People ask me to share my reading list with them. I always credit my breadth of reading for how knowledgeable I am about most things.
The way I decide what to read is hardly straightforward, which is why I am making this post – to share how I arrive at my reading list and how I think about reading in general.
I tend to read in themes. When I become intrigued by a topic, I look for books that help me understand it more deeply – but not necessarily books that are directly about that topic. Instead, I look for what Malcolm Gladwell calls ‘overstories’; indirect, overlapping narratives that illuminate a subject from the edges rather than the center. By reading these adjacent stories, I piece together my own timeline and interpretation.
For example, last year I wanted to study 20th-century New York and understand how it became the financial capital of the world and the city of dreams. The easy approach would have been to read straightforward histories of New York. But that wouldn’t have given me the nuance I wanted. As someone who likes thinking from first principles, I prefer to build my own theory. So I read books about people who moved to New York during that era—founders, immigrants, strivers, and builders who created businesses or achieved outsized success. Through their distinct stories, I reconstructed what New York must have felt like at the time. In the end, I didn’t just learn, I formed my own version of the story. That’s how I choose what to read.
For 2026, these are reading themes with some commentary.
- Chips – I think semiconductor chips will be oil’s equivalent in today’s digital age, and I want to understand how they are produced, the entire supply chain, the companies driving them and the intrigue behind how they get from source to the customer. To start, these are the four books I will be reading:
- Apple in China by Patrick McGee
- Chip Wars by Chris Miller – Of course, this book
- The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt
- House of Huawei by Eva Dou
- Biographies and Memoirs – I love reading the stories of builders in their own words; they often contain anecdotes that others miss, which I find very valuable. Building is tough; everyone can talk, but very few do the actual work, so I have a great deal of respect for people who actually build. My choice of builders this year is based on various topics that I want to get overstories from:
- When The Going Was Good by Graydon Carter
- Source Code by Bill Gates
- Call Me Ted by Ted Turner
- Breaking History by Jared Kushner
- Walt Disney by Neal Gabler
- The Power Broker by Robert Caro
- The Age of Creation – in order to create, you must know the methods of creation. You can read about people or things:
- 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin
- Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
- Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Gods of New York by Jonathan Mahler
- Systems Thinking – I am a systems thinker, and there are some books I re-read as my yearly ritual to further deepen my thought leadership in this field. I can only share one for now, so as not to give away what I’m working/ideating around:
- Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
- Fiction and Others – books that don’t fit into a category, or fiction, sometimes I like to use fiction or narrative non-fiction to take breaks in between my laborious and in-depth reads:
- Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
- Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst
- No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe
- The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Of course, depending on live events that occur this year, my themes may change and take a detour, but this gives you an idea of how I think about my list. Feel free to join me; the books are not listed in any chronological order, and I have already completed some of the books on this list this year (on my third book), and I may write some reviews as the year progresses.
Enjoy.