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.
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.
Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
One thing I’ve learned over time is to read fewer books but to take the time to write summaries for the good ones. The ROI of spending 2h writing a synopsis is much higher than spending those 2h powering through the next book on your list. Reading is not about page count or speed. What matters is how it changes your thinking and what you take away form it. Optimize for comprehension, not volume.
One thing I’ve learned over time is to read fewer books but to take the time to write summaries for the good ones. The ROI of spending 2h writing a synopsis is much higher than spending those 2h powering through the next book on your list. Reading is not about page count or speed [1]. What matters is how it changes your thinking and what you take away from it. Optimize for comprehension, not volume.
If your goal is to maximize comprehension, you need to ask questions while you read — questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading. This is something I believe curious people do naturally. Forcing yourself to ask questions and to answer them also makes it easy to write a synopsis: When you’re done, simply write down the most important questions you’ve encountered and how the book has answered them. This is the template I use:
In 1-2 sentences, what is the book about as a whole?
What are the 3-4 central questions it tries to answer?
Summarize the answers in one paragraph each.
What are the most important things you have learned personally?
While the end product is short and concise, it takes time and focus to write it. Which is of course why it’s effective: It forces you extract and re-formulate the book’s insights in your own words.
Not coincidentally, I use a similar framework for writing essays: I structure them around questions I’m trying to answer, typically no more than 3-4. If I can’t formulate those concisely, or if there are more than 3-4, it’s usually not worth posting the piece. Without that clarity, it ends up either rambling or shallow and not offering any coherent insights.
Since summarizing leaves you with less time to read, you’ll have to get better at selecting books. I use a combination of two simple techniques for this, topical reading and inspectional reading [2]:
Topical Reading — Each quarter, I select 4-5 topics I care about and want to gain a deeper understanding of. Start wide and get a sense of what the important works are for each topic. Collate a broad list of works.
Inspectional Reading — Use inspectional reading to prune the list for each topic down to max. 2 books. Inspectional reading is simply systematic skimming or pre-reading: Read the summary on the back of the book, and the preface or introduction, study the table of contents to get a general sense of the book’s structure, read the summary statements at the beginning or end of each chapter. This typically takes no more than an hour and can be extremely effective at filtering out works that are not useful or irrelevant to you.
It’s surprising how even many of the most prolific readers I know are unaware of the value of inspectional reading. Most readers start on page one of a book and plow through until they’re done or decide to cut their losses — without ever reading the table of contents or the preface.
One great alternative to writing summaries is to talk about the books you’re reading. Explaining the ideas you’re reading about to someone else is one of the best ways to engage with the material, since (a) it forces you to formulate it in your own words, and (b) they might challenge the ideas and get you to examine them more critically.
Footnotes
[1] Speed reading — very hyped in tech circles a few years ago — is largely a scam in my view. Beyond a certain point, there is simply a hard tradeoff between speed and comprehension.
[2] Adler & Van Doren, How to read a book (1972)