written in the ’30s. The plot is breathtaking, this is one of my favorite science fiction books.
• Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II
  • There are some interesting facts, but this is not a very conceptual presentation of history
• PKD, The Divine Invasion
• Robinson, Red Mars
  • I like it when science fiction recognizes politics. The second half is less interesting than the first.
• PKD, Martian Time Slip
• Milosz, The Captive Mind
• PKD, Our Friends From Frolix 8
• Walder, China Under Mao
  • This book is conceptually driven, not simply a grim recitation of facts
• Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production 1800-1932
  • An excellent technical history of the development of American interchangeable parts
• Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century
• Forster, Howard’s End
• PKD, Now Wait for Last Year
• Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945
• PKD, The Simulacra
• Ellroy, American Tabloid
• Davis, Essays One
• Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy
• PKD, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Flaubert, Madame Bovary
• Hotta, Japan 1941
• Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century
• Sanderson & Forsythe, China’s Superbank
• Shalamov, Kolyma Tales
• Stephenson, Anathem
  • So much nerd pleasure
• May & Neustadt, Thinking In Time: The Uses Of History For Decision Makers
• Paine, The Wars for Asia 1911-1949
  • At last, a conceptually-organized history of these wars
• Milton, Paradise Lost
• PKD, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
• Tufte, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style
• Houellebecq, Submission
• PKD, The Crack in Space
• Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics
• Proust, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
• Crow, 400 Million Customers
  • A delight
• Proust, The Guermantes Way
• Douthat, The Decadent Society
• Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
• Fishman, One Giant Leap
  • Very good for putting into perspective all the challenging problems that NASA had to solve for Apollo
• Davis & Wei, Superpower Showdown
• Brady, Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China
• Proust, The Prisoner
• Paxman, Friends in High Places: Who Runs Britain?
• Proust, The Fugitive
• Mowery & Nelson, Sources of Industrial Leadership
• Proust, Finding Time Again
• Meyskens, Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China
• Yeo, Varieties of State Regulation: How China Regulates Its Socialist Market Economy
• PKD, Dr. Bloodmoney
• Pieke, Knowing China: A Twenty-First Century Guide
• Greene, The Quiet American
• Todman, Britain’s War: A New World, 1942-1947
• PKD, Galactic Pot Healer
• Dyson, Analogia
• Zhao, Prisoner of the State
• Dickens, Bleak House
• Smil, Transforming the Twentieth Century
• Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
• Swafford, Mozart: The Reign of Love
• Duke, Thinking in Bets
• Megargee, Inside Hitler’s High Command
  • A model book for the study of a system
• Sophocles, Antigone
• Heller, Catch-22
• Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
• Fravel, Active Defense
• Tolstoy, War and Peace
• Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
• Mill (John Stuart), Autobiography
• Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
• Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times
• Asimov, Foundation
  • I profess heresy and say that Asimov did not grab me
• Sivaram, Taming the Sun
• Shakespeare, The Tempest
• Abbate and Parker, A History of Opera
  • The best general introduction to this subject, and well-written to boot, featuring sentences that sparkle
• Lem, Solaris
• Barmé, In The Red
  • Excellent on Chinese culture in the ’90s
• Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries
• Baldini, The Story of Giuseppe Verdi
• Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
  • Exhilarating, as good as Stephenson, and more zany
• Izzo, Laughter Between Two Revolutions
• Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
• Funder, Stasiland
  • What a skilled storyteller the author is
• Kimbell, Italian Opera
• Osterhammel, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia
• Nikitin, YT
• Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City
• Burnham, Mozart’s Grace
• Hunter, Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna
• Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life
• Li, Middle Class Shanghai
• O’Reagan, Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science after the Second World War
• Abbate, Unsung Voices
• Chapoutot, The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi
• Glantz and House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler
• Krepinevich and Watts, The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy
• von Glahn, The Economic History of China: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century
• Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment
• PKD, A Maze of Death
• McMeekin, Stalin’s War
• Lindtner, Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation
• Kushner, The Mars Room
  • Superb, I want to read all of Kushner’s other novels
• Niederhoffer, The Education of a Speculator
• Russell, The Sparrow
• Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
  • So much better than War & Peace: only society scenes, no boring slogs through war
  • But rather reason thus, with reason fetter; philosophy is good, but society is better
• Saich, From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party
• Watts, Blindsight
• Heyes, Cognitive Gadgets
• McDougall, the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age
• Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata
• Kushner, The Flamethrowers
• Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World
• Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia
• Gates, China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism
  • Tempted to say this is my favorite book about Asia
• Smil, The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing
• Scott, Seeing Like a State
• DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia
• Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
  • Rundell writes my favorite series in the LRB: profiling delightful animals like the golden mole. And I think this biography works so well because she writes John Donne as a delightful animal.
• Ullrich, Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich
• Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World
  • A very original work about the madness of scientists
• Howard, The First World War
• Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism
• Hofmann, Viennese: Splendor, Twilight, and Exile
• Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
• Kushner, Telex From Cuba
• Reese, Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church
• Diaz, Trust
• Ringen, The Perfect Dictatorship
• Wilson, Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II
• Friedrich, The Jesuits
• Farnsworth, Classic English Style
• Fitzgerald, The Bookshop
• Kirby, Empire of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China
• Scott, Against the Grain
• Dunlop, Every Grain of Rice
• Postrel, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World
• Rundell, Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise
• Ypi, Free
• Kuang, Babel: An Arcane History
• Tooze, The Deluge
• Vinge, The Peace War
• Vinge, Marooned in Realtime
• Dykstra, Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State
• King, On Writing
• Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
• Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900
• Jemisin, The Fifth Season
• Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers
  • A China book that makes a strong argument backed up by research both archival and oral
• Greenhalgh, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China
• Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature
• Yang, Between Winds and Clouds The Making of Yunnan
• Rogen, The Food of Spain
• Elliott, Imperial Spain
  • Excellent, helped to answer my big questions on Spain: how did it conquer the Americas and then fall apart so quickly?
• Farrell & Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy
• Maier, The Project-State and Its Rivals
• PKD, Vulcan’s Hammer
• Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress
• Nye, American Technological Sublime
• Gillis, The Prussian Bureaucracy in Crisis
• Knausgaard, The Morning Star
  • Much of the best parts of My Struggle, without the tedium
• Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet
  • I was pleased to join Fuchsia around a banquet table to record an episode of Conversations with Tyler
• Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
  • Everyone warned me how filthy this book is, but no one prepared for how funny
• Baker and Phongpaichit, A History of Thailand
• Wong, Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China’s Superpower Future
• Ash, The Mountains Are High
• Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
  • I wish there were more economic geographies like this book
• Lehmann, Desert Edens: Colonial Climate Engineering in the Age of Anxiety
• Caro, The Power Broker
  • The work is magnificent, but reading it makes me feel that Moses is now underrated
• Crumb, The Book of Genesis
• Rundell, The Golden Mole: And Other Vanishing Wonders
• Kennedy, Engineers of Victory
• Westad, The Cold War: A World History
• Tsu, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
• Clarke, Piranesi
• Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
• Hessler, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education
  • Maybe the best single book to someone curious about China
• Branigan, Red Memories
• PKD, Eye in the Sky
  • Surprised this hasn’t been filmed yet
• Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions
• Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better
• Kay Johnson, China’s Hidden Children
• qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division
• Greenhalgh and Winckler, Governing China’s Population
• Schmitt, Dialogues on Earth and Space
• Hong Fincher, China’s Leftover Women
• Baradaran, The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America
• Kotkin, The Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization
• Harrell, An Ecological History of Modern China
• Yang, How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control
• Haushofer, The Wall
• Duncan, Rickover and the Nuclear Navy: The Discipline of Technology
• Carter, Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai
• Roth, The Plot Against America
• Sabin, Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism
• Lei, The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China
• Wortman, Admiral Hyman Rickover: Engineer of Power