Summer reading list 2024
Books have a nice kind of survivorship bias: If something is still being read after decades or centuries, it must contain some universal truths or be useful at a fundamental level. So focusing on the classics tends to be good reading advice. While I don’t have any actual classics on this year’s list, many books do turn out to be 30+ years old and that’s probably not a coincidence.
Sam Walton — Made in America: Walton wrote his autobiography in the final year of his life when he was terminally ill, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from reading it. Full of optimism, drive and passion for “minding the store”, Walton was a world-class operator who understood the principles of great business are simple yet hard to execute well: Customer obsession, controlling your costs, hiring the right people at the right time and making everyone an owner.
Akio Morita — Made in Japan: Written 6 years before Walton’s autobiography, this is Morita’s account of how he started Sony in the rubble of post-war Japan and built it into one of the largest consumer electronics companies at the time. Sony’s rise mirrors that of the Japanese economy so this reads well as a front row account of the country’s evolution from low-cost producer of low-value-add goods to industrial powerhouse — stopping at its de-facto peak in 1986.
Bernard Moitessier — The Long Way: Moitessier’s account of his 1968/69 non-stop solo sail around the world. I’ve long been fascinated by endurance, physical and mental, and what drives people to seek out such extremes. The Long Way proved to be especially insightful, capturing the psychological push and pull of being out at sea for months without contact with the rest of world. One with his boat and one with the universe, Moitessier describes even the most dangerous situations with a meditative calm.
Edward Chancellor (ed.) — Capital returns: Collection of investment reports from Marathon Asset Management. Capital cycle theory — the lagged relationship between supply and demand, and the resulting oscillation between periods of underinvestment/high returns and overinvestment/low returns — is another great example of a set of simple yet powerful ideas that are hard to execute on. I came across it when reading Nick Sleep and Qais Zakaria’s collection of investor letters earlier this year (also highly recommended).
Kent Beck — Tidy first: I’ve been writing code for 15+ years but only recently started to think about software design more systematically. Beck’s book is known for its simple and pragmatic take on improving software quality (first half of the book), and it’s indeed refreshingly actionable if you’ve read any of the standards on the topic. But what really stands out is the second half. Using ideas from option pricing, Beck shows that well-designed software is valuable primarily because it increases optionality. But whether the premium you pay for that option is worth it depends on how volatile the requirements at. At sub 150 pages, takes the prize for highest value per page this year.
