I am a voracious reader. Multiple books a week kind of crazy. Occasionally people ask me for a list of good books in the various areas I am interested in. This is it. Just a few books on each topic, perhaps not even the best ones, but the ones that left an impression on me.

Investing for accumulation

In 2012 I have written a post about investing with books recommendations. I mostly stand by it still, with the exception that I now consider dividend investing as a viable alternative even in the accumulation phase. It is less tax-friendly, but the income stream helps you not to panic when the principal decreases in some years.

Investing for income

Once you have accumulated enough assets, you need to generate an inflation-resistant income from them. At this point in time, no insurance company sells inflation-linked annuities, so you are left with two options:

  1. Asset allocation: selling some assets every year hoping that the principal grows enough to replenish what you spend and overcome inflation.
  2. Dividend investing: you live on the increasing dividends from your stock holdings without touching the principal.

I don’t consider real estate investing as passive income. Too much work for me.

On asset allocation, The intelligent asset allocator. On dividend investing, I like anything by Daniel Peris and the more advanced Josh Peters.

Of the two strategies, I am partial to dividend investing, which can be simply implemented in ETF form these days (i.e., SCHD or others).

Classics

In the past few years I have started a classical education on my own. I went to a classical secondary school and was left with an itch to pursue it more. The Great Books of the Western World series is now free on Archive.org. The first few books contain reading plans, but instead I have finished this one. I am currently in the middle of this one, which I like less.

Philosophy

My introduction to stoic ideas came from Irvine. One quickly moves to Seneca’s ‘Letters to Lucilius’ and the rest of the Roman stoic literature, which I prefer to read in Italian (no links).

Management & Leadership

I have been a manager for a good part of my career, but didn’t read too many books about it. Perhaps I considered it as a learn-by-experience kind of thing … A few books I like are Crucial Conversations and Leadership and self deception.

Time management

I had too many emails in my mailbox every day. I needed a system to manage my workload. The philosophy underpinning it is in Getting things done. That is useful in many situations, apart from email overload. The practical implementation is a variation of Total Workday Control.

Statistics

You never understand statistics enough. I don’t remember how I got introduced to the main concepts, maybe at school? A simple tour to uncertainty is Savage.

I am partial to Bayesian statistics, but I learned it directly from a somehow complex book that I really liked: Gelman

I also like Exploratory Data Analysis. The classic is Tukey, but there must be something more modern, certainly in Python …

Health

I encourage everyone to read anything by Gary Taubes. Good Calories, Bad Calories changed my life.

I also read extensively about weight lifting. I think most people don’t realize that you can do it with different goals in mind. Getting bigger is just one of them and perhaps the less important one. Among the trove of crap, there are a few good books.

Because of my age, I am partial to lifting weights slowly, Slow Burn style. Because of my laziness, I like spending the least amount of time doing it as in Body by science.

Coding

I have a post for that here.

Typography

I know, right? Too many good books to mention. Let’s do one: The elements of typographic style.

Narrative

Apart from classics, I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy. Try Ted Chiang and Patrick Rothfuss. The former is mind opening, the latter writes fantastically (read this).

Others

Many other topics touched my fancy here and there (chess, photography, economy, fonts, design, art history, big history, world politics, …). My library has 100s of books. Mostly I have read, some skimmed, some nothing. Enough for now.