Library

A list of books from my shelf I think are worth recommending. I own well over a hundred — these are the ones I would put my name on. Updated as I work through the rest.

Economics and Money

• What Has the Government Done to Our Money? — Murray Rothbard. Short, sharp case for sound money and against fiat manipulation. Read this before Man, Economy, and State.
• The Ethics of Money Production — Jörg Guido Hülsmann. The moral case against state-issued money, treated rigorously. Natural companion to Rothbard.
• Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market — Murray Rothbard. The Austrian magnum opus. Long. Builds the full framework from praxeological first principles. The one to read once the short ones make you curious.

Finance and Investing

• Your Money and Your Brain — Jason Zweig. Behavioral finance in plain language. Why your brain is built for the savanna and the market punishes you for it.
• The Permanent Portfolio — Craig Rowland and J. M. Lawson. A practical guide to Harry Browne’s all-weather allocation: equal parts stocks, bonds, gold, and cash. Boring and durable. The opposite of clever.
• How a Second Grader Beats Wall Street — Allan S. Roth. The case for index funds, low fees, and wide diversification, told through teaching it to an eight-year-old. If a child can learn it, no professional has an excuse.
• Evidence-Based Technical Analysis — David R. Aronson. Applies actual statistical rigor to chart-pattern claims. Most TA fails the test. The parts that survive are the ones worth knowing.

Independence and Living

• Early Retirement Extreme — Jacob Lund Fisker. The systematic case for a high savings rate plus self-sufficiency. The single most influential book on how I structure money.
• The Millionaire Next Door — Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko. The data on who actually has money in America. Most of them drive used cars and live below their means. A study in invisibility.
• Bullshit Jobs — David Graeber. Why so much modern white-collar work feels meaningless, and what that does to the people doing it. An anthropologist looking honestly at office life.
• Deep Response — Tyler J. Disney. On building an honest internal life inside an attention economy. Companion to his blog.

Health and Nutrition

• Pottenger’s Cats: A Study in Nutrition — Francis M. Pottenger Jr. A decade of feeding cats different diets and watching them degenerate over generations. Quietly disturbing. Changes how you think about cooked versus raw food.
• Nutrition and Physical Degeneration — Weston A. Price. A pre-WWII dentist tours indigenous populations and documents what happens to teeth and bone structure when traditional diets get replaced by industrial food. The photographs are unforgettable.
• We Want to Live — Aajonus Vonderplanitz. The most uncompromising argument for a raw primal diet I have read. Fringe, and you have to filter, but worth wrestling with.
• Why We Sleep — Matthew Walker. The case for sleep as the foundation everything else rests on. A few specific claims have been challenged in print, but the central thesis holds and the practical implications are immediate.
• Seeds of Deception — Jeffrey M. Smith. The case against the genetic manipulation of the food supply. Read with appropriate skepticism, but the regulatory-capture material is sobering.

Software

• The UNIX Programming Environment — Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike. The book that made me understand Unix. Small, sharp, written by people who built the system. Still the right introduction four decades later.

Classical and Language

• The Secret of Secrets (pseudo-Aristotle, Secretum Secretorum) — A medieval advice text attributed to Aristotle but not actually his. Strange and beautiful. Read it as a window into how knowledge was organized before the modern disciplines split — politics, ethics, medicine, alchemy, and statecraft on the same page.
• Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata — Hans Ørberg. Learn Latin by reading Latin from page one. The natural method done well. The textbook I wish I had had.

The list is intentionally short. If a book belongs here and is missing, it means I have not finished it yet — or that I would not put my name on it.