The Unsolicited Reading List

20 books, in no particular order

The Library of Alexandria came to symbolise humanity’s attempt to collect, preserve & understand the sum of human knowledge. Its legacy endures less in what we know it contained than in the idea itself: that knowledge is worth seeking, preserving & passing on.

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” - Franz Kafka

No one asked, but here are 20 books I would recommend. The list is inevitably shaped by my professional interests & the environment I grew up in, although plenty have nothing to do with either.

Some are easy reads, others took a fair bit of persistence - Tolstoy & Dostoevsky in particular needed a few attempts over the years. No ranking or set criteria, just books that have stuck with me for one reason or another.

1. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

3. The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros

4. Baruch: My Own Story by Bernard Baruch

5. Iacocca: An Autobiography by Lee Iacocca

6. Principles by Ray Dalio

7. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

8. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay

9. Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company by Andrew S. Grove

10. Hedge Fund Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager

11. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

12. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

13. Hard to Be a God by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

14. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

15. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre

16. The Great Game by John Steele Gordon

17. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

18. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

19. The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby

20. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov