Ask HN: Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2023?

I love diving deep in ancient history with respect to sites across the world to uncover the truth. I find these books fascinating :-

- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Epic-Humanity-Billy-Carson/dp/B0CR7...

- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stage-Time-Secrets-Reality-Ancient/...

- Also if you want to uncover a plethora of free online resources ->> https://sacred-texts.com/ <<-

Here's my list from 2023 (mostly history with some mythology):

* Lost Continents by L. Sprague de Camp (1954)

* Slouching Towards Utopia by J. Bradford DeLong (2022)

* The Rise of Universities by Charles Homer Haskins (1923)

* Colonial New England on 5 Shillings a Day by Bill Scheller (2010)

* The Book of Yōkai by Michael Foster (2015)

See here for some notes I wrote about these books: https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-books-2023/

I find that I am usually one year off when reading new books. I was really excited about Slouching Towards Utopia but didn't get to it until last Spring (though it came out in early Fall 2022).

I really enjoyed The Fat Tail by Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat, which is about political risk and how to mitigate or manage it. Think revolutions, regulatory changes, elections etc. and how they affect markets. Another gem I found was the book Rational Choice in an Uncertain World by Robyn M. Dawes. It is a bit dated (the first version that I read is from 1988), but covers a lot of early research by people like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. As someone born after the book was published a lot of the examples and scenarios used to illustrate rational choice were also new to me, e.g., the Cuban missile crisis, Affirmative Action. However, there is also a second edition from 2009 so it might be a better option.

It wasn’t written in 2023 but my favorite non-fiction book I read last year was We Took To the Woods.

Written in the early 1940s it has bits of wisdom sprinkled throughout the tales of life in the backwoods of Maine at a time when the area was barely accessible to those on the outside.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions- Thomas Kuhn (oldie but goldie)

Permanent Record -Ed Snowden (maybe a little dated but still fairly relevant)

I found the two Sam Quinones books on the US opiate epidemic fascinating.

- Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

- The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

The Missing Billionaires: A Guide To Better Financial Decisions, by Victor Haghani & James White.

This book covers wide ranging topics within investing, hedging, personal finance, lifecycle investing and asset pricing. One of the key ideas is recognizing comprehensively that investing and spending are both simultaneous goals of lifecycle investing. It is absolutely refreshing to see the basics of investing revisited in a theoretically sound & rigorous framework.

The authors run a wealth management firm, Elm Wealth.

The Path Between the Seas - David McCullough