Books Recommended by Morgan Housel

The Better Angels of Our Nature taught me that you can be a long-term optimist even when things around you look pretty bad.

When Breath Becomes Air will make you reexamine what’s important in life and make you appreciate each day you’re here.

Endurance is the best example of how far people can be pushed when the stakes are high.

Boyd. John Boyd was the Elon Musk of the Air Force: erratic, brazen, vulgar, and convinced that rules don’t apply to him. But, like Musk, he was a genius, and revolutionized his field. So the military had to keep him happy, even if they couldn’t stand him. It’s such a good story about learning, bureaucracy, and innovation.

Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit has had the biggest influence on how I write.

Tribe. A fascinating look at how and why people connect to tribes, and how it impacts our thinking and wellbeing.

Why Don’t We Learn From History? shows why people keep screwing up after others before them did the same thing.

23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism will make half of readers angry, but the other half will be better able to realize that no system for organizing an economy is perfect.

A Man On The Moon: Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. Walking on the moon is probably the coolest thing humans have ever done. The hardest, boldest, riskiest, thing ever attempted by anyone – I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.

Breath. Incredible book about something most of us spend little time thinking about: breathing. Odds are you’re doing it wrong, it’s impacting your day, and you can improve it dramatically without much effort.

Destiny of the Republic. The story of President James Garfield’s assassination, and how the doctors who tried to save him didn’t believe in germs, which is what probably killed him in the end.

How To Lie With Statistics will make you laugh and be skeptical of almost everything in one sitting.

The Hidden Life of Trees. A fascinating book about the complexity of something that seems basic. One example: Trees that grow up in their mothers’ shade grow slowly, because their moms block most of the sun. Slow growth leads to dense wood, which leads to a strong tree.

The Molecule of More. A book about dopamine, the most powerful chemical in your brain that we rarely think about has so much influence on the world. Dopamine doesn’t give you happiness in the moment; it convinces you that there’s happiness in the future that you should pursue, always pushing us for more, more, more.

30 Lessons for Living is a collection of life advice from very old people who have seen it all.

American Moonshot. The best book I’ve read on the 1960s space race, telling the story of not just the scientists and engineers who made landing on the moon possible, but the anxiety of what would happen if the Soviets did it first and the political panic behind the scenes.

April, 1865: The Month That Saved America. I like the saying, “History doesn’t crawl; it leaps.” Few periods saw such a stark leap as when the Civil War ended and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated within the same week. Jay Winik is one of the few hardcore historians who’s also a great writer.

Bubble in the Sun. The telling of America’s first modern bubble: the Florida real estate boom of the 1920s. What’s great about this book is that so many of the characters, scenes, incentives, behaviors, and outcomes could be right out of today’s world. Same as it ever was.

City of Dreams. America is a nation of immigrants, and an incredible part of that story is how many of those immigrants came to one city – New York – during a short period of time: 1880 to 1920.

Crashing Through. A man is blinded as a baby, then regains full vision at age 46 after an experimental surgery. An amazing, counterintuitive, story about what it’s like to see the world for the first time as an adult.

Empty Mansions. The story of an heiress who inherits a fortune but lives a life of seclusion with almost no contact with the outside world while collecting mansions that go unvisited until she dies at age 104 after living in a hospital for years despite excellent health, setting off an epic battle for her money.

Famous Financial Fiascos is one of the best investing history books that few people have heard of.

Fortune’s Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt. Cornelius Vanderbilt was the richest man in history, worth the equivalent of $250 billion. He left most of it to his heirs.

Guns at Last Light is the best World War II book I’ve read, and explains the most important event in modern history through human stories rather than bland statistics.

Investing: The Last Liberal Art is the most underappreciated investment book.

Lords of Creation. The best book I’ve read on the Gilded Age, and how Rockefeller, Morgan, Ford, Carnegie, and a few others dominated American business.

The Big Change, a look at how life in America changed from 1900-1950, got me interested in the social and cultural part of economic growth.

The Birth of Plenty is the best explanation of how and why economies grow.

The Body. Probably Bill Bryson’s best work, and one of the most practical science books I’ve read. Effectively an anatomy textbook written by one of the great storytellers of our time.

The Choice. Maybe the best book I’ve read in years. The true story of a young Hungarian girl sent to Auschwitz where her parents are murdered upon arrival but who manages to survive a year of torture and starvation before being liberated.

The End is Always Near. Dan Carlin, one of the best historian storytellers, looks at periods in history when it seemed like the world was coming to an end – wars, famines, pandemics, and societal collapses.

The Great Depression: A Diary is the best economics book I’ve read, written by a person who didn’t know he was writing one.

The Patriarch. An incredible biography of Joseph Kennedy, who lived one of the most interesting lives in American history. It begins: “Had Joseph P. Kennedy not been the patriarch of America’s first family, his story would be worth telling. That he was only adds to its drama and historical significance.”

The Quest of the Simple Life, written in 1907, totally changed how I think about personal finance and life goals.

The Science of Fear is the first book that opened my eyes to how poor we are at interpreting risk.

The Science of Storytelling. The best story always wins, and I loved his book on why that is and how to do it.

The Wisdom of Psychopaths shows how big an advantage you have when you’re unemotional about emotional topics.

The Wright Brothers is one of the best business and innovation stories of all time.

This Will Make You Smarter is a series of short essays by brilliant people in a book that lives up to its title.

Truman, a biography of the 33rd president, is an incredible story of the world’s biggest problems falling into the lap of someone who never thought he’d face them.