Favourite Books
My favourite books on investing
The greatest of them all…The Intelligent Investor by the incomparable Benjamin Graham. A must for anyone who wants to be an investor. if you read this one and the number 2 below, you really don’t need to read anything else.
This is not a book, but this collection of annual letters from the Oracle of Omaha beats the best investment books out there (including mine).
If you want to understand Buffett and his simple (but not easy) investment approach, you can’t do better than Robert Hagstrom’s The Warren Buffett Way.
Morgan Housel is a Partner at The Collaborative Fund and has written an excellent book on money; it’s not necessarily a book on investing.
This one looks like a coffee table book, but it is genuinely readable and will make you a better investor and a human being. It’s called Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. The best chapters are Charlie’s lectures on various college campuses where he offers his timeless wisdom and advice.
One of the most successful investment books of all time is Peter Lynch’s One Up On Wall Street. He had a stupendous track record from 1977 to 1990 and maybe what he said will resonate with you. His advice for the retail investor is to use what they know from their life experience to invest in high quality businesses.
My favourite books on evolutionary theory
The greatest book of all (yes, “all” – including all the books ever written on any subject): Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Was published in 1859 but is eminently readable even today.
A popular book that got me started on evolutionary theory is Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. He makes a controversial case (that the unit of selection is gene) but boy.
Carl Simmer is an extraordinarily gifted writer and his book Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea is a genuine classic.
A graduate-level book that covers most topics of evolutionary theory quite well is Mark Ridley’s Evolution.
One of my favourites on the general theory of evolution is Stephen Jay Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. It’s a huge book but its value far exceeds its weight.
A highly accessible book on genetics for laypeople is Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene: An Intimate History. The study of genetics can be difficult but this book makes it is easy.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to discern where evolutionary biology ends and philosophy begins (e.g., is the gene really ‘selfish’?). If I had to choose one book to get started on the philosophy of evolution, it would be Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science by Elliott Sober.