This is a new initiative of mine, where I list the books that I have read in year X and also mention the book that I’m currently reading. This post also comes after a long break and I hope to start blogging regularly (as you can see I am already 2 years behind).

Alright, it’s 2020, we’re in the early stages of the pandemic and are confined to our homes. I lost the habit of reading during my undergrad so I finally thought of getting some reading done.

A brief bit of context for the type of books you’ll see below - I always was interested in human psychology (still am) and had also started thinking about investing. I was reading books independently out of these two categories, until I stumbled upon this sub-field in economics called behavioral economics. In short, as the name suggests, it combines the fields classical economics and psychology in order to understand why humans make certain choices/decisions (in other words, understand why humans do what they do) in investing, and more broadly, in life. This, therefore, ended up defining the trajectory for some of the the books I would be reading for the year.

  1. Think and Grow Rich - Napolean Hill
  2. The Power of your Subconscious Mind - Dr. Joseph Murphy
    • More of a self-help than psychology, the book gives some amazing insights into our subconscious mind and how we can condition it to achieve our goals.
  3. Atomic Habits - James Clear
    • I don’t think I have ever seen this book outside of Amazon Charts
  4. Freakonomics - Steven Dubner and Stephen Levitte
    • While the book is definitely a fun read, Steven Dubner also has a podcast series Freakonomics Radio that continues discussing the questions that we usually take for granted (or not).
  5. Misbehaving, the making of Behavioral Economics - Richard Thaler
    • The book that I would recommed for anyone interested in this sub-field of economics.
  6. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness - Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
    • Since I loved Thaler’s style of writing, I decided to read this. As aptly said in the title, it is amazing how simple nudges in the right direction, can go a long way in cultivating a better life. This is precisely one of the reasons I am interested in behavioral economics - it brings forth the subtleties of human behaviour that would otherwise be hard to observe in the (hundreds of) decisions that we make in our everyday lives.
  7. Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely
  8. Apathy and Other Small Victories: A Novel - Paul Neilan
    • This has to be the funniest book I have ever read.
  9. The Master Algorithm - Pedro Domingos
    • For someone working in machine learning (and being fairly familiar with the topics of the book), I found that the author gives some refreshing takes on the topics, that could be easily understood by non-machine learning audience.
  10. The Spy and The Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story in the History of Cold War - Ben Macintyre
    • Who doesn’t love a gold old spy thriller ;)
  11. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything - Joshua Foer
    • This book is not about moonwalking or Einstein. I bought this just by looking at the title. However, it gives some great tips on training your memory for long term retention. In hindsight, as a PhD student now, a meta-lesson that I got from this is that a catchy title has important downstream effects in whether someone reads (or does not read) your work, given a split-second to decide.

People who know a bit about the field might be wondering how I have left out what, in my opinion, is the classic in behavioral economics - Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I procrastinated on this for far too long (my gullible System 2 is the one to blame here) but finally, this is the book that I am currently reading.