What I've been reading

People ask me all the time what I've been reading, or what I would recommend. I'm still working on a canonical football book post, listing "must reads" for understanding the game (to be honest it's not an easy list). But I want to make this "what I've been reading" bit a semi-regular series. It will of course include both football and non-football books.

1. The Great Crash of 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith - Wish it was less pertinent, but them's the breaks.

2. Concept Passing: Teaching the Modern Passing Game by Dan Gonzalez - An important book. I have an article with contributions from Dan that will be up on the site next week; I recommend checking out both (the article and the book).

3. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe - Never read this -- until now -- and am pleasantly surprised how both pertinent and entertaining it is. Read the book; avoid the movie.

4. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Taleb is well, ascerbic, but this is an excellent and important book. I also like it better than the Black Swan, which, while good, often feels somewhat like a bloated chapter out of Fooled by Randomness.

5. Wall Street on the Tundra by Michael Lewis - An article about Iceland ("the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, 'Well, at least we didn’t do that.'") for Vanity Fair magazine. Great stuff.

6. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood - Not sure if it is exactly up the alley of a lot of this site's readers, but it was one of the best novel's I've read in some time. Judge Richard Posner wrote an excellent review of the book for the New Republic that can be found here.

7. Blindsided: Why the Left Tackle is Overrated and Other Contrarian Football Thoughts by KC Joyner - Eh