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Reading

As of Jan 2023, in addition to the books I read, I will save some of the most interesting, in-depth articles I read as well. If you have any recommendations, please reach out.

2024

  1. What Happened to the US Machine Tool Industry? - Brian Potter
  2. The RAG Revolution: The Future of Computing - Chris Zeoli
  3. How to land and convert your first defense pilots - Nini Hamrick
  4. Warfare 2.0: AI for Situational Awareness - Pendulum
  5. Building in America - Maggie Gray
  6. The Shift from Models to Compound AI Systems - Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research
  7. A Techno-Industrialist Manifesto - Aaron Slodov
  8. The Practice Of Value Investing - Li Lu
  9. Valuation Multiples - Michael Mauboussin
  10. The New Era of Mining - Anna-Sofia Lesiv
  11. Startup Risk - Kevin Mahaffey
  12. Mistborn Wax & Wayne Series, Books 1, 2, 3, 4 - Brandon Sanderson
  13. The Silvers Series Books 1, 2, 3 - Daniel Price
  14. The Box - Marc Levinson
  15. 2054 - Elliot Ackerman
  16. Fourth Wing & Iron Flame - Rebecca Yarros
  17. Tress of the Emerald Sea - Brandon Sanderson
  18. The Lessons of History - Will & Ariel Durant
  19. The Wealth of Shadows - Graham Moore
  20. Hyperion - Dan Simmons
  21. Moscow X - David McCloskey
  22. How to Build an AI Data Center - Brian Potter
  23. Reamde - Neal Stephenson
  24. Capex & Opex supercycles - Hemant Mohapatra
  25. A Primer on Data Warehouses & Data Lakehouses - Eric Flaningham
  26. Building the World’s Best Venture Firm - Demren Sinik
  27. Am I Being Too Subtle? - Sam Zell
  28. A Technical Guide for Founders & Operators Building Agents - Activant
  29. How to Hire a CTO - Khosla Ventures
  30. Advanced Portfolio Management - Giuseppe Paleologo
  31. The Cradle Series - Will Wight
  32. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power - Daniel Yergin
  33. Invisible asymptotes in vertical software - Matt Brown
  34. Machines of Loving Grace - Dario Amodei
  35. Defensibility Parts 1, 2 (Stacks), 3 (Power), 4 (Revolutions), 5 (Multi-waves) - Kevin Mahaffey
  36. Data Centers Part 1, Part 2

2023

  1. Changing Fortunes - Paul Volcker, Toyoo Gyohten
  2. Memories of Ice - Steven Erikson
  3. Nuclear energy: past, present, and future - Julia DeWahl
  4. The Three-Body Problem: Finding the New Stable Points in VC - Frank Rotman
  5. 2034 - Elliot Ackerman, Admiral James Stavridis
  6. Geopolitics are Changing. Venture Capital Must, Too - Hemant Tenaja & Fareed Zakaria
  7. Inflection Points - Michael Dempsey
  8. The Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson
  9. Startup Decoupling & Reckoning - Elad Gil
  10. Why Technology Will Define the Future of Geopolitics - Eric Schmidt
  11. The U.S. Is Not Yet Ready for the Era of ‘Great Power’ Conflict - Michael Gordon
  12. Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption - Atlantic Council
  13. Space Launch: Are We Heading For Oversupply or a Shortfall? - McKinsey & Company
  14. The Race to $100B: The Palo Alto Networks Story - Francis & Rak Garg
  15. Chip War: The Quest to Dominate the World’s Most Critical Technology - Chris Miller
  16. Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle - Marathon Asset Management
  17. Delta-v - Daniel Suarez
  18. Breakfast With Pops - Adam Draper
  19. eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work - Randall Stross
  20. The Grid (Part I, II, III, IV) - Brian Potter
  21. Is payments a race to the bottom? - Simon Taylor
  22. Red Rising Series - Pierce Brown
  23. The Freight Ecosystem - Eli Dukes
  24. Can open source be too open? - Philip Clark
  25. Problems for Adyen and Paypal in the competitive payments landscape - Tech Fund
  26. Food For Thought: The Potential Ripple Effect of GLP1s - Zach Reitano
  27. The Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
  28. Nvidia Envy: understanding the GPU gold rush - John Luttig
  29. Welding and the Automation Frontier - Brian Potter
  30. How to Scale Nuclear Power - Ryan McEntush
  31. Cable Cowboy: John Malone & the rise of the modern cable-TV business - Mark Robichaux
  32. 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Hamilton Helmer
  33. White Sun War: The Campaign for Taiwan - Major General Mick Ryan
  34. Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes - Morgan Housel
  35. Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in WWII - Arthur Herman

2022

  1. Mastering the Market Cycle - Howard Marks
  2. The Power Law: Venture Capital & the Making of the New Future - Sebastian Mallaby
  3. Upgrade - Blake Crouch
  4. The Bond King - Mary Childs
  5. How Will You Measure Your Life? - Clayton Christensen
  6. Atomic Awakening: New Look at the History & Future of Nuclear Power - James Mahaffey
  7. The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss
  8. The Wise Man’s Fear - Patrick Rothfuss
  9. Gardens of the Moon - Steven Erikson
  10. The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare - Christian Brose
  11. Deadhouse Gates - Steven Erikson

2021

  1. Daemon - Daniel Suarez
  2. Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon - Colin Bryar, Bill Carr
  3. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management - Roger Lowenstein
  4. Kings of Crypto - Jeff John Roberts
  5. The Undoing Project - Michael Lewis
  6. Angel: How to invest in Technology Startups - Jason Calacanis
  7. A Memory Called Empire - Arkady Martine
  8. Dark Matter - Blake Crouch
  9. Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok & ByteDance - Matthew Brennan
  10. Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
  11. Fallen Leaves - Will Durant
  12. Radical Candor - Kim Scott
  13. Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase - Duff McDonald
  14. Thinking in Bets - Annie Duke

2020

  1. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! - Richard Feynman
  2. Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer
  3. Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
  4. The Ride of a Lifetime - Bob Iger
  5. Hillbilly Elegy - JD Vance
  6. The Man Who Solved the Market - Gregory Zuckerman
  7. What it Takes - Stephen Schwarzman
  8. The Holdout - Graham Moore
  9. The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson
  10. Polar Vortex - Matt Mather
  11. Burn In - P. W. Singer
  12. The Making of Prince of Persia - Jordan Mechner
  13. The Algebra of Happiness - Scott Galloway
  14. Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt - Steven Johnson
  15. The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
  16. Tape Sucks: Inside Data Domain, A Silicon Valley Growth Story - Frank Slootman
  17. The Psychology of Money - Morgan Housel

2019 (I commuted a lot this year)

  1. Destined for War - Graham Allison
  2. The Fixer - Bradley Tusk
  3. Red Moon - Kim Stanley Robinson
  4. Educated - Tara Westover
  5. The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin
  6. The Obelisk Gate - N.K. Jemisin
  7. Made in America - Sam Walton
  8. The Stone Sky - N.K. Jemisin
  9. Leviathan Wakes (Expanse Book 1) - James Corey
  10. Caliban’s War (Expanse Book 2) - James Corey
  11. Abaddon’s Gate (Expanse Book 3) – James Corey
  12. The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
  13. I am Pilgrim - Terry Hayes
  14. Vicious - V.E. Schwab
  15. The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. - Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland
  16. Six of Crows - Leigh Bardugo
  17. Crooked Kingdom - Leigh Bardugo
  18. Shadow and Bone Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
  19. The Demon Under the Microscope - Thomas Hager
  20. City of Thieves - David Benioff
  21. The Last Days of Night - Graham Moore
  22. The Sherlockian - Graham Moore
  23. Circe - Madeline Miller
  24. The Alice Network - Kate Quinn
  25. The Fish That Ate the Whale - Rich Cohen
  26. Red Notice - Bill Browder
  27. Amazon.com: Get Big Fast - Robert Spector
  28. A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs - Tren Griffin
  29. Bitcoin Billionaires - Ben Mezrich
  30. Dune - Frank Herbert
  31. Nemesis Games - James Corey
  32. The 25th Hour - David Benioff
  33. Recursion - Blake Crouch
  34. The Light Brigade - Kameron Hurley
  35. The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
  36. Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea - Gary Kinder
  37. The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz
  38. We Are Legion - Dennis Taylor
  39. For We Are Many - Dennis Taylor
  40. All These Worlds - Dennis Taylor
  41. A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles
  42. The Book of Dust - Phillip Pullman
  43. Exhalation - Ted Chiang
  44. Secrets of Sand Hill Road - Scott Kupor
  45. Trillion Dollar Coach - Eric Schmidt
  46. What You Do Is Who You Are - Ben Horowitz
  47. That Will Never Work - Marc Randolph
  48. A Man For All Markets - Edward Thorp
  49. Team of Teams - Stanley McChrystal

2018

  1. Subscribed - Tien Tzuo
  2. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
  3. CyberStorm - Matthew Mather
  4. The Financial Diaries - Jonathan Morduch & Rachel Schneider
  5. The Spider Network - David Enrich
  6. All Systems Red - Martha Wells
  7. Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
  8. The Messy Middle - Scott Belsky
  9. Powerful - Patty McCord
  10. Shackleton’s Way - Margot Morrell
  11. Bad Blood - John Carreyou
  12. Dollars and Sense - Dan Ariely
  13. On Grand Strategy - John Lewis Gaddis
  14. Artemis - Andy Weir
  15. How the Other Half Banks - Mehrsa Baradaran
  16. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team - Patrick Lencioni
  17. Billion Dollar Whale - Bradley Hope, Tom Wright
  18. Who is Michael Ovitz? - Michael Ovitz
  19. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
  20. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  21. Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely
  22. When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi
  23. The House of Morgan - Ron Chernow
  24. Leonardo da Vinci - Walter Isaacson
  25. Walt Disney - Neal Gabler
  26. Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer
  27. Executive Orders - Tom Clancy
  28. Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy
  29. Ghost Fleet - P.W. Singer & August Cole
  30. Death’s End - Cixin Liu
  31. The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu
  32. Station Eleven - Emily St. John
  33. Bandwidth - Eliot Peper

2017

  1. Option B - Sheryl Sandberg
  2. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
  3. Lean In - Sheryl Sandberg
  4. Stealing Fire - Steven Kotler
  5. Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
  6. The Mission, the Men, and Me - Pete Blaber
  7. Grit - Angela Duckworth
  8. The Great Bridge - David McCullough
  9. The Power Broker - Robert Caro
  10. The New Tycoons - Jason Kelly
  11. Extreme Ownership - Jocko Willink
  12. Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss
  13. The Upstarts - Brad Stone
  14. Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
  15. Financially Fearless - Alexa von Tobel
  16. The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu
  17. The Score Takes Care of Itself - Bill Walsh
  18. Hatching Twitter - Nick Bilton
  19. Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance - Louis Gerstner

I didn't track the books I read before 2017. Sorry.

Books to read:

  • Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works - A.G. Lafley
  • Churchill: Walking with Destiny - Andrew Roberts
  • The Art of Doing Science & Engineering - Richard Hamming
  • Power Trip: The Story of Energy - Michael Webber
  • Who Will Care For Us? Long-Term Care and the Long-Term Workforce - Paul Osterman
  • Black Leopard, Red Wolf - Marlon James
  • The Obstacle is the Way - Ryan Holiday
  • Difficult Conversations - Douglas Stone
  • Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
  • The Money Hackers - Daniel Simon
  • Payments Systems in the U.S. - Carol Coye Benson
  • Atomic Habits - James Clear
  • The Mosquito - Timothy Winegard
  • The Case for Space - Robert Zubrin
  • An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management - Will Larson
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
  • The Culture Code - Daniel Coyle
  • The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara
  • Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation
  • Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville

Go back to Michael’s homepage: https://michaelxbloch.com/

Michael Bloch Reading List

NameAuthorYear ReadGenre