Library

These are books from my shelf that I think are worth recommending. I own quite a few and these are the ones I would put my name on. I add to it as I work through the rest.

Economics and Money

• What Has the Government Done to Our Money? — Murray Rothbard. This is a short one, it makes the case for sound money and against what the government does to it. I would read this before Man, Economy, and State.
• The Ethics of Money Production — Jörg Guido Hülsmann. It makes the moral case against state-issued money, and it takes it seriously the whole way through. It pairs well with Rothbard.
• Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market — Murray Rothbard. This is the big Austrian one and it is long. It builds the whole framework up from first principles, starting with the simple fact that people act. I would save it for once the shorter books have made you curious.

Finance and Investing

• Your Money and Your Brain — Jason Zweig. Behavioral finance written plainly. The point that stuck with me is that your brain was built for the savanna, and the market will punish you for it if you let it.
• The Permanent Portfolio — Craig Rowland and J. M. Lawson. A practical walk through Harry Browne’s all-weather allocation, equal parts stocks, bonds, gold, and cash. It is boring and it holds up, which is really the whole point. It is not trying to be clever.
• How a Second Grader Beats Wall Street — Allan S. Roth. The case for index funds, low fees, and spreading your money wide, told through him teaching it to his eight-year-old son. I guess the point is that if a kid can learn it, none of the professionals charging you have much of an excuse.
• Evidence-Based Technical Analysis — David R. Aronson. He takes the usual chart-pattern claims and runs actual statistics on them. Most of them do not survive, and the few that do are the ones worth paying attention to.

Independence and Living

• Early Retirement Extreme — Jacob Lund Fisker. The case for a high savings rate and learning to do things yourself, laid out systematically. This is probably the single book that most shaped how I handle money.
• The Millionaire Next Door — Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko. It is the data on who actually has money in America, and most of them are not who you would think. They drive used cars and live below their means, you would never pick them out of a crowd.
• Bullshit Jobs — David Graeber. It is about why so much office work feels pointless to the people doing it, and what that does to a person over time. He is an anthropologist and he looks at it honestly, which I appreciated.
• Deep Response — Tyler J. Disney. On keeping an honest inner life while everything around you is trying to grab your attention. It goes well with his blog.

Health and Nutrition

• Pottenger’s Cats: A Study in Nutrition — Francis M. Pottenger Jr. He spent about a decade feeding cats different diets and watching them fall apart over generations. It is quietly disturbing, and it really did change how I think about cooked versus raw food.
• Nutrition and Physical Degeneration — Weston A. Price. A dentist before the war traveled around to indigenous groups and documented what happens to teeth and faces when the traditional diet gets swapped for industrial food. The photographs are the part you do not forget.
• We Want to Live — Aajonus Vonderplanitz. The most extreme argument for a raw primal diet that I have read. It is fringe and you have to filter a lot of it, but I still think it is worth wrestling with.
• Why We Sleep — Matthew Walker. The case for treating sleep as the thing everything else sits on top of. A few of his specific claims have been challenged since, but the main point holds up and you can act on it right away.
• Seeds of Deception — Jeffrey M. Smith. The case against messing with the genetics of the food supply. I would read it with some skepticism, but the parts about regulators getting captured are sobering.

Software

• The UNIX Programming Environment — Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike. This is the book that made Unix click for me. It is small and it was written by the people who actually built the system, and it is still the right place to start four decades later.

Classical and Language

• The Secret of Secrets (pseudo-Aristotle, Secretum Secretorum) — A medieval advice book that got attributed to Aristotle but was not really his. It is strange and beautiful. I read it as a window into how people organized knowledge before the modern subjects split apart, you get politics, ethics, medicine, alchemy, and statecraft all on the same page.
• Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata — Hans Ørberg. You learn Latin by reading Latin straight from the first page. It is the natural method done right, and it is the textbook I wish I had when I started.

The list is short on purpose. If a book seems like it should be here and is not, it means I either have not finished it yet, or I would not put my name on it.