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26 August 2026

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Your best reads of 2016

Please use the comment section to share your most enjoyable book of 2016.

It will soon be the time of year when people turn their mind to casual reading, so tell us your best book. It could be an oldie or a newie, and let's get a reading list going.

 

  •   8 December 2016
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20 Comments
Graham Hand
December 07, 2016

I enjoyed dusting off 'Nudge' by Thaler and Sunstein. Great insights into how people behave and make decisions, often counterintutive.

Leisa
December 08, 2016

I've been getting into the audiobook format this year. I quite enjoyed 'reading' The Good Girl, by Mary Kubica while out walking! A suspense/thriller told from the different perspectives of each character.

Gary M
December 08, 2016

Alastair Campbell's 'Winners and How They Succeed' is an easy read, describing how dozens of people have made a massive impact on society.

Jeremy Cooper
December 08, 2016

Snap. Did the same. There is a film also. Very refreshing.

Looking forward to reading Michael Lewis' new book: The Undoing Project - about the partnership between Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman who wrote many brilliant papers on why we are such poor intuitive statisticians and related behavioural economics topics.

Alex
December 08, 2016

Too many fans of Thaler? A great summary of his work in Misbehaving, The Making of Behavioural Economics.

Ian Wilson
December 08, 2016

The Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape, a great read for the young ones to start on the journey to financial literacy and for the older generation who did not bother.

Jonathan Hoyle
December 08, 2016

'I Am Pilgrim' by Terry Hayes

Brilliant

Harry McGrath
December 08, 2016

Yes, I Am Pilgrim a great read!

Jonathan Hoyle
December 08, 2016

Indeed Jeremy. 'Thinking fast and slow' is the Book of the Decade.

John O'Connell
December 08, 2016

Why Minsky Matters, by L Randall Wray.
Minsky was a maverick economist who the mainstream rejected as a crackpot ... yet his theories of how an economy and markets work was vindicated by the global financial crisis. His core idea is that 'stability is inherently destabilising' Sounds odd, but it means that the longer we have stable predictable markets the more greed will embolden people to lever up ... the eventual result is the additional leverage makes the market/economy unstable... resulting in a spectacular meltdown ie you need to embrace capitalisms cycles for capitalism to work.

Minsky's own work was very hard slog ... but this book from one of his students is a well written read that brings clarity to this Bear Grylls of the economist world to life.

Doug Reynolds
December 08, 2016

On a light hearted note try GIRT a history of Australia that will have you laughing at every page and learning as well

John O'Connell
December 08, 2016

Narconomics; How to run a drug cartel, by Tom Wainwright.

This book is an expose par excellence, written in an engaging style. It looks at the South American drug cartels through an economists eyes - similar to Freakonomics - the beauty here is the dispassionate observation of drug cartels as corporate businesses with their gruesome actions as being the inevitable outcomes of drug 'CEOs' trying to make ends meet.
Its so good that next year McKinsey will probably turn it into a powerpoint.

watch Narcos on Netflix, then read this book ... it will make you question everything you believe about how to tackle the illicit drug industry.
highly recommended for the beach

Alan Hartstein
December 08, 2016

Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar is loosely about jokes and their relationships to different strands of philosophy. It's side-splittingly funny from start to finish, and I won't say any more because that would spoil it!

Denise Williams
December 08, 2016

"The Straight Dope. The Inside Story of Sport's Biggest Drug Scandal" by Chip Le Grand.

"City Limits: Why Australia’s cities are broken and how we can fix them" by Jane-Frances Kelly and Paul Donegan

"25 Years of Whitt & Wisdom" by Noel Whittaker

"The organized mind : thinking straight in the age of information overload" by Daniel J. Levitin.

"The sovereign individual : mastering the transition to the information age" by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg.

Tim
December 08, 2016

When Breath Becomes Air

Nothing to do with investment – everything to do with life.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Breath-Becomes-Paul-Kalanithi/dp/1847923674/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481187595&sr=1-1&keywords=when+breath+becomes+air

T

Rodney Behrendorff
December 08, 2016

Scott Pape's new book The Barefoot Investor

It covers everything from the cradle to the grave in one excellent book. In that sense it is correct when it portays itself as the "The only money book you'll ever need".

Allan Hanson
December 09, 2016

The most Important thing: Uncommon sense for the thoughtful investor - Howard Marks

The book is more about psychology and ways of thinking about value portfolio management.

Garry M
December 11, 2016

Retirement gives time for more reading!
For those who wonder why some countries sustain wealth and others wallow in despair I thoroughly recommend Why Nations Fail by Economoglu and Robinson.For those who are interested in the historical shaping of global foreign policy,World Order by Henry Kissinger ,and for a terrific novel on how the Brits deceived Hitler about which part of the French coast the Allied Invasion would be centred on,I recommend The Best of Our Spies by Alex Gerlis

James
December 14, 2016

Chaos Monkey _ Obscene fourtune and random failure in Silicon Valley. Story of a failed PHD student who went from Goldman sachs to a small startup that sold to Twitter then onto facebook where he built agorithims for them. Very well written and interesting insight into silicon valley mindset and inside story of Facebook circa listing in 2013.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. Autobiography of founder of Nike. he oultines the early tears of Nike and how it almost went broke after failed japanese trade deals and product flops. Very interesting.

Paul
January 20, 2017

The great unwinding by George Packer

 

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