I received numerous requests for book recommendations in the last few weeks. The rise in the mercury clearly correlates with an increase in reading under umbrellas on the beach.
Here are a few books I really enjoyed over the last few years. Note that my tastes are far ranging and eclectic and cover everything from sci-fi soap operas to behavioral economics.
Beach Reads and Page Turners
- A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle
- Bill the Vampire by Rick Gualtieri
- Circling the Sun by Paula McLain
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- Infinity Born by Douglas E. Richards
- Last Days of Night by Graham Moore
- Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell
- Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
- Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
- Star Force (Book Series) by BV Larson
- The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel by Garth Stein
- The Martian by Andy Weir
- The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant by Drew Hayes
- We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis Taylor
Non-Fiction
- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
- Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
- Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan
- Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance
- How to live: a life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell
- Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
- Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
- Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg
- Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- SuperFreakonomics by Levitt & Dubner
- Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton
- The Big Short by Michael Lewis
- The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
- The Greatest Trade Ever by Gregory Zuckerman
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson
- The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor—and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car! by Tim Hartford
- The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely
- What if by Randall Munroe
