All Other Books I’ve Read (Updated Monthly)

OCTOBER 2024

• Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, a book that, among other things, posits that around 40% of jobs in a modern economy could disappear tomorrow with no consequence. This reality—and the fact that it’s usually known to the workers themselves—creates unthinkable psychic damage. (I made a four-minute video breakdown of his theory.) But what really tickled me was his annotated notes section, which he uses as an opportunity not just to cite sources, but to take swings at economic bloggers who have slighted him over the years. Formidably petty. Color me inspired.

• Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakeley, which inspired our episode on Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Capitalism (But Were Afraid to Ask).

SEPTEMBER 2024

• Down, Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Kate Manne’s intensely analytical book that reads like a geometric proof for building a working definition of misogyny, outside the realm of the standard-issue “hates women” variety. She focuses not on an individual’s feelings toward women, but instead on the sets of systems and cultural beliefs that police women’s behavior according to patriarchal ideals. She explicitly differentiates misogyny from sexism—terms which are often colloquially used as synonyms—calling misogyny the “law enforcement” arm of patriarchy, and sexism the “rationalization” arm, which serves to justify it.

AUGUST 2024

• Liars is a blistering, haunting cautionary tale of power dynamics in marriage. A Substack interview with the novel’s author, Sarah Manguso, so thoroughly piqued my interest that I bought a copy before I’d even finished reading the conversation. It’s composed of short vignettes, each illustrating a moment of subtle yet accretive abuse: weaponized incompetence, financial manipulation, and the disorientation the narrator feels trying to editorialize her relationship into something tolerable.

• The Coin: A first-person, stream-of-consciousness novel by first-time author Yasmin Zaher. The unnamed protagonist, a Palestinian woman who moves to New York City, is acutely aware of wealth and class, but is blocked from accessing her $28 million inheritance due to some weird family dynamics. She becomes convinced there’s a coin slowly rusting inside her and descends into a freewheeling unreliable narrator madness, at one point getting roped into a scheme with a man she meets on the street reselling Birkin bags. I remember almost nothing about my 2020 reading of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh beyond it making me feel vaguely drugged, but this book reminded me of how I felt reading that one.

JULY 2024

• White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg: Wow, what a ride. One of the more shocking revelations came in the book’s introduction: The original people the British government sent to North America were not noble adventurers in search of religious freedom, but the deplorables of British society they were trying to get rid of—the poor, prisoners, and beggars. Those who settled in what would become the United States of America promptly recreated a sort of first-come, first-served class hierarchy, based around land ownership.

• THICK: I am blown away by Tressie McMillan Cottom’s book of essays, and while I’m tempted to call her a genius, that feels like showing up two hours after the party ends and suggesting we throw on some music—she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2020.

• Sisters in Hate by Seyward Darby: I recently tore through this book about American women and white extremism. It manages to walk a really interesting line between emphasizing women’s centuries-long fight for equality and the way in which white nationalism has attracted white women who feel disenfranchised by many of the same factors that led to the fight for equality in the first place.

• Fantasyland explains so much about modern American life, up to and including the events of the last two weeks. Author Kurt Andersen explains that we’ve always been a land of mythic and fantastical thinking, which, in my estimation, is a prerequisite for a worldview that prizes the potential allure of individual wealth accumulation over community.

APRIL 2024

• Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Journalist Anand Giridharadas applies an overdue cynical lens to the corporatized charge to “do well by doing good,” and I have to say, I’m feeling like a schmuck for all the times I believed some technology company was in it for the betterment of society. One particularly disturbing example: An app called “Even” that attempts to smooth the choppy, unpredictable minimum wage incomes of gig economy workers…by charging them $260 per year to set some of their own money aside. In other words, it creates (and charges for) the illusion of a stable income. “Even would endeavor, with characteristic Silicon Valley ambition, to counteract the effects of a generation’s worth of changes in the lives of working-class Americans…including outsourcing, stagnant wages, erratic hours, defanged unions, deindustrialization, ballooning debt, nonexistent sick leave, dismal schools, predatory lending, and dynamic scheduling” with—what else?—a venture-backed app.

MARCH 2024

• On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good—I connected with writer Elise Loehnen after enjoying her series exploring who gets to be an expert, and she was kind enough to send me her book. Two of the deadly sins she covers, sloth and greed, show up in our relationships with work and money—and we’re going to have her on the show to deep dive more.

FEBRUARY 2024

• One in a Millennial, Kate Kennedy’s book of essays, left me shook at the universal-yet-piercingly-specific experience of modeling popular girls’ handwriting and the irresistible magnetism of those Limited Too initial purses. We were lucky enough to have Kate join me on the show.

JANUARY 2024

• No One is Talking About This really took me by surprise. It was poetic, hysterical, and moving. The format—little vignettes about the author’s experience going viral on the internet, losing her mind, then finding it again—sucked me in. I laughed, I cried, I read it in 24 hours. Here’s one: “Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores.”

• Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America should come with a rage trigger warning. It details private equity’s role in a few particularly pernicious places: nursing homes, the healthcare system, housing, and prisons. The formulaic approach—buy a giant incumbent firm with a boatload of debt, sell its real estate for a quick buck, charge a bunch of management fees, drive it to bankruptcy to discharge pension obligations, and sail away with hundreds of millions—is diabolical. It’s hard to see any ostensible upside for the people impacted, based on the case presented here. The author was a federal prosecutor and served as special counsel for private equity at the Department of Justice.

• Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization is a book I bought a while ago, attempted to read, and for reasons I don’t quite remember, lost interest in after about a chapter. Recently, I was drawn to pick it back up again. On this second attempt, it strikes me as almost meditative in its descriptions of the grand vastness of our universe and our relative tininess.

DECEMBER 2023

• Evicted by Matthew Desmond. It’s a crime it took me until 2023 to read this book. It might be the most impressive work of nonfiction I’ve ever consumed—it reads like a novel. To write it, Desmond lived for years in some of the poorest trailer parks and rooming houses in Milwaukee to study what life is really like for the poor in America’s cities. He took more than 5,000 pages of notes. This is one of those works of art that makes you feel like nothing you’ll ever do with your life will be even half as groundbreaking…but, like, in a good way?

• Poverty, by America is the latest from Matthew Desmond. Man—it’s a comfort to be back with his immersive writing style. The premise of the book is identifying a “unifying theory” of poverty in the US: As in, we know a bunch of the disparate factors and consequences, but why does the country with the most resources have the highest amount of resource scarcity, too?

• Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, And The Decline Of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg. I really liked the core concept: that social infrastructure is just as important to community flourishing as physical infrastructure. E.g., the library with programming for senior citizens can keep folks healthy and engaged, and the empty lots/urban blight-turned-pocket parks have a real impact on crime deterrence and community health. Klinenberg argues that investing in these types of projects even bodes well for surviving natural disasters, since they strengthen community ties.

• Fiscal Feminist. If you listen to The Money with Katie Show, you know we love Kim Davis, the Fiscal Feminist (she’s an attorney, wealth manager, and advocate for women going through divorce). I grabbed a copy of Fiscal Feminist: A Financial Wake-up Call for Women because we—read: my editor and I—decided last-minute that my upcoming book needs a “woman’s financial guide to navigating marriage and divorce,” too. I figured hers would be the perfect hors d'oeuvre.

NOVEMBER 2023

• Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Last Interview. I know it’s trendy to love Ruth Bader Ginsberg, but I’m convinced some things are popular because they rock (see also: SoulCycle, Taylor Swift). I read this book of RBG interviews before bed. I just couldn’t get enough of her take-no-shit tenacity—she transmuted personal challenges into a collective force for good, like when she was told she wouldn’t be paid as much as her male colleagues because she had a husband who would support her…so she was like, “No problem, I’m going to fight like hell for the Equal Pay Act to be effectively enforced via my legal brilliance.” Legend.

OCTOBER 2023

• Class, Stephanie Land’s sequel to Maid. I read an advance copy in one sitting. It tells the story of what happened after the story told in the Netflix show and memoir Maid ends, when she finally gets to the University of Montana. She struggles to get her degree, gets pregnant with her second child, and two years later, gets her first book deal. There were some parts that felt very similar to Maid (her writing style; the vivid description of the ongoing, relentless struggle of poverty), and other elements that felt radically different (e.g., multiple sex scenes).

• A Healthy State of Panic demonstrates how leaning into your fears can actually become your greatest superpower. A two-time guest on our show, Farnoosh Torabi dropped this gem. I have a cameo in the book, from an interview I did on Farnoosh’s podcast, So Money, about how fear was a huge driving force in designing my financial life to be resilient.

• Among the Bros is my friend Max Marshall’s debut book. It’s the culmination of more than five years of investigative journalism into a drug trafficking ring in Charleston, South Carolina. Millions of dollars’ worth of illicit pharmaceuticals, cocaine, and marijuana were trafficked through—where else?—a College of Charleston off-campus house full of fraternity boys. The elaborate operation expanded to multiple cities and colleges throughout the southeast before it was busted in 2016. I couldn’t put this book down.

SEPTEMBER 2023

• Glossy is my newest Audible conquest. It’s about Emily Weiss’s vision for her billion-dollar brand, Glossier, but—more broadly—it’s about the entire girlboss era of entrepreneurship and the intersection of business, privilege, and beauty. (In other words, an eminently listenable amalgamation of all my interests.)

AUGUST 2023

• Beauty Sick by Dr. Renee Engeln. In preparation for our Hot Girl Hamster Wheel episode featuring beauty culture critic Jessica DeFino, I decided to listen to a book DeFino recommended. Here’s a quote I jammed on: “We don’t consider the gender gap in time and money spent on beauty, but time and money matter. They’re essential sources of power and influence and also major sources of freedom.” I alternate between finding beauty culture consumerism repugnant and alluring, which is why I love anything that explores how it impacts women’s money.

JULY 2023

• Rationality by Steven Pinker. I’ve been trying to get better at sound logic in argumentation (constantly fending off Reply Guys will send even the sanest internet girlie off in search of reinforcements). I’d never taken a formal class in statistics or debate before, and this book has been an eye-opening crash course in the logical fallacies I often rely on to make my point (turns out I’m a sucker for a “straw man” tactic).

JUNE 2023

• The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class. I listened to this audiobook when a Rich Guy recommended it to me, and there was some fascinating data about the correlation between conspicuous consumption, income, and education: Goods considered “conspicuous consumption” (think cars, jewelry, etc.) are purchased disproportionately by those in top income groups, and—even when controlling for income—those with a bachelor’s degree or higher spend 35% more on conspicuous goods than those who didn’t finish high school. This flies in the face of the trope that the only people who buy luxury goods are the “broke” or irresponsible ones.

• Malibu Rising. On my last trip to Europe, I read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and ugly-cried aboard Scandinavian Airlines. I figured it only made sense to read this other banger from Taylor Jenkins Reid on this trip—it featured some fun Easter egg references to characters in the former book. Malibu Rising didn’t rip my soul out of my body like Seven Husbands did, but I still couldn’t put it down. A fun vacation read.

• Between Two Kingdoms is a memoir by Suleika Jaouad, a woman who developed a rare leukemia in her early twenties. It’s the story of reckoning with one’s mortal reality: that your life might end before it really “begins.” I couldn’t put it down, despite the fact that it actively flayed my soul.

MAY 2023

• Uneasy Street by Rachel Sherman. This premise was too good to sit on: in-depth interviews with “Manhattan’s elite” (XOXO, Gossip Girl) to understand their own perceptions of affluence and deservingness.

APRIL 2023

• A Perfect Vintage. Chelsea Fagan, a woman I admire deeply, was already impressive enough as the co-founder and CEO of one of the largest independent women’s financial media companies. Now she’s the author of a verified banger novel.

• Crying in H Mart. This book reminded me a bit of I’m Glad My Mom Died, in the sense that it explored an imperfect mother/daughter relationship, but was sad in a more relatable (and far less horrifying) way.

• Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry. Michael and Peter, the hosts of If Books Could Kill, mentioned this book in their episode last week. I ran to download it. I was captivated, I tell you.

• Capitalism, Alone. This book is about as dense as they come, but full of interesting tidbits: It’s estimated that one-third of the rise in US inequality between 1967 and 2007 is attributed to something called “assortative mating.” Translation: Ever since women became independently wealthy and educated, they tend to couple up with similarly wealthy and educated men.

MARCH 2023

• Range by David Epstein. I heard some chatter about this book a few years ago but hadn’t picked up a copy until my bookstore run recently. I’m only a few chapters in, but so far I’m enjoying the way it challenges traditional advice about “early specialization.” Even more importantly, it stresses the fact that you don’t have to figure out what you want to do early in life in order to be successful; that dabbling in a wide variety of things can actually make you better at your chosen field by the time you settle on it.

• Narrative Economics by Robert Shiller. The free library box in my neighborhood delivered a gift from the econ gods, and when I saw Shiller’s name on a spine tucked inconspicuously amongst the Westerns, I grabbed it and ran. (You may know his name from things like the Case-Shiller index of housing prices or the Shiller PE ratio.) The book is about the way stories shape our economic reality, and it’s surprisingly easy to read, considering its author is a Nobel Prize-winning Yale professor.

• Maid. The book that inspired the Netflix series of the same name somehow manages to be a total page-turner while also challenging deeply held cultural beliefs about what it means to be poor in the US.

• Fleishman is in Trouble. Someone recommended this book-turned-show to me by saying, “It’s about these middle-aged divorce people…but it’s funny!” I loved this show. My only complaint is that it’s not longer.

• Tipped: The Life-Changing Guide to Financial Freedom for Waitresses, Bartenders, Strippers, and All Other Service Industry Professionals. The author of this book sent me a copy, and although I’m not a service industry professional, I really enjoyed it. If you work for tips and find that your financial woes exist outside the bounds of 9–5 money advice, check this one out.

FEBRUARY 2023

• Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell. Cults exist on a spectrum, Montell argues, and just about everything from the horrific, deadly Jonestown to cult fitness like SoulCycle (honey, I’m home) falls on it. Her core thesis? Language is the bedrock foundation of cult-y tendencies; it’s how you most readily establish an in-group and manipulate how people think (for better, in the case of “cult fitness”...or worse, in the tragic case of, well, the Peoples Temple).

• I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy and Making a Scene by Constance Wu. There’s something about this type of short essay-style memoir writing that just absolutely captivates me. Both books have a few content “trigger warnings” that are worth looking into before diving in, but I enjoyed them both (though, as the name suggests, McCurdy’s is far darker and more complex).

• How I Built This by Guy Raz. As a fan of the podcast with the same name, I was pumped when I discovered there’s a whole book breaking down the lessons from Guy’s various interviews. This is a fun one for anyone who enjoys stories about entrepreneurship.

• The Cult of We by Maureen Farrell and Eliot Brown. After watching Apple TV+’s WeCrashed, this cover caught my eye at the bookstore. Penned by two Wall Street Journal reporters, the book tells the story of WeWork, yes—but it also explains the broader venture capital, startup-obsessed landscape that allowed visionary grifter Adam Neumann to generate SaaS-level investment for what was pretty clearly a real estate company.

• How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis. The title is hokey, but I listened to this into this one on Audible and actually finding it quite entertaining. The narrator has a delightful British accent, which really ramps up the fun.

JANUARY 2023

• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. This book blew my mind. Haidt accomplishes something that feels almost impossible in the Year of Our Lord 2023: He’ll make you empathize with “the other side” (whatever that may be for you) and understand why other points of view have merit worth considering, too.

• Invisible Trillions by Raymond Baker. The premise is fascinating. Put simply, it examines GDP per capita and income per capita to raise a very interesting question: Wait, where’s all the money? Through a complex system broadly dubbed “financial secrecy,” Baker unpacks how things like offshore bank accounts, tax havens, falsified trade, and black markets—among others—pull money out of the system and hide it away using illicit means. His thesis? This is what’s actually responsible for the lion’s share of inefficiencies and inequality in our economy.

• Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up by Jerry Colonna. My dear friend Ben Miller, the founder of the financial product ChroniFi, gifted me this book at one of our last lunch chats. I was reluctant to start it, because business-y leadership books tend to be slogs. Not this one, my friends. I’ve never read a book about leadership with such a simple thesis: Better humans make better leaders. One particularly salient question Colonna poses: What type of personal mythmaking do we tell ourselves about ourselves?

• Powder Days by Heather Hansman. As a former Coloradan, I knew I had to read this book when my friend McCall recommended it. It’s an amazing deep dive into “ski bum culture,” as well as the way it’s being impacted by the same economic trends that are playing out more broadly in the US (like the way people buying second homes in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, are pricing out locals).

DECEMBER 2022

• Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. I’m kind of cheating with this one because I’m not technically rereading the entire thing, but instead revisiting a few key principles (like the importance of focus in a noisy world) as I reflect on the year and what habits I want to change in the years ahead.

NOVEMBER 2022

• Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live) by Eve Rodsky. My bewilderingly smart sister-in-law, Maverick, sent me this book with the promise that we’d enjoy discussing it. Join us! This book is about the less-than-egalitarian division of domestic labor (and what to do about it).

OCTOBER 2022

• Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. I’m not sure how I just now discovered this excellent (and data-dense) book, but it presents a compelling case for the ways in which our political system has been “hijacked” by the superrich over the last 40 years, and how we can rebuild a democracy that represents the interests of the many, rather than the few.

• The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz. An exploration of the pervasive myth that the “traditional” family structure throughout history was Breadwinner Man & Caretaker Woman™. Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, y’all.

SEPTEMBER 2022

• Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo, edited by Rebecca Walker. This anthology of essays explores the way in which money is one of the last conversational frontiers in ~female life~; that we talk about sex and family and health openly, but how we often suffer alone through our financial woes.

• Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol. The alcohol industry loves the “alcoholism as a disease” framework, as it puts the blame on the user, not the drug (a strong departure from the way we place the blame on the tobacco industry, not “cigarette-holics”). Fascinating.

• The Red Bandanna: A Life. A Choice. A Legacy. The story of Welles Crowther, an equities trader who worked in the World Trade Center, who sacrificed himself to save 18 people on 9/11. His family later discovered he was actively considering quitting his Wall Street job to become a New York City firefighter. It’s an incredibly moving true story about what it means to be brave, and it’s full of details that’ll make the hair on your arms stand up—like the fact that his parents had their first date on September 11 many years earlier. Barstool summed it up well here.

AUGUST 2022

• A Court of Thorns And Roses. All right, y’all, I’m not normally a big #fantasy girl—but in my quest to read more fiction, I asked a voracious reader pal for the best fiction she’s read in the last few years. I’m halfway through Book #2 and…yeah, it’s pretty damn good.

• A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel. This is one of the most popular investing books of all time, and when I first read it in 2018, I didn’t understand most of it. Now, a couple of years and a whole lot of knowledge later, I’m revisiting it.

• Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee. “The reason a busy schedule is a status symbol in the United States is because we have long valued ‘earned status,’ a side effect of the ‘self-made man.’ It’s not your family name that matters—it’s how hard you’re working.” Headlee makes a compelling case for…well, doing nothing.

• Crazy Rich Asians. In keeping with my fiction trend, I’m throwing it back to an oldie but goodie. Crazy Rich Asians is my go-to plane movie, but I had never read the book. I had no idea it was a trilogy!

JULY 2022

• The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. I’m not usually a big fiction reader, but I ripped through this book on one (1) flight. It’s so good. Brought me to tears in public.

• Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials by Malcolm Harris. The 21st century US economy makes an interesting economic backdrop for our generation.

• Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino. Technically, I’m rereading this—but that should tell you how good it is. A collection of essays that’ll blow your mind.

• Financial Adulting by Ashley Feinstein Gerstley. This is the first personal finance book I’ve read that addresses where the various wealth gaps in the US originated (racial, gender, etc.). 10/10 history lesson.

JUNE 2022

• The Whiteness of Wealth by Dorothy A. Brown. I picked up this book in New York last week and am only a handful of pages in, but I’m already impressed with the #nuance. In keeping with our Money with Katie Book Club idea…you heard it here first! The author (a tax attorney and law professor) writes about why tax law isn’t as colorblind as she once believed.

• The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances-White. This book is a departure from the type of stuff I usually read (i.e., books about money), but surprisingly, it has no shortage of financial implications. Shocker. One part I found especially interesting? The myth that women are somehow innately less confident than men, and the way that myth manifests itself in the workforce.

MAY 2022

• Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed by Meghan Daum. This book’s subtitle is “Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids,” and when it arrived, my husband had some…questions. While I plan to have kids eventually, I saw an excerpt from this book that dove into gender role theory, feminism, and the idea that a woman’s “natural” place in the home is really just an invented social convention that took hold after the Industrial Revolution. Friends, if you like essay-style writing, it is a phenomenal look into the “mother vs. career person” false dichotomy.