Best Reads in 2014

A friend asked me for some recommendations from my reading list last year. I generally read 30 – 50 books a year.

Some of my favourites from 2014:

• How Google Works – Eric Schmidt
• Flash Boys – Michael Lewis
• Zero to One – Peter Thiel
• Fewer, Bigger, Bolder – Sanjay Khosla
• Left Brain, Right Stuff – Phil Rosenzweig
• Scaling Up Excellence – Robert Sutton
• Overworked and Overwhelmed – Scott Elbin
• The Organized Mind – Daniel Levitin
• Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
• The Phoenix Project – Gene Kim

There were a number of books that I did not enjoy in 2014. I tend to either ditch them early or endure them with the faint hope that perhaps things will get better later on in the book.

One example? Capital by Thomas Piketty.

This is what Stevereads had to say about it:

Like a few other culprits on our list this time around, Piketty”™s bloated, nearly-unreadable crap-suzette ”˜study”™ of the fissile nature of capitalist societies wouldn”™t have gained anywhere near the level of notoriety it did if it weren”™t for the craven me-tooism of its reviewers. For two awful months (until, South Sea-style, the thing”™s bubble burst under the pressure of its own absurdity), it was lovingly and lengthily reviewed in every literary journal in Christendom, and if professional reviewers were out of their depth and required actual economists to step in and write pieces pointing out Piketty”™s errors, fair enough. But the only reason so many non-economist reviewers even attempted it in the first place was a plain, damning thing…

The book that I enjoyed the most from 2014 was Console Wars by Blake Harris. From the website:

Console Wars is the story of how a humble family man, with an extraordinary imagination and a gift for turning problems into competitive advantages, inspired a team of underdogs to slay a giant and, as a result, give birth to a sixty-billion-dollar industry.