The Ezra Klein Show

I had this one encounter that reminded me so much of kind of the original coining of the Metaverse and books like Ready Player One.

And number three, Casey Cep's Furious Hours. Casey Cep is like a young master at work and it's the story of the book that Harper Lee tried to write after To Kill a Mockingbird, which was going to be a true crime book, a narrative nonfiction.

We love to kill disabled people in books. It's like one of the first books I read was Little Women and all these women in my life said like, oh, I'm trying to, I find so much identification with Little Women. And I'm like, well, you know, Beth just dies.

Three books would be Beartown by Frederick Backman it's the first in a trilogy about this hockey youth hockey club in a small town in Sweden and I'm looking forward to reading the next two.

we owned The Giving Tree, which is, of course, about a boy and this tree that gives everything down to the very material of its existence to the boy.

He's author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning Evicted. And Evicted, which was a book about housing markets, particularly for the poor, it was a smash hit.

And that brings up the book that other people may know you for earlier, Evicted.

The Princess Bride is by William Goldman. It is hilarious.

It pretends to be an abridged version of a different book, started with William Goldman telling stories to his own daughters, and is an important part of finding joy in a hectic world.

Sung Tzu, The Art of War. I actually have been picking that up again because I think we talked earlier about the need to find a way that Putin can have his golden bridge, some sense of victory.

It is called The Dead Hand, the untold story of the Cold War arms race and its dangerous legacy. It's a really harrowing story of how humans can lose the plot. We as humans, USSR and United States... set ourselves on an incredibly dangerous path, both nuclear weapons and bioweapons, and came close many times to existential level threats.

The other book I'll recommend is Your Face Belongs to Us by my colleague, our colleague at The Times, Kashmir Hill, which is about the facial recognition AI company, Clearview AI, and is one of the most compelling tech books I've read in a few years.

I did read Your Face Belongs to Us by Cash and incredible book. Definitely read that one.

and then I read another book called The Second Mountain. And in that one, I came to think willpower is just not that strong.

And my last book recommendation is Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, which is about this sequel that everyone's like, you're never going to be able to fly that far.

Another book that I learned a lot from just in the way that it's structured and the way that it brings really disparate ideas together is Helen MacDonald's H Is for Hawk, which is a book about grief and memory but also training a hawk and also literary theory.

So back in 2010, I picked up this book that everyone seemed to be reading that year. Just Kids by Patti Smith.

Just Kids is this memoir of Smith's early years in New York and her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

But Just Kids, the beauty of it, the reason I think it worked for so many people, won the National Book Award that year, is it's one of those rare books that makes you feel what a moment must have been like.

I've read it repeatedly. And I know a lot of people for whom that's true. And one of the reasons, I think, is that a lot of us, we sort of wish we had been there in that moment.

The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies, which is just a fantastic exploration of why when things go very wrong in our society, at the end of the day, after all of the investigations, there's sort of no one to blame, and it's the structures of our institution that we've created to do that.

Well, you know, the book that has forever changed my life is Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, Fooled by Randomness. I read it before I started SunEdison a long time ago. And it reminds me today that like all the things that people take credit for, a lot of it was luck. And it's important to figure out luck versus, you know, what you actually did.

Have you ever read the late David Graeber's book, Bullshit Jobs? ... it's about this idea of jobs that the people doing them think need not exist. There are many jobs, and you can poll people and they will tell you this, where they think that what they are doing is useless.

Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek, just an ethic of the way at least helped inform me about leadership and pushing for outcomes with conviction.

Another is a book called The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. It's an amazing book, a vignette about this teenage girl, her upbringing, and it ties in a lot about what it means to live in inadequate housing and people's dreams and aspirations about housing.

The writer Eric Fromm, wrote a book called Escape from Freedom, and he says the real meaning of life is that you get to live it, and what he means is that you, you know, that is the only meaning of life, that you get to live it as you want.