I often get asked what I read and
what I would recommend reading. While what one should read is largely a function
of area of interest and background and therefore unique to each individual, I
have tried to list here the resources I use or have used in the past for my
reading. Hope this helps. If reading resources are what you are looking for, please
skip the next two paragraphs.
Reading is and has always been my
first love. It is a habit my parents inculcated in me in early childhood and my
mom made sure to purchase books in bulk from a famous shop located in my birth
town of Indore when we went on annual visits to my grandparents’ during
summers. She always made it a point to ask my teachers for book recommendations
when she came visiting on results day at school. As a result, I was exposed to
great reading material in my formative years in both English and Hindi. To this
day, I credit my command over Hindi to the foundation that my mom laid for me
by making me read the Panchtantra, Hitopdesha, Ramayana, Mahabharata and Premchand
in Hindi in their unabridged versions. My general interest and curiosity in the
world around was piqued through my reading of the encyclopaedias meant for
children of slightly older ages. I consider it the greatest gift my parents
have given to me. But enough about that for now. Fast forward to the present.
With time, my reading preferences
have shifted and evolved and I read very little fiction now. Not that I don’t
like it but with pending reading far outstripping available time, my priorities
lie elsewhere. Here’s a near exhaustive list of everything I used to read,
still read or plan to read at some point in future. It includes books,
magazines, websites, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages I use as the source of
my reading material. The volume of material out there I’d like to read is
overwhelming and it feels like having to run faster every day to stay at the
same place.
Books
My reading is quite eclectic. I
read business, economics, finance, strategy, politics, policy, psychology, philosophy, science, biographies,
history, oil and gas, mining, military affairs and so on. You can find a list
of most of the books I have read in the last 7-8 years or want to read going
forward in the following links.
Goodreads is a platform that I
use to chronicle my reading, rate books and write short reviews. Amazon bought
it out for a billion dollars some 2-3 years back. If you are not there already,
you should be. It is an excellent place to see what readers are saying about a
particular book and to browse through other people’s reading lists to see what
they are reading and whether it’s aligned to your interests.
I have changed the setting for my
Amazon wishlist to public so it’s visible to everyone now. This is the list of
books I plan to read at some point and keep adding anything that looks or
sounds interesting.
The Financial Times newspaper
comes out with a long-list of candidates for its Book of the Year Award every
year and it has been a reliable source for me to pick the best books of the
year. I also try to keep sourcing recommendations from knowledgeable people at
every possible opportunity and add them to my Amazon wish list.
The Blinkist is a new app available for iPhone and Android that
offers concise, succinct summaries of books for those who are hard pressed for
time. As of now there are only a 1000 books and beyond a 3-day trial period you
need to pay a subscription fee. They have received funding and plan to use the
money to expand the library to more than 10,000 books.
Newspapers & Magazines
Here’s a list of newspapers and
magazines I read either occasionally or frequently.
1) Economic Times
2) Mint
3) Business Standard
4) Financial Times (I follow
mostly the Mining/Oil & Gas sections on a regular basis owing to my
interest and background)
5) Wall Street Journal
6) New York Times
7) Foreign Policy (gives excellent
perspectives on international affairs)
8) The Economist
9) Harvard Business Review (started
reading this after coming to SPJIMR and have continued since)
10) The Caravan (India’s only
long form journalism magazine)
11) Bloomberg
Some of these like Economist,
HBR, NYT, FT, WSJ etc. offer a few articles for free every week/month. If you
use Chrome, it is pretty easy to get around this restriction most of the time
by switching to Incognito mode. Businessworld and Business India are two Indian
business magazines that are good but I have hardly been able to read them in
the last two years due to lack of time.
Reading on Technology/Start-up Space
2) http://theverge.com
(their Long Form pieces are extremely insightful)
3) http://inc42.com
(if you are following the Indian start-up space, this is the single best
resource to read that I know of)
Using Social Media
The accounts I follow include a
mix of media outlets, financial research houses, private equity funds,
well-known faces in the field of journalism, policy, politics, finance and
economics and so on. Their tweets either contain useful takes on issues or links
to good reading material on the web. If you are on Twitter, here’s the list of
accounts I follow:
On Facebook, I follow the pages
of Bloomberg, National Geographic, Inc42, HBR, FT and The Economist actively.
Facebook is the source of most of my reading material these days.
Finance Related
The following are some of the best
sources of Finance related reading material on the web that I am aware of.
1) http://valuewalk.com
(if connected to or interested in the world of investing, this is THE resource
of resources)
2) http://zerohedge.com
(What you find here cannot be found anywhere else on the web. Seasoned finance
professionals follow this blog religiously for its boldly cynical take on
markets and financial institutions. Many of the predictions made here about
disastrous events have turned out to be prescient.)
3) http://advisorperspectives.com (a
platform similar to Project Syndicate but for Finance related stuff only)
4) http://mauldineconomics.com (The
newsletters are an absolute gem and free of cost. With George Friedman (the
founder of Stratfor) joining John Mauldin, the new Geopolitics newsletter from
them is essential reading for anyone connected to markets.)
5) http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com
(This is the famous Musings on Markets blog of Aswath Damodaran, the acclaimed
valuation practitioner)
6) http://doubleline.com
(The website of Double Line Capital run by Jeff Gundlach. He is the guy any practitioner
in the Fixed Income space follows religiously)
7) http://vccircle.com
(For the latest dope on funding, capital raising and M&A deals in the
Indian start up/PE space)
8) http://visualcapitalist.com (Purely for
the mindblowing graphics they use to explain everything)
Apart from these, I am subscribed
to newsletters from McKinsey, BCG Perspectives, Knowledge@Wharton, Absolute
Return Partners, Biharilal Deora (the guy who heads the Indian chapter of the
CFA Institute), VCCircle, TechCircle and Project Syndicate among others which
largely serve the function of clogging up my inbox even though I take a look at
them every now and then. It’s amazing how much of the top-notch stuff one can
get for free these days.
In case you are wondering, I DON’T read all of the above regularly.
The MBA program doesn’t afford the luxury of time to be able to read even a
fraction of what I’d like to. Most of the links I open these days go into a
repository in the forlorn hope that I’ll get around to reading them at some
point. The tool I use for this is Pocket.
It is available as a simple extension for Chrome and any link you want to read
later can be saved along with relevant tags to make it easy to search later. Pocket
is not just a repository; it’s also a curated content platform. You can choose
your areas of interest and get mails with links to the best content available
on the web in that genre.
If you haven’t closed this tab
already and endured this long winded post up to this point, a big thank you and
happy reading J
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