Spring Reading List 2026

Following my winter reading list, here’s what I’ve been reading this spring.

The Fish That Ate the Whale

by Rich Cohen

The story of Sam Zemurray, a Russian immigrant who started by selling ripe bananas off a train car in Alabama and ended up running the United Fruit Company, one of the most powerful corporations in American history. Along the way he overthrew governments, built railroads through jungles, and basically treated Central America as his personal fiefdom.

Cohen writes it like a gangster story because that’s basically what it is. Zemurray was brilliant, ruthless, and operated in that era where the line between business and imperialism didn’t really exist. It’s a wild ride.

Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

A quiet novel told by an old woman looking back on her life in a small Kentucky farming community. Hannah loses her first husband in World War II, rebuilds her life with a second marriage, raises children, and watches them leave for cities and professions that have nothing to do with the land she and her husband worked.

Berry writes about place and community and the slow erosion of rural life without ever being preachy about it. It’s just one woman’s honest account of what she gained and what she lost. The prose is simple in that way that’s actually very hard to pull off.

Thinking in Systems

by Donella H. Meadows

A primer on systems thinking from one of the field’s clearest writers. Meadows breaks down how to see the world in terms of stocks, flows, and feedback loops rather than isolated events. She covers everything from bathtub dynamics to why good intentions so often produce terrible policy outcomes.

The book was published posthumously and has that quality of someone who spent decades teaching these ideas and finally distilled them down to their essence. It’s short, practical, and changed how I think about a surprising number of things. If you’ve ever wondered why complex problems resist simple solutions, start here.

Life, the Universe and Everything

by Douglas Adams

Third book in the Hitchhiker’s series and continuing my reread from last season. This one picks up with Arthur Dent stuck on prehistoric Earth and quickly spirals into a plot involving cricket, an ancient war, and the destruction of everything. It’s probably the most conventionally plotted of the series, which for Adams still means gloriously chaotic.

The jokes still land decades later. Adams had a gift for making absurdity feel inevitable, like of course that’s how intergalactic warfare would work. Of course cricket is the key to everything.

Slow Burns

These three are all collections of shorter essays and writings, and I’m reading them more as a practice than straight through. All are excellent and I’m continuing to work through them.

• Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charles T. Munger
• The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush by G. Pascal Zachary
• The Essays: A Selection by Michel de Montaigne

Wrap Up