Oscar Hong

Reading is a big part of my life. A few years ago, I started tracking the books I read. I’ve listed them here roughly in the order I read them. I last updated this list 4 hours, 44 minutes ago.

While I no longer write extensive book notes, every once in a while I’ll add short comments or highlights here. Books I’ve learned the most from and recommend often are bolded.

Feel free to reach out if you have or want any book recommendations, or just to talk more about a favourite book we share!

2025

1. Juliet Barker, Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle

• Barker’s definitive account was the perfect on-ramp to learning about The Hundred Years' War. A young Prince Hal was shot in the face by a Welsh longbow arrow at Shrewsbury in 1403. This experience gave him the tactical foundation for a most unlikely and overwhelming victory 12 years later at Agincourt. He was 29.

2. Dan Jones, Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England's Greatest Warrior King

• Jones is a master at narrative history. His take on the life of Henry V is accessible without being overly reductive, threading the needle between hagiography and cynical revisionism.

3. Helen Castor, The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV

• Another case of the reading journey being one big rabbithole. Napoleon led me to Churchill, which in turn led me to Shakespeare’s Henriad. One can’t possibly understand the motivations of Henry V, without first understanding his father, the usurper, Henry IV. And one can’t do that without contrasting him to the cousin he overthrew, Richard II. Castor has the best book on this fraught rivalry.

4. Matthew Parker, One Fine Day: Britain's Empire on the Brink

• Joyce said: “In the particular is contained the universal.” Parker applies this principle to history, by using single day in 1923—when the British Empire was at its territorial zenith—to examine the structural weaknesses that would eventually unravel the empire.

5. Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

• The authors convincingly argue that bubbles, despite their destructive aspects, serve as vital accelerants for technological adoption. Apropos today as the AI buildout is underway. Could AI have taken off without crypto mining creating the demand for (and later glut of) GPUs?

6. Simon Winchester, Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers
7. Haruki Murakami (Translated by Jay Rubin), End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland

• The release of a new translation prompted me to re-read. Possibly Murakami’s apex mountain, as far as surreal fiction goes.

8. Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: Vol 1: The Idealist, 1923-1968

• Kissinger’s undergrad thesis, The Meaning of History, was so long that Harvard added a “Kissinger rule” to cap the maximum length of a thesis at 35K words. His advisor also refused to read past 150 pages.

9. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, & Power

• A book nominally about one thing (oil) that is in fact about everything in the last 150 years.
• The “Hydrocarbon age” defining economies, warfare, and geopolitics is obvious. But I didn’t consider how much of an impact it had on culture. E.g. people went car-mad when they added tailfins and 40% of marriages were proposed in automobiles in the 1950s.
• First oil well in 1859. Rockefeller entered the business in 1863 and set up Standard Oil in 1870. When the wave is big enough, even being “too late” is still early.
• The French Rothschilds fought the Nobels over the Baku oil fields in Russia. Both had to exit once the political turmoil got out of control (in part the work of one 29 year-old Joseph Stalin).
• George Bush passed up Wall St. jobs that’d be consider “normal” for someone of his station (Yale grad, senator dad) to move to West Texas and work his way up starting as a trainee painting oil pump equipment. Especially for the pedigreed, there’s always high alpha in opting to do the low-status thing.

10. Max Adams, The Birth of the Anglo-Saxons: Three Kings and a History of Britain at the Dawn of the Viking Age
11. Anil Ananthaswamy, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI
12. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance
13. Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
14. Asako Yuzuki, Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder
15. Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
16. Eva Dou, House of Huawei: The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company
17. Larry Diamond (editor) et al., Silicon Triangle: The United States, Taiwan, China, and Global Semiconductor Security
18. Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
19. Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back
20. Michael Crawley, Out of Thin Air: Running Wisdom and Magic from Above the Clouds in Ethiopia
21. Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth

2024

1. Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

• After reading Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile last year, I wanted to learn more about Churchill. Naturally I started with Roberts, as his Napoleon is one of my favourite biographies (self-recommending). Definitive yet accessible, Roberts captures the heroism and complexity of Churchill the man, the writer, and the leader. It’s full of passages like this one that fill the reader with zeal:
• “Before the new MP had even taken his seat, he had fought in four wars, published five books, written 215 newspaper and magazine articles, participated in the greatest cavalry charge in half a century and made a spectacular escape from prison. ‘At twenty-five he had fought in more continents than any soldier in history save Napoleon,’ a contemporary profile of him was to proclaim, ‘and seen as many campaigns as any living general.’”

2. Michael Shelden, Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill

• The Churchill we see in our collective memory is the old man leading Britain through WW2, but I was more interested in his formative years. To understand a man, you have you understand the world when he was twenty. This biography covers Churchill up to 1915 (his political nadir). Shelden’s prose is immiently Churchillian: “Believing himself a hero, Churchill worked the magic of making others believe it, too.”

3. John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

• You’ll like this if you like Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. A book ostensibily about the day-to-day drudgery of writing, but really about the mental fortitude need to produce great work. Recommend reading as a companion to the novel.

4. Chris Bailey, How to Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times
5. Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
6. Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

• Main takeaway is to write in “classic style,” i.e. always anchor to a visual description of something in the real world, even when discussing abstract concepts.

7. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

• Wanted to read Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning novel after coming across this article about how he wrote the book in a month. Most of the book is the narrator’s inner monologue and since he’s an old-school English butler, you have to be patient with the passive voices, indefinite pronouns, and circumlocution. You’ll be rewarded at the end. I particularly appreciated its theme echoing Tennyson’s Ulysses:
• “Don't keep looking back all the time, you're bound to get depressed. And all right, you can't do your job as well as you used to. But it's the same for all of us, see? We've all got to put our feet up at some point... All right, so neither of us are exactly in our first flush of youth, but you’ve got to keep looking forward.”

8. Andrew Roberts, Leadership in War: Essential Lessons from Those Who Made History
9. Letters for the Ages: The Private and Personal Letters of Sir Winston Churchill
10. Guy de Pourtalès, Nietzsche in Italy
11. Dan Charnas, Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind
12. Kelly and Juliet Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

• This book got me to take mobility more seriously and walk a lot more. Prelude to “The Year of Movement” in 2025.

13. The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry
14. Mark Helprin, The Oceans and The Stars
15. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
16. James Dodson, Final Rounds: A Father, a Son, the Golf Journey of a Lifetime
17. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
18. Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems
19. Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
20. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant
21. Margaret A. Boden, Artificial Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction
22. Jonathan M. Hansen, Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary
23. John McPhee, Levels of the Game
24. J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
25. Josh Starmer, The StatQuest Illustrated Guide to Machine Learning
26. Amor Towles, Table for Two
27. John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• “It seems to me that if you or I just choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that out death brings no pleasure to our world.” The entire novel is filled with beautiful writing.

2023

1. Jimmy Soni, The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
2. Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World
3. Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
4. Robert A. Caro, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing
5. Craig L. Symonds, World War II at Sea: A Global History
6. Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
7. Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
8. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
9. Sam Walton, Sam Walton: Made in America
10. John Williams, Stoner
11. Samir Kassir, Beirut
12. Mike Wilson, The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison
13. Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
14. Keith Clarke, Culture Won: How Culture Propelled Arm from Start-Up to Global Technology Phenomenon
15. Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927
16. String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis
17. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why
18. Leo Tolstoy (Translated by Anthony Briggs), War and Peace
19. Seth Godin, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work
20. John McPhee, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process
21. Clair Brown and Greg Linden, Chips and Change: How Crisis Reshapes the Semiconductor Industry
22. Joe Studwell, How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World's Most Dynamic Region
23. William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi
24. Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, His Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
25. Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965-2000
26. Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

• I’d also recommend the excellent year-long podcast series by 99% Invisible. It shows the ripple effects this book still has on today’s politics.

2022

1. Eric Berne, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships
2. Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way
3. Blake Crouch, Dark Matter
4. Matthew Dicks, Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling
5. Robert Greene, Mastery
6. Gary Halbert, The Boron Letters
7. Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again
8. Ryan Holiday, Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave
9. John Kaag, Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are
10. Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics)
11. Henry Kissinger, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy
12. Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
13. Jessica Livingston, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
14. Michael S. Malone, The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley
15. Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be
16. Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation
17. James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
18. Michael Ovitz, Who Is Michael Ovitz?
19. Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life
20. Michael Watts, Kierkegaard: An Essential Introduction

Earlier…

Including some what I remember reading in undergrad and high school.

1. Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
2. David Benioff, City of Thieves
3. Carol J. Benson et al., Payment Systems in the U.S.
4. Michael Beschloss, Presidents of War: The Epic Story, from 1807 to Modern Times
5. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
6. David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
7. William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
8. Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test
9. Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
10. John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
11. Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers
12. S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
13. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
14. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
15. Hamilton Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
16. Dee Hock, Autobiography of a Restless Mind: Reflections on the Human Condition Volume 1
17. Homer (Translated by Emily Wilson), The Odyssey
18. Eric Jorgenson, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness
19. Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked
20. Phil Knight, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
21. Cormac McCarthy, The Road
22. Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
23. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
24. John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design
25. Plato, The Republic
26. Ahmed Siddiqui, The Anatomy of the Swipe: Making Money Move
27. Randall E. Stross, eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work
28. Dante Alighieri (Mandelbaum translation), Commedia (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso)
29. Marcus Aurelius (Hays translation), Meditations
30. Chris Bailey, The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy
31. John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
32. Mark Cuban, How to Win at the Sport of Business
33. Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work
34. Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
35. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times
36. Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
37. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
38. Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
39. Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
40. Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now
41. Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
42. Matthew Polly, Bruce Lee: A Life
43. Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
44. Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
45. J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun
46. Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
47. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
48. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
49. William Golding, Lord of the Flies
50. Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
51. James Kerr, Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life
52. George Orwell, Animal Farm
53. Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life