Every year I re-edit my list of favorite books of all time. This year's edition has a few subtractions from years past and a two additions I read in 2014 (one by Peter Thiel and one by Ben Horowitz). Enjoy:
Ultimate Auren Hoffman Reading List:
Against the Gods
The Remarkable Story of Risk
by Peter L. Bernstein
The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000
by Niall Ferguson
Coming Apart
by Charles Murray
Churchill: A life
by Martin Gilbert
Difficult Conversations
by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen
Economics Facts and Fallacies
by Thomas Sowell
The Effective Executive
by Peter F. Drucker
Exodus
by Leon Uris
(fiction)
Fooled by Randomness
by Nassim Taleb
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069
by William Strauss & Neil Howe
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Jack Weatherford
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
by Ben Horowitz
How the Mind Works
by Steven Pinker
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
by Robert B. Cialdini
John J. McCloy: Chairman of the Establishment
by Kai Bird
Just and Unjust Wars
by Michael Walzer
Justice
by Mike Sandel
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat : And Other Clinical Tales
by Oliver Sacks
The Moral Animal : Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
by Robert Wright
The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
by George Friedman
Night
by Elie Wiesel
The Nurture Assumption
by Judith Rich Harris
Outliers
by Malcolm Gladwell
Path to Power: Early Life of Lyndon Johnson
by Robert A. Caro
A Piece of the Action
How the Middle Class Became the Money
by Joseph Nocera
The Prize
The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
by Daniel Yergin
Revolution 1989
Victor Sebestyen
The Signal and the Noise
by Nate Silver
Social Animal
by David Brooks
Stumbling on Happiness
by Daniel Gilbert
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character
by Richard P. Feynman
Thinking Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman
Too Big to Fail
Andrew Ross Sorkin
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
by Philip Gourevitch
We the Living
Ayn Rand
(fiction)
Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping
by Paco Underhill
A World Lit Only by Fire : The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance – Portrait of an Age
by William Manchester
Zero to One: How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel
Good stuff. Just finished Zero to One.
One quote I really liked: “Very few people take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress. We can be glad that there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered.” Close to: what’s one truth you believe in that most other people disagree with?
One part I question: his critique of Malcolm Gladwell and luck. I think that when you’re in a position to make decisions, you have to believe in personal agency and that the decisions you make have an impact on the future of the company. And those decisions, do obviously have an effect in that space.
But I’m not sure that this contradicts a macro-view that ultimately people attain much of their success and failures as effects of their birth and their upbringing? What do you think? So while one perspective allows you to act as an effective leader another can inform your politics or philosophy of the world?
Thoughts?