Books
A short list of books that are worth your time, with a few sentences on each. They have shaped how I see life and what it means to be a productive and kind member of humanity. I will update it when something new catches my attention.
Don Miguel Ruiz, 1997
Four sentences you could put on a wall. The ethical standards everyone should reflect on and consider as the foundation of a life. Short enough to read in an afternoon, deep enough to spend a decade getting wrong. I come back to it.
Marcus Aurelius, c. 170–180 AD
The private notebook of a Roman emperor working through how to be a good man under impossible pressure. Two thousand years old and still the best book on how to keep your head when things are heavy. Read it slowly, a page at a time.
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886
Hard reading. Worth the work. Nietzsche on what morality actually is, where it comes from, and why most of what gets called “ethics” is something else wearing the costume. Read it after Marcus Aurelius if you can. The contrast does the teaching.
C. S. Lewis, 1952
The clearest articulation of Christian ethics ever written for a non-religious reader. Lewis was a professor of literature, not a theologian, and it shows in the best way. Patient, plain-spoken, and free of the church-speak that loses most modern readers in the first chapter. Worth reading whatever your relationship to faith.
A. W. Tozer, 1948
Short, direct, and unembarrassed about its subject. Tozer writes the way someone speaks when they have decided not to bother performing humility. If Mere Christianity is the case for the door, this is what is behind it.
Leo Tolstoy, 1894
Tolstoy in his late phase, after he had given up the novels for theology and got banned from his own church for it. The book that taught Gandhi nonviolent resistance. Christian anarchism articulated by one of the great writers of the 19th century, with a force you will feel in your chest. Difficult to read without it changing something.
Saifedean Ammous, 2018
The clearest case for sound money in print. Ammous walks you through the history of money from cattle and shells through gold and fiat, and then makes the argument for Bitcoin with the patience of someone who knows you are skeptical. If you read one Bitcoin book, read this one.
Saifedean Ammous, 2021
The companion volume. Where the first book is for Bitcoin, this one is the indictment of the system Bitcoin is replacing. Read the chapter on what fiat does to families and you will never look at currency the same way.
Davidson and Rees-Mogg, 1997
Predicted, in 1997, with surprising precision: digital cash, the decline of the nation-state’s monopoly on violence, the collapse of mass institutions, the rise of individuals operating outside traditional jurisdictions. Some of it has aged badly. Most of it has aged like prophecy. Read it understanding when it was written.
Shoshana Zuboff, 2019
Long, dense, occasionally repetitive, and the most important book written about the technology business in the last twenty years. Zuboff’s framing of “horseless carriage” thinking, the trap of judging new systems by old metaphors, is the conceptual move at the center of everything I do. Read the first 200 pages even if you do not finish it.
George Orwell, 1949
The book everyone has read and few have actually read. Read it again as an adult, with the surveillance state actually built. The parts that hit hardest now are the small ones. How language gets bent, how truth becomes optional, how the people running the system do not even need to lie convincingly anymore.
Yuval Noah Harari, 2011
A short history of how humans went from one of several primate species to running the planet. Harari’s later books I have notes on; this one I still recommend. The chapter on how money is a story we collectively agree to believe is worth the price of the book.
Ayn Rand, 1957
Long, polemical, and badly in need of an editor, and still the most thorough articulation of one specific worldview ever put to fiction. Read it as a thought experiment, not a manual. Useful as a mirror: the parts that resonate and the parts that do not will tell you something about yourself.
David Boaz, 1997
The most reasonable case for libertarianism written for a general audience. Boaz is calm, well-read, and willing to address the strongest objections rather than the weakest. Whether or not you agree, the book is the right starting point for understanding the position.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2012
Taleb’s argument that some systems get stronger under stress, not weaker, and that the systems we build today are almost all of the wrong kind. Reading this changes how you evaluate decisions. The man is insufferable on Twitter and right on the page.
Daniel Kahneman, 2011
A Nobel laureate on the two systems running in your head, the fast, intuitive one and the slow, deliberate one, and on how reliably the fast one fools you. Required reading for anyone whose work involves decisions, which is everyone. Half the security job is knowing which system you are using.
Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, 2016
Computer science applied to everyday life. When to stop dating and commit, how to organize a closet, when to cut your losses on a project. Genuinely useful. Read it once and you will find yourself reaching for the chapter titles in conversation for years afterward.
Charles Petzold, 1999 (revised 2022)
The most patient explanation ever written of how computers actually work, from electrical signals through logic gates through assembly through high-level code. Petzold builds the whole stack from scratch in plain English. If anyone in your life uses computers and feels like they do not understand them, hand them this book.
James Clear, 2018
The best practical book on habit change in print. Clear is a clear writer, the framework holds up, and the techniques actually work. Read it when you have something specific you are trying to change. It is what it claims to be, which in this category is rare.
Angela Duckworth, 2016
Duckworth’s argument that grit, passion plus perseverance over time, is a better predictor of success than talent. The research holds up. The personal applications are real. Grit is the characteristic that lets you overcome almost anything, and it can be built.
Ray Dalio, 2017
Dalio’s playbook from running one of the most successful investment firms in history, written as a set of operational rules he tested over four decades. Dense, repetitive, and worth it. The principle of “radical transparency” is harder than it sounds and changes how an organization functions when it is actually practiced.
Eric Ries, 2011
The bible for building startups quickly and validating ideas before pouring concrete. The “build, measure, learn” cycle is now so embedded in startup culture that people forget who articulated it. Read it instead of building something for two years that nobody wanted.
Peter Thiel, 2014
A note before the book: Thiel’s recent political project is a different conversation, and I have no patience for it. The book itself, written before all of that, contains some of the sharpest thinking on monopoly, competition, and contrarian conviction I have encountered. Read it for what is on the page. Take what is useful. Leave the rest with the author.
Have a recommendation? I read everything that comes in. b@mawji.vc