Library
This page (still a work in progress) lists some of the physical books (sure, call us old-fashioned) that line the shelves of Maran Capital Management LLC’s world headquarters. While some of the best books are hard to categorize, we have taken a stab at doing so, and highlighted our top 50 or so recommendations in bold.
“[There] are still people who consider a bookshelf as a mere storage place for already-read books and do not think of the library as a working tool.”
Science/Physics
The Beginning of Infinity (Deutsch) - This is still the book I recommend and give away (and re-read) the most, a decade after having encountered it. A grand, optimistic, and at times ground-breaking synthesis of important ideas across physics, philosophy, epistemology, evolution, political systems, computation, mathematics (yes, including infinity), universality, art, beauty, creativity, and much more.
The Fabric of Reality (Deutsch)
Reality Is Not What It Seems (Rovelli)
Anaximander (Rovelli)
Helgoland (Rovelli)
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman (Feynman)
What Do You Care What Other People Think (Feynman)
The Meaning of It All (Feynman)
Genius (Gleik) - re Feynman
Tuva or Bust (Leighton) - re Feynman
Idea Makers (Wolfram)
Leonardo Da Vinci (Isaacson)
A Brief History of Time (Hawking)
Isaac Newton (Gleik)
Einstein (Isaacson)
Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field (Forbes and Mahon)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bryson)
The Big Bang (Singh)
The Emergent Multiverse (Wallace)
The Quark and the Jaguar (Gell-Mann)
Exact Thinking in Demented Times (Sigmund)
Structures (Gordon)
Timefulness (Sjornerud)
Biology/Evolution
The Selfish Gene (Dawkins)
The Ancestor's Tale (Dawkins)
The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins)
Genome (Ridley)
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Dennett)
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (E.O. Wilson)
Oxygen: The Molecule (Lane)
Life Ascending (Lane)
Power, Sex, Suicide (Lane) - All of Lane’s books are great. This one (on mitochondria) is slightly less dense and a good on-ramp to his more challenging books (the Vital Question and Transformer) on the origins of life on earth.
Transformer (Lane)
The Vital Question (Lane)
The Sixth Extinction (Kolbert)
The Emperor of All Maladies (Mukherjee)
The Gene (Mukherjee)
“Let us call an antischolar — someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device — a skeptical empiricist.”
Emergence/Complexity/Computation
Scale (West) - The first half is great (and makes the book worth recommending), but you can skip the second half.
A New Kind of Science (Wolfram)
Emergence (Johnson)
Chaos (Gleik)
Complexity (Mitchell)
Deep Simplicity (Gribbin)
The Fractalist (Mandelbrot)
Triumph of the City (Glaeser)
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs)
Finite and Infinite Games (Carse)
Algorithms to Live By (Christian and Griffiths)
Math
Fermat's Inigma (Singh)
A Tour of the Calculus (Berlinksi)
Zero (Seife)
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Hoffman)
Philosophy
Fooled by Randomness (Taleb) - I’m not sure where Taleb’s books belong, but he would probably be happy to be here in philosophy.
Skin In The Game (Taleb)
The Black Swan (Taleb)
Antifragile (Taleb)
Godel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter)
Intuition Pumps, and Other Tools for Thinking (Dennett)
How Will You Measure Your Life (Christensen)
Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl)
Popper Selections (Popper)
Meditations (Aurelius)
A Guide to the Good Life (Irvine)
How to Live, A Life of Montaigne (Bakewell)
Letters from A Stoic (Seneca)
Breaking the Spell (Dennett)
The God Delusion (Dawkins)
A History of God (Armstrong)
Zen and the Brain (Austin)
Buddha's Brain (Hansen)
The Art of Happiness (Dalai Lama)
Pragmatism and other writings (James)
Atlas Shrugged (Rand)
The Fountainhead (Rand)
Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Heller)
Liberty Defined (Paul)
Psychology/Behavioral Finance
Influence (Cialdini)
Fooling Some of the People All of the Time (Einhorn) - David vs. Goliath
Flow (Csikzentmihalyi)
The Inner Game of Tennis (Gallwey)
Alchemy (Sutherland)
The Honest Truth About Dishonesty (Ariely) - A topic he seems to have known well
Situations Matter (Sommers)
Expectations Investing (Rappaport and Mauboussin)
Think Twice (Mauboussin)
The Rational Optimist (Ridley)
Inevitable Illusions (Piatelli-Palmarini)
The Winner's Curse (Thaler)
Inefficient Markets (Shleifer)
More Than You Know (Mauboussin)
Beyond Greed and Fear (Shefrin)
The Wisdom of the Crowds (Surowiecki)
Blink (Gladwell)
The Invisible Gorilla (Chabris and Simons)
The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (Coates)
The Lucifer Effect (Zimbardo)
Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite (Kurzban)
Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman)
The Psychology of Money (Housel)
Never Enough (Wilkinson)
The Design of Everyday Things (Norman)
Thinking in Bets (Duke)
The Hard Break (Edelheit)
System 1 (Kearing, Ewing, and Wood)
Tribal Leadership (Logan et al)
Insight (Eurich)
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Tufte)
Learning/Creativity/Intelligence
Creativity, Inc (Catmull) - Pixar
Range (Epstein)
The Art of Learning (Waitzkin)
Imagine (Lehrer) - Which was pulled by its publisher following evidence of plagiarism and fabricated quotes
Originals (Grant)
Superforecasting (Tetlock and Gardner)
Where Good Ideas Come From (Johnson)
On Intelligence (Hawkins)
The Creative Act (Rick Rubin)
Unlabel (Ecko)
Eminem, The Way I Am (Eminem)
Deep Work (Newport)
So Good They Can't Ignore You (Newport)
The 46 Rules of Genius (Neumeier)
Moonwalking with Einstein (Foer)
The Checklist Manifesto (Gawande)
Decoded (Jay Z)
Essentialism (McKeown)
Musicophilia (Sacks)
Building the Intentional University (ed: Kosslyn and Nelson)
The Case Against Education (Caplan)
“The logic of fallibilism is that one not only seeks to correct the misconceptions of the past, but hopes in the future to find and change mistaken ideas that no one today questions or finds problematic. So it is fallibilism, not the mere rejection of authority, that is essential for the initiation of unlimited knowledge growth.”
Investing
Poor Charlie's Almanack (Ed: Kaufman)
Security Analysis (Graham and Dodd)
The Intelligent Investor (Graham)
The Essays of Warren Buffett (Ed: Cunningham)
Buffett, The Making of An American Capitalist (Lowenstein)
The Snowball (Schroeder)
Damn Right (Lowe) - on Munger
Seeking Wisdom (Bevelin)
Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (Fisher)
John Neff on Investing (Neff)
Value Investing (Whitman)
You Can Be a Stock Market Genius (Greenblatt) - The bible of special situations investing
The Little Book that Beats the Market (Greenblatt)
Value Investing (Montier)
Value Investing (Greenwald et al)
Deep Value (Carlisle)
The Dhandho Investor (Pabrai) - Great introduction to value investing for those just learning
The Education of a Value Investor (Spier)
The Most Important Thing (Marks)
The Warren Buffett Portfolio (Hagstrom)
Investing, the Last Liberal Art (Hagstrom)
How to Pick Stocks Like Warren Buffett (Vick)
Pilgrimage to Warren Buffett's Omaha (Matthews)
How They Did It (Stahl)
Big Money Thinks Small (Tillinghast)
Economics
Economics in One Lesson (Hazlitt)
Business/Business Biography
Things a Little Bird Told Me (Stone) - Twitter
Shoe Dog (Knight) - Nike
Setting the Table (Meyer)
Made in America (Walton) - Wal Mart
A Man For All Markets (Thorpe)
Steve Jobs (Isaacson) - Apple
The Outsiders (Thorndike)
Hatching Twitter (Bilton) - Twitter
Let My People Go Surfing (Chouinard) - Patagonia
Elon Musk (Vance) - Tesla
Idea Man (Allen) - Microsoft
How Google Works (Schmidt) - Google
The New Digital Age (Schmidt) - Google
In the Plex (Levy) - Google
The Warren Buffet CEO (Miles) - Berkshire Hathaway
One Click (Brandt) - Amazon
The Everything Store (Stone) - Amazon
Delivering Happiness (Hsieh) - Zappos
Models Behaving Badly (Derman)
Personal History (Graham) - Washington Post
Iacocca, An Autobiography (Iacocca) - Chrysler
Titan (Chernow)
Carnegie (Nasaw)
Beyond the Pale (Grossman) - Sierra Nevada Beer
The Sovereign State of ITT (Sampson) - ITT
First a Dream (Clayton)
The Virgin Way (Branson) - Virgin Airlines
Losing My Virginity (Branson) - Virgin Airlines
Conscious Capitalism (Mackey and Sisodia) - Whole Foods
Cable Cowboy (Malone)
Howard Hughes, The Untold Story (Brown and Broeske)
AOL.Com (Swisher)
Winner Takes All (Binkley) - Wynn Casinos
Running Scared (Smith) - Wynn Casinos
America For Sale (Bouchard)
Junk to Gold (Johnson)
The Billionaire Who Wasn't (O'Clery)
Mondo Agnelli (Clark) - Fiat, etc.
Distant Force (Roberts) - Teledyne
Pour Your Heart Into It (Schultz) - Starbucks
Am I Being Too Subtle (Zell)
I Invented the Modern Age (Snow) - Ford
My Life and Work (Ford) - Ford
Maestro (Woodward)
The Luxury Strategy (Kapferer and Bastien)
Liars Poker (Lewis)
Investment Biker (Rogers)
Adventure Capitalist (Rogers)
Foolproof (Ip)
Anatamy of the Bear (Napier)
Tomorrow's Gold (Faber)
The HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business (Yudkoff)
Straight from the Gut (Welch) - GE
Stocks for the Long Run (Siegel)
Capital Ideas (Bernstein)
Against the Gods (Bernstein)
The Power of Gold (Bernstein)
Bull (Mahar)
King of Capital (Carey and Morris)
Octopus (Lawson)
Red Notice (Browder)
The Big Short (Lewis)
Too Big to Fail (Sorkin)
Bottle of Lies (Eban)
Lords of Finance (Ahamed)
Irrational Exuberance (Shiller)
Good to Great (Collins)
Built to Last (Collins and Porras)
The Money Masters (Train)
Money Masters of our Time (Train)
Hedge Hunters (Burton)
Barbarians at the Gate (Burrough and Helyar)
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Mackay)
When Genius Failed (Lowenstein)
Fatal Risk (Boyd)
Fault Lines (Rajan)
Greed and Glory on Wall Street (Auletta)
The Predator's Ball (Bruck)
Rogue Trader (Leeson)
In An Uncertain World (Rubin)
The Man Who Beats the S&P (Lowe)
The Alliance (Hoffman, Casnocha, Yeh)
Little Bets (Sims)
Venture Deals (Feld and Mendelson)
The Dao of Capital (Spitznagel)
Dream Big (Correa)
Double Your Profits in 6 Months or Less (Fifer)
Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner)
Zero to One (Thiel)
The Innovators Dilemma (Christensen)
The Science of Success (Koch) - Koch Industries
Good Profit (Koch) - Koch Industries
The Halo Effect (Rosenzweig)
Turn the Ship Around (Marquet)
100 Baggers (Mayer)
Dear Chairman (Gramm)
Intelligent Fanatics Project (Iddings and Cassel)
Creating Shareholder Value (Rappaport)
Lights Out (Gryta and Mann) - GE
Little Black Stretchy Pants (Chip Wilson) - Lululemon
Character Counts (Bogle)
Julian Robertson, A Tiger in the Land of Bulls and Bears (Strachman)
Money Men (McCrum)
Blindspot (Banji and Greenwald)
Trillion Dollar Triage (Timiraos)
The Attention Merchants (Wu)
Winning Now, Winning Later (David Cote)
The Innovators (Isaacson)
Billion Dollar Whale (Wright and Hope)
“Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.”
History
The Lessons of History (Durant and Durant)
The Swerve (Greenblatt)
From Third World to First (Lee Kwan Yew)
Benjamin Franklin (Isaacson)
The Science of Conjecture (Franklin)
Why The West Rules For Now (Morris)
1493 (Mann)
Guns, Germs, and Steel (Diamond)
Collapse (Diamond)
Enlightenment (Porter)
The Embarrassment of Riches (Schama)
The Age of Wonder (Holmes)
Sapiens (Harari)
1776 (McCullough)
Frederick Douglass (Blight)
The Blood Telegram (Bass)
King Leopold's Ghost (Hoschild)
The Burma Road (Webster)
Undaunted Courage (Ambrose) - Re Lewis and Clark
The Forgotten Man (Shlaes)
The Measure of Civilization (Morris)
Silk Roads (Frankopan)
Odessa (King)
Under the Black Flag (Cordingly)
Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Lawrence)
Ghost Wars (Coll)
How China Became Capitalist (Coase and Wang)
When Montezuma Met Cortez (Restall)
Operation Mincemeat (Macintyre)
Writing
Telling True Stories (Kramer and Call)
Good Prose (Kidder and Todd)
On Writing (Stephen King)
Several Short Sentences About Writing (Klinkenborg)
Draft No. 4 (McPhee)
Fighting for the Press (Goodale)
Working (Robert Caro)
Writing for Story (Franklin)
On Writing Well (Zissner)
Wired for Story (Cron)
Bird by Bird (Lamott)
Exploration/Travel/Running/Sports
Endurance (Shackleton)
Silence: In the Age of Noise (Kagge)
Walking: One Step at a Time (Kagge)
Into Thin Air (Krakauer)
K2 (Viesturs)
Beyond Possible (Purja)
The Push (Caldwell)
Alone on the Wall (Honnold)
Basin and Range (McPhee)
Coming into the Country (McPhee)
A Death In Brazil (Robb)
The Places In Between (Stewart)
Running the Amazon (Kane)
Into Africa (Dugard)
On The Grand Trunk Road (Coll)
Dark Star Safari (Theroux)
Neither Here Nor There (Bryson)
A Walk in the Woods (Bryson)
Not So Funny When It Happened (Cahill)
The Perfect Mile (Bascomb)
Once a Runner (Parker, Jr.)
Harriers (Shivers)
Running with the Legends (Sandrock)
Born to Run (McDougall)
Every Second Counts (Lance Armstrong)
It’s Not About the Bike (Armstrong)
Chasing Lance (Dugard)
Bowerman and the Men of Oregon (Moore)
Gold in the Water (Mullen)
Running with the Buffaloes (Lear)
14 Minutes (Salazar)
Open (Andrei Agassi)
Narrative Nonfiction
The Code Book (Singh)
The Ghost Map (Johnson)
Tiger (Vaillant)
Barbarian Days, A Surfing Life (Finnegan)
Shadow Divers (Kurson) - David vs. Goliath
The Emperor of Scent (Burr) - David vs. Goliath
The Church of Baseball (Shelton) - on the making of the movie “Bull Durham”
The Third Plate (Barber)
Banana (Koeppel)
Salt, A World History (Kurlansky)
The River at the Center of the World (Winchester)
China Airborne (Fallows)
Country Driving (Hessler)
Kingpin (Poulsen)
Endgame (Brady)
Cutting for Sign (Langewiesche)
Where Men Win Glory (Krakauer)
Every Patient Tells a Story (Sanders)
A Civil Action (Harr)
Tubes (Blum)
Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Boo)
Moneyball (Lewis)
Flash Boys (Lewis)
The Blind Side (Lewis)
Quiet (Cain)
Galileo's Middle Finger (Dreger) - David vs. Goliath
One Billion Customers (McGregor)
Start Up Nation (Senor and Singer)
Twighlight in the Desert (Simmons)
Chain of Title (Dayen)
Shakey Ground (McLean)
Trading Up (Silverstein and Fiske)
The Weather Makers (Flannery)
How to Cool the Planet (Goodell)
Ice Age (Gribbin)
Sun in a Bottle (Siefe)
Lords of the Harvest (Charles)
Cradles of Eminence (Goertzel)
How Children Succeed (Tough)
In the Heart of the Sea (Philbrick)
The World For Sale (Farchy)
The Chickenshit Club (Eisinger)
Seal Team Six (Wasdin and Templin)
Rigged (Mezrich)
The Billion Dollar Spy (Hoffman)
The Dead Hand (Hoffman)