Bookshelf

This is a running list of books I’ve read since roughly the spring of 2023. Books that I particularly enjoyed, or at least thought were particularly interesting, are bolded.

  • The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future, by Gretchen Bakke
  • The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Stoner, by John Williams
  • The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind, by Dan Davies
  • Submission, by Michel Houellebecq
  • The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920, by Andrew Isenberg
  • Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee
  • The World for Sale, by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
  • Fathers and Children, by Ivan Turgenev
  • The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All , by Mary Childs
  • The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University, by Edward A. Bell
  • Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World, by Scott Reynolds Nelson
  • The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes
  • Trade Wars are Class Wars, by Matt Klein and Michael Pettis
  • American Foreign Policy and its Thinkers, by Perry Anderson
  • Conversations with Goethe, by Johann Peter Eckermann
  • On the Natural History of Destruction, by W. G. Sebald
  • 2666, by Roberto Bolaño
  • The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon
  • India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today, by Ashoka Mody
  • Deep Work, by Cal Newport
  • Herzog, by Saul Bellow
  • The Political Economy of Stalinism, by Paul Gregory
  • The Russian Origins of the First World War, by Sean McMeekin
  • The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why, by Richard Nisbett
  • Chess Story, by Stefan Zweig
  • The Snows of Yesteryear, by Gregor von Rezzori
  • Life & Times of Michael K, by J. M. Coetzee
  • Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott
  • Augustus, by John Williams
  • Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
  • Darkness by Design: The Hidden Power in Global Capital Markets, by Walter Mattli
  • The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman
  • Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, by Barry Eichengreen
  • The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford
  • Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution, by Robert Allen
  • Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, by Gregor von Rezzori
  • A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, by Peter Handke
  • The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japan’s Great Recession, by Richard Koo
  • The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe, by Thane Gustafson
  • Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance, by Perry Mehrling
  • The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, by Bryan Ward-Perkins
  • Faust, Part I, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
  • Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams
  • The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Brazil Apart, by Perry Anderson
  • Automation and the Future of Work, by Aaron Benanav
  • Kaputt, by Curzio Malaparte
  • Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962, by Yang Jisheng
  • Political Order in Changing Societies, by Samuel Huntington
  • The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty, by Monica Prasad
  • Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country, by John Kampfner
  • Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
  • Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee
  • The Prodigal, by Derek Walcott
  • A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor
  • Global Development: A Cold War History, by Sara Lorenzini
  • Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, by Ethan Watters
  • Kaput: The End of the German Miracle, by Wolfgang Münchau
  • Nature and Selected Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit, by Philip Stephens
  • 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric Cline
  • Berlin Stories, by Robert Walser
  • An Area of Darkness, by V. S. Naipaul
  • The Balkans, by Mark Mazower
  • Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
  • King Lear, by William Shakespeare
  • The Laws of Trading: A Trader’s Guide to Better Decision-Making for Everyone, by Agustin Lebron
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
  • The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, by Richard Hanania
  • House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again, by Amir Sufi and Atif Mian
  • Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World, by Gaia Vince
  • How Long Will South Africa Survive?: The Looming Crisis, by R. W. Johnson
  • Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market, by Walter Bagehot
  • A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market, by Edward Thorp
  • Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow
  • The Indian Ideology, by Perry Anderson
  • Spain: The Trials and Triumphs of a Modern European Country, by Michael Reid
  • The Great Demographic Reversal, by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan
  • The Curse of Cash: How Large-Denomination Bills Aid Crime and Tax Evasion and Constrain Monetary Policy, by Kenneth Rogoff
  • Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change, by Thane Gustafson
  • Caesar: Life of a Colossus, by Adrian Goldsworthy
  • Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order, by Stefan Link
  • Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, by Norman Ohler
  • The Transformation of the World, by Jürgen Osterhammel
  • Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Geopolitics of the International Monetary System, by Barry Eichengreen
  • The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, by Friedrich Nietzsche