The Best Books I Read in 2023

My six best reads of 2023 were The Black Swan, The 48 Laws of Power, Elements of Eloquence, The Psychology of Money, Never Finished, and The Beginning of Infinity. This was, by a wide margin, my biggest library year yet — somewhere north of twenty borrows once I count the reference books, a couple of novels I picked up for the kids, and a few titles that didn’t quite make this list, like Designing Your Life, Reality Is Not What It Seems, and Chaos Kings.

Narrowing a year like that down to six was genuinely hard. Here’s what made it.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Taleb’s central idea is that the events that matter most in history — market crashes, breakout successes, catastrophes — are almost always things nobody saw coming, and that we only make them look predictable after the fact by inventing a tidy explanation. He calls these black swans, and his argument is that we systematically underestimate how much of our world runs on them.

I went back a couple of months later for Antifragile, his follow-up on building systems, businesses, and even people that don’t just survive disorder but actually improve because of it. Read together, the two books reframed how I think about risk — not as something to eliminate, but as something to be positioned for.

Read The Black Swan first if you want the diagnosis; read Antifragile after if you want the prescription.

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Greene distills three thousand years of court intrigue, military strategy, and corporate maneuvering into forty-eight blunt rules about how power actually gets won and lost, each one illustrated with a historical episode where someone followed the law brilliantly or ignored it fatally.

The book doesn’t pretend to be a manual for good behavior, and it’s more useful read that way — as a field guide to tactics you’ll recognize the moment you see them used on you, whether or not you ever choose to use them yourself.

Read it as a lens for understanding organizational politics, not as a script to follow.

Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth

Forsyth takes apart the rhetorical tricks behind lines that have stuck for centuries — Shakespeare, the King James Bible, pop lyrics, ad slogans — and shows that memorable language usually isn’t an accident of talent, it’s a small set of identifiable techniques used deliberately.

It’s a rare book that’s genuinely funny about grammar, and it left me noticing structure in sentences I’d read a hundred times without ever seeing why they worked.

Read it if you write for a living, or even just email for a living, and want your sentences to land harder.

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

Housel’s premise is that doing well with money has much less to do with intelligence than with behavior — nobody makes financial decisions on a spreadsheet, they make them at the kitchen table, under the influence of ego, fear, and whatever story they’ve told themselves about their own life.

Told in short, self-contained chapters, it’s the rare finance book that skips the formulas entirely and just tells true stories about how people actually behave with money, which turned out to be far more useful to me than another chapter on compound interest.

Read it if every other money book has felt like homework. This one doesn’t.

Never Finished by David Goggins

Goggins’s second book picks up where Can’t Hurt Me left off, going deeper into what he calls his “Mental Lab” — the specific practices he built to keep pushing past what he assumed were his limits, in a voice that’s as blunt and confrontational on the page as it apparently is in person.

It’s not a comfortable read, and it isn’t meant to be. What stayed with me was less the extreme physical feats and more the underlying claim: that most of what we call our limit is just the first place we stopped testing it.

Read it when you need a jolt, not when you need comfort.

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

Deutsch’s argument is that human knowledge has no upper bound — that good explanations, once found, keep opening onto further problems rather than closing a subject off, and that this capacity to keep explaining is what makes progress genuinely unbounded rather than a fixed resource we’re slowly using up.

It’s the densest book on this list by far, and the one I found myself rereading paragraphs of rather than pages. Closing the year on it felt right — a big, optimistic argument for why the questions never really run out.

Read it slowly. It rewards a second pass more than almost anything else here.

That’s my 2023 list — my biggest reading year and my hardest cut. What was your best read this year?