CHAPTER · 04

The Margin

A reading log, with footnotes and asides.

A small shelf

Books I'd carry across borders. Pull a boxed set open.

How Life Works

Philip Ball

The Art and Craft of Problem Solving

Paul Zeitz

Energy

Richard Rhodes

Apple in China

Patrick McGee

Apple: The First 50 Years

David Pogue

How Music Got Free

Stephen Witt

Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work

Alvin E. Roth

Why Nations Fail

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets

Donald MacKenzie

A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market

Edward O. Thorp

The Super Gap

Oh-Hyun Kwon

Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building

Claire Hughes Johnson

We Few: U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam

Nick Brokhausen

Higher Love: Climbing and Skiing the Seven Summits

Kit DesLauriers

The Cold Cold Ground

Adrian McKinty

The Man Who Saw Seconds

Alexander Boldizar

The Warrior’s Apprentice

Lois McMaster Bujold

The Will of the Many

James Islington

Think You’ll Be Happy: Moving Through Grief with Grit, Grace, and Gratitude

Nicole Avant

Speaker for the Dead

Orson Scott Card

Ghost Forest

Pik-Shuen Fung

Fahrenheit-182: A Memoir

Mark Hoppus and Dan Ozzi

Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Augustus

John Williams

The Education of Henry Adams

Henry Adams

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

René Girard

Thrown

Kerry Howley

Sátántangó

László Krasznahorkai

Leisure: The Basis of Culture

Josef Pieper

Invisible Cities

Calvino

Cosmicomics

Calvino

If on a winter's night

Calvino

Republic

Plato

Two Treatises of Government

John Locke

The Prince

Machiavelli

Political Theory

Andrew Heywood

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order

Ray Dalio

Broken Money

Lyn Aden

The Ascent of Money

Niall Ferguson

Globalizing Capital

Barry Eichengreen

The Intelligent Investor

Benjamin Graham

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Burton Malkiel

Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives

John C. Hull

Venture Deals

Brad Fred & Jason Mendelson

Money and the Mechanism of Exchange

Jevons

How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle

Ray Dalio

Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises

Ray Dalio

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

The Social Animal

Elliot Aronson

Principles: Life and Work

Ray Dalio

Principles: Your Guided Journal

Ray Dalio

Principles for Success

Ray Dalio

Game Theory

Giacomo Bonanno

The Beginning of Infinity

David Deutsch

Philosophy of Right

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation

Jeremy Bentham

Reflections on the Revolution in France

Edmund Burke

What is property

Joseph Proudhon

Mutual aid

Peter Kropotkin

Spheres of Justice

Michael Walzer

World Society

John W. Buton

On Revolution

Hannah Arendt

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

Peter L. Bernstein

The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It

Douglas W. Hubbard

Financial Risk Manager Handbook

Philippe Jorion

Risk Management and Financial Institutions

John C. Hull

Hedge Fund Operational Due Diligence: Understanding the Risks

Jason Scharfman

read unread

Link log

Read elsewhere, filed in the margin.

Read	Title	Source	Margin
2026-07-18	What Salesforce Learned from 20,000 Enterprise Agent Deployments	blog.bytebytego.com	—
2026-07-14	How Anthropic Built a Multi-Agent Research System	blog.bytebytego.com	—
2026-07-14	How Cursor Shipped its Coding Agent to Production	blog.bytebytego.com	—
2026-07-11	How OpenAI Built Its Data Agent	blog.bytebytego.com	For data agents, keep the agent and tools simple, focus on the data foundation.
2026-07-10	How AI Agents Manage Memory and Avoid Forgetfulness	blog.bytebytego.com	—
2026-07-10	AI Agent versus MCP	blog.bytebytego.com	—
2026-07-10	How Uber Built a Conversational AI Agent For Financial Analysis	blog.bytebytego.com	OpenSearch maps natural language to column names to improve SQL query construction accuracy.
2026-07-09	The Typical AI Agent Stack, Explained	blog.bytebytego.com	—
2026-07-08	The Anatomy of an AI Agent	blog.bytebytego.com	—