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Top 10 Lists
Here are ten of my favorite websites. Some of them are little homemade ones of startling quality, others are larger commercial sites that are very useful. At most of them you can either contact the owner or meet a lot of interesting people or both. |
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These are not the ten greatest books of all time nor the ten books most similar to my book. I picked ten books to recommend and made two requirements. The first is that it was available for sale new at Amazon. If you limit your reading to books in print, you're missing extraordinary opportunities. But there are lots of places to get lists of older classics, and there's no point in sending lots of people chasing a few used copies.
Second is that you won't find the book on every other list about investing or poker. There's no need for me to tell you about Sklansky's Theory of Poker, McManus' Positively Fifth Street, Markowitz's Portfolio Selection or Wilmott's Quantitative Finance. These and maybe twenty other books that inspired me are well-known. I tried to pick books that didn't sell as well, or aren't usually thought of in these categories. All of them influenced my book, but you'd have to buy me at least one drink to explain why in some cases. All are well worth buying and reading.
I'm conscious that I could throw this list out and come up with another list of ten great books. My apologies to those books and their authors.
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- Iceberg Risk: An Adventure in Portfolio Theory by Kent Osband
The best-selling quantitative finance novel ever written, but still underappreciated. This guy really knows his math, and really knows his risk, and really knows how financial institutions work. It should be required reading for business school finance majors, but it is too fun to read to get into the curriculum.
- Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge by William Poundstone
Everybody knows Poundstone's other books, especially the recent (and great) Fortune's Formula. But this one is still my favorite, and one a lot of people haven't seen.
- Physical: An American Checkup by James McManus
Another author you know, from Positively Fifth Street. Well good Jim and bad Jim are back and Jenny gets her revenge for the lap dance. After I read PFS, I dived into McManus' poetry, which I admire but don't really enjoy, and his novels, which don't have enough of him in them to be really great. He's not exactly empathetic. Plus you can read him free in the New York Times and on his blog, so why buy the cow when they give away the milk? But he has two things that make me want to read everything he writes: he does incredible things with language while making it look easy, and he has gigantic common sense exceeded only by his lovably human ability to overrule it.
- Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito
A serious work of literature in its own right, it's also a masterful scholarly biography of an important economic thinker who has been left too long to American Literature professors and pulp fiction fans.
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- The Foundation of Statistics by Leonard J. Savage
The clear explanation of the stuff so many people try to make complicated. Clear and rigorous, but written with personality and passion.
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
No, it's not an S&M story set in Spain, it's another path-breaking work of economics, misunderstood because it's well-written and fun to read.
- The Parrot's Theorem: A Novel by Denis Guedj
Great math, good fun.
- Total Poker by David Spanier
One of the few books to explain the why of poker, from a man who loved it.
- Winning at Poker by Dave Scharf
I limited myself to one poker how-to book on this list. This one made it because it's written by a real player who obviously loves the game, it's neither badly written nor wrong about its poker, and the guy doesn't make it obvious every page that he thinks he's better than you-in fact you like the guy a lot. That may seem like faint praise, but there aren't a lot of books that meet all those conditions.
- You Know Me Al by Ring Lardner
More economics that's fun to read. Deeply insightful, hysterically funny, staggeringly bitter.
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