№ 01
“Number Go Up, by Bloomberg's Zeke Faux, is the best book yet written about cryptocurrency. Zeke is engaging, sometimes self-aware, and writes well.” source
Tech writer and essayist
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie, known online as patio11, is a technology and finance essayist who spent years at Stripe and now writes the Bits about Money newsletter and hosts the Complex Systems podcast. His long-running Kalzumeus Software blog is a canonical reference for engineers navigating salary negotiation, SaaS, and the plumbing of modern financial systems.
8
Recommendations
2024
Most recent list
Non-Fiction
Most-recommended
On the record
All Patrick McKenzie book recommendations.
№ 02
“The Big Short is a dramatization of a gang of outsiders (and insiders who are presented as outsiders for narrative convenience) who correctly predict the mechanism and course of the global financial crisis. It is not enough to merely be right and contrarian if you want to make money.” source
№ 03
“A worthy entry in the dragon/banking crossover genre. The series features a fairly extensive look at a not-quite-Medici merchant bank with a plausible business model and clientele, focused primarily on distributing risk among merchants for sea voyages and capital development for land-based productive enterprises.” source
№ 04
“All sorts of people try to tell lies for money far, far more than civilians would appreciate, and at a much higher rate and a much wider segment of the population.” source
№ 05
“If you want to know about how government procurement works from someone who really knows something about it, you should go read Bureaucracy by James Q. Wilson.” source
№ 06
“The bible on this subject is a book called Trading and Exchanges, by Larry Harris. It is expensive, dense, and worth every penny if you plan to pursue this professionally.” source
№ 07
“If you learn best from books, my buddy Josh Doody wrote one on this topic called Fearless Salary Negotiation. I rather enjoyed it.” source
№ 08
“The Man Who Solved the Market is the best account we have of Renaissance Technologies, and it is a rare book that treats a firm which prints money as being intellectually interesting rather than merely enviable.” source
Readers with overlapping taste
