Vance Farouk Grissom
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Booklist

last updated: Nov 14, 2021

Really, really good books:

Every once in a while, you stumble upon a book that is so well-written, so full of novel ideas, and so informative, that it literally expands the world you live in. I hope to keep finding more of these.

  • Titan: the Life of John D. Rockefeller
  • The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, and Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook
  • The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
  • The Mating Mind
  • Alchemy: the Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
  • The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
  • The Lessons of History
  • Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders (compiled as a book, but can be read for free here)

Good books:

Other books are great, and help you think about things differently, and teach you a lot, but maybe didn't find you at the right time in life, or just touched you in a smaller way.

  • The Art of Game Design
  • The Goal: a Process of Ongoing Improvement
  • Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises
  • Skin in the Game
  • Antifragile
  • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
  • Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World
  • How to Read a Book
  • A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
  • The Consuming Instinct

Fiction I'd recommend:

  • Exhalation: Stories (or most anything by Ted Chang)
  • Fire Upon the Deep
  • The Artemis Fowl series
  • Stories of Your Life and Others (again, Chang)
  • The Interpreter of Maladies
  • What's Mine is Mine (George MacDonald)
  • The Foundation series

And, other books I've read (or mostly read), but didn't feel too strongly about. Happy to share my opinion if you're planning to read some of these - just because they're down here doesn't mean they're not good books:

  • Plain Talk: Lessons from a Business Maverick
  • House of Morgan
  • Quantum
  • Very Important People
  • Start-up Nation: the Story of Israel's Economic Miracle
  • Benjamin Franklin: an American Life
  • Principles: Life and Work
  • What Hedge Funds Really Do
  • Liar's Poker
  • Zero to One
  • The Wright Brothers
  • The Charisma Myth
  • Finite and Infinite Games