Summer has a way of creating space for reading that the rest of the year doesn’t.
Whether it’s a slower pace on vacation, longer daylight hours, or simply the pull of a good book by the pool, I look forward each year to digging into my ever-growing stack. My tastes tend to lean toward nonfiction, including history, finance, business, and the occasional deep dive into how the world really works, though I’ll always make room for a good story, too.
I believe that reading matters. It’s one of the best tools we have for understanding where we’ve been, what’s happening now, and where things might be headed. Each summer, I like to share a handful of the books on my list in the same spirit as years past, which you can find here: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.
A few reminder notes before you dive in:
- The summaries below are pulled from the books, publishers, or distributors, not written by me.
- Recommending a book doesn’t mean I endorse every idea in it. I read widely, including things I disagree with.
- The order below is random and doesn’t reflect ranking or priority.
As Abraham Lincoln said, “A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others — it’s one of the best investments of time there is.”
Here’s What I’m Reading This Summer
History Matters — David McCullough
A posthumous collection of essays, speeches, and interviews from the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, many published here for the first time. Edited by his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson and longtime researcher Michael Hill, with a foreword by Jon Meacham, the book gathers McCullough’s reflections on the importance of history, the character of figures like Truman and Washington, and the writing life that made him one of America’s great storytellers. View on Amazon
The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel: Romanovs, Revolutionaries, and the Forgotten Titan Who Fueled the World — Douglas Brunt
The untold story of Emanuel Nobel, likely the wealthiest man in Russia after the tsar, who built the family’s oil empire into a rival of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Sweeping from Victorian London through World War I and the Russian Revolution, the book traces his rise, his collision with a young revolutionary who would become Stalin, and his race to escape Russia before losing everything. View on Amazon
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less — Barry Schwartz
Schwartz argues that while freedom of choice is essential to autonomy and well-being, the modern explosion of options — from jeans to retirement plans — has become a source of anxiety, paralysis, and regret rather than satisfaction. He distinguishes “maximizers,” who chase the best possible option, from “satisficers,” who are content with good enough, and offers practical steps for cutting through the noise of everyday decisions. View on Amazon
The Algorithm: The Hypergrowth Formula That Transformed Tesla, Lululemon, General Motors, and SpaceX — Jon McNeill
Written by the former president of Tesla, this book lays out the five-step framework Elon Musk used to drive Tesla and SpaceX to record growth: question every requirement, delete every possible step, simplify and optimize, accelerate cycle time, and automate. McNeill shows how he’s since applied the same approach at General Motors, Lululemon, and other companies to speed up innovation and execution. View on Amazon
1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History — and How It Shattered a Nation — Andrew Ross Sorkin
From the bestselling author of Too Big to Fail, an immersive account of the 1929 stock market crash and the years of speculation, denial, and reckoning that led to it. Drawing on newly uncovered documents, Sorkin reconstructs the crash almost hour by hour through the bankers, regulators, and speculators who lived it — a story the author frames as a timely reminder of the cycles that drive financial upheaval. View on Amazon
The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance — Ron Chernow
Winner of the National Book Award, Chernow’s sweeping history traces four generations of the Morgan banking dynasty, from its obscure beginnings in Victorian London to the 1987 crash. The book follows the family’s growing influence over railways, corporate mergers, and government finance, and its evolving relationship with world events from the Gilded Age through the Great Depression and beyond. View on Amazon
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World — Liaquat Ahamed
A Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the four central bankers — from the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany — whose decisions in the years after World War I helped set the stage for the Great Depression. Ahamed argues that the crash wasn’t simply an inevitable confluence of events, but the result of choices made by a small group of powerful men grappling with a financial system they didn’t fully understand. View on Amazon
Central Banking 101 — Joseph Wang
Written by a former senior trader on the Federal Reserve’s Open Markets Desk, this book demystifies how money is created and how it moves through central banks, commercial banks, and government treasuries. Wang walks through the mechanics of monetary policy, the structure of money markets, and the global dollar system, offering an insider’s view of an institution most people don’t fully understand. View on Amazon
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World — Niall Ferguson
Ferguson makes the case that finance — not just technology or politics — is the foundation of human progress, tracing money, credit, and banking from ancient Mesopotamia to the 2008 crisis and beyond. Along the way he connects the Italian Renaissance to foreign exchange dealers, the French Revolution to a stock market bubble, and shows how financial innovation has shaped the rise and fall of empires. View on Amazon
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution — Walter Isaacson
Isaacson traces the history of the computer and the internet from Ada Lovelace’s 1840s vision of programming through the rise of transistors, microchips, video games, and the web. His central argument is that breakthrough innovation rarely comes from lone geniuses — it comes from collaboration, and the pairings and rivalries of figures like Turing, Gates, Jobs, and Berners-Lee tell the real story of the digital age. View on Amazon
That’s what is on my summer reading list! If you’ve read something that you would recommend, I’d love to hear about it. Some of my favorite books over the years have come from recommendations shared by clients and friends.
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