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What follows is my current book queue. As always, I would be grateful for additional title suggestions from any readers out there! Please leave a comment in any of the posts in this blog. You can also reach me at dan1529[at]yahoo[dot]com.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America by Thomas Friedman

Find More Time: How to Get Things Done at Home, Organize Your Life, and Feel Great About It by Laura Stack

Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life by Maxwell Maltz

Undaunted Courage : Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives by Richard A. Swenson

The Great 401 (K) Hoax: Why Your Family's Financial Security is at Risk, and What You Can Do about It by William Wolman and Anne Colamosca

Note: What I Just Read reserves the right to read these books out of order.
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The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker

A book about heeding the miraculous cognitive process we call intuition, "a brilliant internal guardian" that enables us to perceive things before they happen. This book give you a tremendous set of tools for assessing risks, making predictions, and understanding which things you should (and shouldn't!) be afraid of. This book is a wonderful navigational tool for modernity. I'll add that aside from being an insightful guy, author Gavin de Becker is quite an interesting guy. I recommend digging into any of the podcasts or long-form interviews he's done. See for example  this interview with Tucker Carlson , striking in part because Carlson (for once) hardly talks--he simply lets de Becker talk. [Again, please skip or skim these notes below, they are too long and life is short!] Notes:   Chapter 1: In the Presence of Danger 1) "Like every creature, you can know when you are in the presence of danger. You have the gift of a brilliant internal guardian that stand...
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Merchants of Grain by Dan Norman

[Recommended for investing geeks and students of power structures. Everyone else can take a pass.] Certain industries or companies need to be "visible" and in the public eye. See, for example, story stocks like Nvidia, or branded consumer products companies (which require name recognition and habit formation in order to sell product), or any company run by a celebrity CEO. Think of this as one level of visibility. Note also: any publicly traded company--even if it has a name or a CEO nobody's ever heard of--must file financial reports and other filings. To have access to public equity markets and have your stock trade on an exchange, your company has to "come in and register" (to borrow the phrase from incompetent SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler), and this means putting a lot of information about your business out in the open. Now anybody can look at your filings, see your profitability metrics, see who your managers and directors and large shareholders are, and s...
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The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann R. Wyss

Reading this famous book opens a window into the cultural and ethical milieu of early 19th century Europe. We see an idealized family facing severe challenges in an unknown and exotic part of the world, and doing so without despair or pessimism. To a modern reader, the Robinson family might resemble  The Cosby Show : the father comes across as a bit of a pedant, the children speak in complete and grammatically-correct sentences [1] , and the family solves problems in the book-chapter equivalent of a 30 minute TV segment. Other dubious elements of the story might amuse the adult reader: see for example their island's impossible array of wildlife and botany, or the family's ability to MacGyver almost anything out of anything. And yet one can easily see how this would be a wonderful and ethically nutritious story for a young person to read (or have read to him or her), as it conveys a range of non-cynical messages that are rapidly disappearing from the modern era: on not being id...
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