Best Books by Year.
A year-by-year reading log and personal canon of the books that shaped my thinking.
Best Books by Year
bogdanbaciu.com · updated April 22, 2026
I've kept a running spreadsheet since 2012 of the five best books I read each year, ranked out of everything I read that year. Not the five best books published that year—the five best I read that year, irrespective of publication date. It's a cheap tradition and it has turned out to be one of the most durable personal-knowledge artifacts I've built. The list below is the living version. I'll keep updating it through 2026.
The list
2012
1
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Nobel Prize. Foundation text for how my own cognition misleads me.
2
The Power of Habit
Cue, routine, reward. Read once, used a hundred times.
3
How Will You Measure Your Life?
Clayton Christensen applying strategy frameworks to a life.
4
Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
The best corporate history of the last 20 years.
5
What Money Can't Buy
Sandel's free Harvard lectures are a parallel reason to read this.
2013
1
Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works
Game-changer. The five-question cascade is the tool I still use.
2
Negotiauctions
M&A + negotiating contracts. The book I wish every dealmaker read.
3
Sam Walton: Made In America
Builder autobiography, honest in the way founders rarely are.
4
Average Is Over
Tyler Cowen on what the middle of the skill distribution is going to feel.
5
Competing in Capabilities
Oxford lecture series. The capability window.
2014
1
Zero to One
Founder doctrine in 200 pages.
2
The Obstacle Is the Way
Stoicism, operationalized. Short and useful.
3
The Advantage
Organizational health as moat.
4
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
The Chernow biography everyone should read at least once.
5
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ben Horowitz on the specific misery of running a company.
2015
1
Triggers
Most helpful personal-development book on here. The daily-question format comes from this.
2
It's Your Ship
Empowering and building culture. Read twice.
3
Triumphs of Experience
The Harvard Grant Study. Long-term longitudinal view of men and their lives.
4
The Outsiders
Eight unconventional CEOs. COO skills + capital-structure management.
5
Henry Ford
Another biography of a grinder; pairs with Alfred P. Sloan's My Years at General Motors.
2016
1
The Daily Stoic
Page a day for a year.
2
The Power of a Positive No
Save the deal, save the relationship, still say no.
3
The Ideal Team Player
Humble, hungry, smart. A diagnostic I now use in hiring.
4
Shoe Dog
Phil Knight's memoir. Another example of a grinder.
5
High Output Management
Andy Grove of Intel fame. The operations bible.
2017
1
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Most useful through the lens of operator/CEO.
2
Extreme Ownership
How U.S. Navy SEALs lead and win.
3
Sapiens
Interesting in a slow year; not necessarily novel to some.
4
The First 90 Days
Getting up to speed faster and smarter in a new role.
5
Time, Talent, Energy
Overcome organizational drag. Top-vs-average variance.
2018
1
Capitalism in America
Greenspan overview; invigorating and inspiring.
2
High Growth Handbook
The playbook for scaling from Series A to D.
3
Willpower Doesn't Work
Ex-KPMG; a helpful perspective on environment over discipline.
4
Chasing Daylight
How my forthcoming death transformed my life. Ex-KPMG CEO. Rare and hard.
5
Hit Refresh
Microsoft's turnaround from the inside; decent in a slow year.
2019
1
Grinding It Out
Another grinder autobiography; still the best one on service franchising.
2
My Years at General Motors
Still the best long-form operations memoir ever written.
3
Softwar
The Larry Ellison / Oracle biography. Brutal in the good way.
4
Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
Cowen's short, dense argument for sustainable growth as the moral priority. The book that made me take long-horizon thinking seriously.
5
Individualism and Economic Order
The Hayek essay collection. 'The Use of Knowledge in Society' is the one that stuck—the case against central planning restated as an information problem.
2020
1
How Innovation Works
A good reminder that innovation is incremental, not heroic.
2
Human Compatible
Stuart Russell on AI and the problem of control. Prescient.
3
Dual Transformation
The Christensen-school playbook for running the old and the new at once.
4
Little Black Stretchy Pants
Founder view; unvarnished.
5
The Ride of a Lifetime
The Disney memoir; the most readable CEO book of the decade.
2021
1
This Is Marketing
One of his; still the best at short-form marketing philosophy.
2
Stalin
Enormous and unflinching.
3
The Origins of You
Developmental psychology. Which parts of who you are were set early.
4
Boyd
The John Boyd biography. OODA loop, maneuver warfare, dissident career.
2022
1
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
The 1,200-page textbook. Read it cover to cover because I needed to know what I didn't know about the field.
2
The Stranger
First Camus. Short, and it stays with you longer than books ten times its length.
3
Enchiridion and Selections from the Discourses
The original Stoic handbook. Holiday and the rest are commentary on this.
4
The Effective Executive
Drucker on time, contribution, and decisions. Should have read it a decade earlier.
5
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
The systems-engineering book that made distributed-system tradeoffs finally click.
2023
1
Designing Great Data Products
The Howard essay on the Drivetrain approach—building systems that make predictions actionable, not just accurate.
2
How Emotions Are Made
Emotions as constructed, not detected. Rewired how I think about affect and other people.
3
The Design of Business
Martin on abductive reasoning and the knowledge funnel. Companion volume to Playing to Win.
4
The Idiot
First Dostoyevsky. Prince Myshkin as a test of whether goodness survives contact with people.
5
The Unified Star Schema
Inmon and Puppini's answer to the modern-warehouse mess. Practical, opinionated, and correct.
2024
1
Dopamine Nation
Addiction as the modern default state. Short, brutal, useful.
2
Why Information Grows
Economic complexity as crystallized imagination. The physics-of-economics book I didn't know I wanted.
3
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Why we do what we do, across a second, an hour, a year, a life. The only book on here that earns the word synthesis.
4
The Gene: An Intimate History
Mukherjee's history of the gene concept. Pairs with The Emperor of All Maladies.
5
Edison
Morris's last biography, told backwards. Inventor as operator—closer to Ford than to genius mythology.
2025
1
Future-Generation Government: How to Legislate for the Long Term
How to legislate for people who don't exist yet. The question nobody else is asking.
2
What We Owe the Future
Longtermism as a moral position, argued in full. The most coherent version of the case.
3
Private Equity Value Creation Analysis, Volumes I & II
Two-volume practitioner text. The closest thing to a playbook for operational PE.
4
Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard
The Girard biography. Mimetic theory told through the life, not the abstractions.
5
Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality
The Jesuit talks. Less a book, more a set of koans about waking up.
Best 10 Across All Years
| Year | Book | Why it stays |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | Thinking, Fast and Slow—Daniel Kahneman | The best single operating manual for how your own judgment goes wrong. |
| 2013 | Playing to Win—A.G. Lafley & Roger Martin | The cleanest strategy framework I know that still survives contact with real companies. |
| 2014 | Zero to One—Peter Thiel | Compact founder doctrine that still sharpens how I think about monopoly, secrets, and category creation. |
| 2015 | Triggers—Marshall Goldsmith | The most practically useful personal-change book on the page. |
| 2016 | The Daily Stoic—Ryan Holiday & Stephen Hanselman | The highest re-read value per page of anything here. |
| 2019 | Grinding It Out—Ray Kroc | The best autobiography on the long, grinding middle of building a service business. |
| 2020 | High Output Management—Andy Grove | The operations book I would keep if I had to throw the rest out. |
| 2021 | The Trusted Advisor—David Maister, Charles Green, Robert Galford | The best compact model of how professional trust actually compounds. |
| 2023 | Competing in Capabilities—John Sutton | The best short explanation of why some firms and people can sustainably sit above the line. |
| 2024 | Private Equity Value Creation Analysis—Michael David Reinard | The closest thing to a practitioner playbook for operational PE work. |