Summer Reading List 2026

Following my spring reading list, here’s what I’ve been reading this summer. The big news is I finally closed out a book that’s been sitting on my bookshelf’s in-progress shelf since I started this whole reading list series.

Poor Charlie’s Almanack

by Charles T. Munger

I’ve been chipping away at this one as a Slow Burn in every reading list I’ve posted so far, a little at a time, in no rush. This summer I finally got through the rest of it. It’s a collection of Munger’s speeches, talks, and mental models, and it rewards exactly the slow treatment I gave it. Trying to read it cover to cover in a week would waste most of what’s in there.

Munger’s whole approach is about building a latticework of mental models from psychology, economics, physics, and biology, then using all of them together instead of reaching for the one hammer you know best. It’s dense in places and repetitive in others since it’s a compilation of speeches given over decades, but the density is the point. I’ll be rereading pieces of this one for years.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

by Douglas Adams

Book four in my continued Hitchhiker’s reread, and this one’s a real departure from the first three. Arthur Dent lands back on Earth, which turns out not to have been destroyed after all, and instead of another galaxy-spanning romp the book settles into something closer to a love story. He meets Fenchurch, falls for her, and spends most of the book being an ordinary Englishman again instead of a hapless space traveler.

It’s the most grounded book in the series and also probably the funniest line-for-line, even if the plot is thinner than the others. Adams was reportedly miserable writing this one under deadline pressure, and you can occasionally feel the seams, but the character work is some of his best.

The Land Trap

by Mike Bird

Bird, a Wall Street editor at The Economist, traces land ownership across three centuries to make the case that land, not stocks or bonds, is the real linchpin of the global financial system. He starts with colonial-era land grabs and works forward through housing bubbles, China’s property crisis, and the way banks have always preferred lending against dirt over almost anything else.

The core argument is that because land is fixed in supply and banks love it as collateral, it quietly distorts everything from inequality to geopolitics in ways that don’t get nearly enough attention compared to more exciting asset classes. It’s a good companion to the kind of systems thinking I was reading this spring, applied to one very specific and very old asset.

I Hate the Ivy League

by Malcolm Gladwell

A curated collection of Gladwell’s Revisionist History episodes on elite higher education, from the absurdity of U.S. News rankings to why the LSAT rewards the wrong things to how colleges like Bowdoin spend fortunes on dining halls instead of financial aid. His thesis, shaped partly by growing up in the Canadian system, is that American higher ed is built to protect and expand privilege for students who already have plenty of it, rather than to actually educate the middle.

It’s Gladwell in his most provocative mode, which means it’s entertaining even when you don’t fully buy the argument. Having read his book on the Bomber Mafia before, this felt like the same instinct for finding the uncomfortable angle on an institution everyone else takes for granted, aimed at a target closer to home.

Slow Burns

Still working through these two. No rush.

• The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush by G. Pascal Zachary
• The Essays: A Selection by Michel de Montaigne

Wrap Up

An odd mix this time: a book I’ve been carrying around for a year, a return to Arthur Dent, a history of dirt, and Gladwell taking swings at elite colleges. Not much of a common thread except that all four were worth the time.