Book Reviews Q1 2026

This is a list of books (in no particular order) I finished reading in Q1 2026 and some comments on each one.

Your Perfect Portfolio - Cullen Roche

A "saver" (investment) advice book targeted at individuals. Focuses on simple low-fee strategies that are easy to stick to. Still, it contains some interesting ideas like true "passive" investing being impossible because while the investable stocks are 35% non-US, the total market cap of stocks is 57% non-US. It also discusses "Total Portfolio", which includes savings as well as self-investments and illiquid assets like housing, which is a welcome departure from other investing books. Overall, despite its somewhat grating humor, the advice seems reasonable, and I would recommend it if you are a person looking for a singular book on how to invest your money.

Like: The Button That Changed the World - Martin Reeves & Bob Goodson

The first chapter is an interesting history of the like button. Unfortunately, the book continues on with an uninteresting attempt to contextualize the history of the like button. They follow up the first chapter with the classic great man theory vs. systemic inevitability debate, but don't do a good job taking this seriously and instead ruminate on the thoughts of Marc "zero introspection"¹ Andreessen. Later they literally cite Andrew Huberman's podcast for a definition of dopamine. The authors took what could've been a good blog post or article and turned it into a bad book.

The Winner's Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now - Richard H. Thaler & Alex Imas

Fun exploration of how the rational actor model used in economics fails as a descriptive model of behavior even when there is an incentive to behave otherwise. A big takeaway for me is that a lesson can be learned by individuals within a specific domain, but not generalized. Executives in construction companies still fall victim to the winner's curse in the lab, even though they don't fall victim to it when bidding on construction projects (otherwise they wouldn't be very profitable). I also found it interesting that essentially equivalent shares traded at a 30% value difference and Palm traded for more than its parent company.

Practical Ethics (2nd ed.) - Peter Singer

Explores relevant ethical issues through Singer's utilitarian lens consisting of consequentialism, equal consideration, and both hedonistic and preference satisfaction utility functions. While these presuppositions may seem reasonable, Singer doesn't offer any strong justification for them. The last chapter more or less argues that people feel they need to pick something that gives their life meaning, so they might as well pick Singer's ethical framework as that thing. While it's respectable that he didn't attempt to give an unjustly strong justification, I find this argument rather uncompelling. Nonetheless, he still manages to attack many common bad arguments (equality of opportunity, breaking the law being inherently unethical, etc.) within this ethical framework. While many of the conclusions he reaches are controversial, they are well reasoned from his reasonable-seeming premises. This book was written in very simple-to-understand language, and I enjoyed reading it.

The Ordinal Society - Marion Fourcade & Kieran Healy

I will be publishing a full review; this was an excellent book.

Beyond Good and Evil & On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. Walter Kaufmann)

Nietzsche is an often misunderstood thinker; according to Nietzsche, a reader "picks about five words at random out of twenty and 'guesses' at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words" (BGE 192), so I presumably must read these books at least another three times to truly understand them. Even on first read, many common interpretations are obviously false. He praises the saint as having will-to-power (BGE 51), making it clearly something beyond just a desire for power as is commonly understood. He also praises Jews as "beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe; they know how to prevail even under the worst conditions" and rails against German antisemitism (BGE 251). Kaufmann believes that unfair attacks on Nietzsche are because "Nietzsche wrote too well and was too superior". I'm not sure what's more ridiculous, that he said this or that I'm inclined to agree.

Nietzsche and Philosophy - Gilles Deleuze (trans. Hugh Tomlinson)

Deleuze brings out the best in Nietzsche and conveniently elides the bad. While I was slightly confused at times, having not yet read Birth of Tragedy or Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he does a great job illuminating the importance of Nietzsche's genealogical approach to philosophy and explaining the active and reactive will-to-power (he even makes a table of the various varieties of will-to-power). A joy to read, containing bangers like "That the flower is the antithesis of the leaf, that it 'refutes' the leaf - this is a celebrated discovery dear to the dialectic. This is also the way in which the flower of Christian love 'refutes' hate - that is to say, in an entirely fictitious manner." and "The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful." I look forward to reading more works by Deleuze.

Odds & Ends: Introducing Probability & Decision with a Visual Emphasis - Jonathan Weisberg

Recommended by Michael G. Titelbaum as an introductory book to Bayesian epistemology. It's an ok introduction to probability aimed at philosophy students, but it doesn't really cover how to apply probability theory to your thinking. I also wish it did a better job distinguishing statistics from epistemology. Someone trying to follow Bayesian epistemology can still have a reasonable case for using frequentist statistical methods, and using Bayesian statistical methods does not inherently require accepting belief as probability, but this isn't made clear by the book. It also ignores that both frequentist and Bayesian statistical methods make subjective modeling decisions.

All of Statistics - Larry Wasserman

Mostly just skimmed this book, but I think I can still say a few interesting things about it. This book has very impressive breadth covering many obscure topics. In exchange for this breadth, it is written in a very dense manner similar to a math textbook. Cross-validating for optimal histogram bin width isn't something I had considered, and I'm curious as to why it isn't more common. Similarly, I wasn't aware of the Epanechnikov kernel as it wasn't taught in CS532 despite its theoretical optimality. Overall worth the read once you already have decent knowledge of statistics.

1. ^ Interviewer: "You don't have any levels of introspection."
   Marc: "Yes, zero, as little as possible...And you probably know if you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective."
   He then later doubled down after this interview, tweeting "It is 100% true that great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings. I regret nothing." He tripled down on this with "Read your Adler, Cuddihy, and Nietzsche, ffs. 🤦‍♂️", which is silly to anyone who has actually read any Nietzsche. He quadrupled down in a bunch of even stupider ways that I've lost the will to catalog.