I applaud you for encouraging new grads to read books, and these are excellent choices. I hope if you do a post like this again that you also might recommend fiction. Novels expand the mind and heart by sharing the human experience in ways that nonfiction books usually don't. Some of my recent favorite novels that I think will make readers better, kinder people: Kin by Tayari Jones, Theo of Golden by Allen Levi, Life & Death & Giants by Ron Rindo, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, The Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie Bostwick, What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown ... sorry, I could go on and on. I hope more grads read as much or more for pleasure as for productivity!
I’ve read 9/12! Deep Work is game changing. I would add: Why We Sleep, David Goggins’ two books, Think Again by Adam Grant, Outlive by Peter Attia, anything by Daniel Pink, Stephen King’s On Writing (kill adverbs), The Elements of Style, The Obstacle is the Way, The Happiness Files by Arthur Brooks, and Daring Greatly.
Adding some of these to my TBR list! Unfortunately, my recent graduate is not a reader beyond anything she is required to read. But I also remember I took a break from anything too "educational" right after college. Was burnt out. Took some time to find my love of books back.
A good graduation reading list should do more than make someone sound educated. It should help them build a relationship with uncertainty, discipline, ambition, loss, and attention. The best books for that stage are not just answers — they are better questions to carry into adulthood.
I've only read 5 of the 12, but Housel is a great starting point. The way he frames the psychology of money (why patience is hard, why compounding is counterintuitive, why people make bad decisions even when they know better) is one of those books that changes how you see your own financial behavior.
The piece he doesn't cover, though, is the ground underneath. A dollar saved in 1955 still bought roughly a dollar's worth of goods when you spent it. A dollar saved today loses more than half its purchasing power before retirement. When the math punishes patience, the behavioral advice to "be patient" hits different.
For anyone checking this list who wants to understand why the economy their parents navigated no longer exists, I'd add Christopher Leonard's "The Lords of Easy Money" and David Gelles's "The Man Who Broke Capitalism." Leonard shows how one institution quietly reshaped what a dollar buys. Gelles shows how one CEO's playbook reshaped what a career looks like. Between the two, a lot of what Housel describes as behavioral starts to look structural.
I applaud you for encouraging new grads to read books, and these are excellent choices. I hope if you do a post like this again that you also might recommend fiction. Novels expand the mind and heart by sharing the human experience in ways that nonfiction books usually don't. Some of my recent favorite novels that I think will make readers better, kinder people: Kin by Tayari Jones, Theo of Golden by Allen Levi, Life & Death & Giants by Ron Rindo, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, The Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie Bostwick, What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown ... sorry, I could go on and on. I hope more grads read as much or more for pleasure as for productivity!
Decent list.
I’d add (in no particular order)
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
Die With Zero by Bill Perkins
and
Atomic Habits by James Clear
I’ve read 9/12! Deep Work is game changing. I would add: Why We Sleep, David Goggins’ two books, Think Again by Adam Grant, Outlive by Peter Attia, anything by Daniel Pink, Stephen King’s On Writing (kill adverbs), The Elements of Style, The Obstacle is the Way, The Happiness Files by Arthur Brooks, and Daring Greatly.
Adding some of these to my TBR list! Unfortunately, my recent graduate is not a reader beyond anything she is required to read. But I also remember I took a break from anything too "educational" right after college. Was burnt out. Took some time to find my love of books back.
A good graduation reading list should do more than make someone sound educated. It should help them build a relationship with uncertainty, discipline, ambition, loss, and attention. The best books for that stage are not just answers — they are better questions to carry into adulthood.
Hope in the Dark is a new one for me! Thanks for the recommendation!
I've only read 5 of the 12, but Housel is a great starting point. The way he frames the psychology of money (why patience is hard, why compounding is counterintuitive, why people make bad decisions even when they know better) is one of those books that changes how you see your own financial behavior.
The piece he doesn't cover, though, is the ground underneath. A dollar saved in 1955 still bought roughly a dollar's worth of goods when you spent it. A dollar saved today loses more than half its purchasing power before retirement. When the math punishes patience, the behavioral advice to "be patient" hits different.
For anyone checking this list who wants to understand why the economy their parents navigated no longer exists, I'd add Christopher Leonard's "The Lords of Easy Money" and David Gelles's "The Man Who Broke Capitalism." Leonard shows how one institution quietly reshaped what a dollar buys. Gelles shows how one CEO's playbook reshaped what a career looks like. Between the two, a lot of what Housel describes as behavioral starts to look structural.