Here are 92 books that Rabbit Is Rich fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a retired professor of philosophy, but my academic training was in modern languages. I am also an active jazz saxophonist. My dissatisfaction with many established approaches to literature led me to look at literary theory, which then made me focus on philosophy. Academic philosophy, though, seemed to me too often to concentrate on questions about theorising knowledge that neglected questions about how we actually make sense of the world. This led me to reassess the importance of art, particularly music, for philosophy. My chosen books suggest alternative ways of looking at the concerns of philosophy at a time when humankind’s relationship to nature is clearly in deep crisis.
I like books that change the very ways in which I see and understand the world.
Polanyi’s The Great Transformation from the end of WW2 made it much clearer to me how a world which regularly finds technological solutions to humankind’s problems could also descend into barbarism. Modern capitalism’s subordinating the functioning of society to the demands of the market changes the status of nature itself in ways that I am increasingly aware of, as the ecological crisis threatens the very survival of humankind.
The book appeals to me not least because of the ways in which it draws important philosophical conclusions from a detailed historical narrative rather than just stating theoretical positions.
In this classic work of economic history and social theory, Karl Polanyi analyzes the economic and social changes brought about by the "great transformation" of the Industrial Revolution. His analysis explains not only the deficiencies of the self-regulating market, but the potentially dire social consequences of untempered market capitalism. New introductory material reveals the renewed importance of Polanyi's seminal analysis in an era of globalization and free trade.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am an English professor, and for the past decade I’ve focused my attention on the fiction that is money. I’ve also been a magazine writer for many years and came to money by a circuitous route – through writing about food, which led to writing about global hunger, which in turn led to writing about how food gets its price, which finally and lastly led me to the strange ways of Wall Street – options, futures, and the idea that money can be manipulated into a story, a narrative, or as we say in English departments, a plot.
This is an academic book, but don’t let it scare you. As for me – it blew my mind! I had no idea of the level of economic sophistication and advance of Medieval Europe. Lopez explains in extraordinary detail the time period when our modern conception of money—as debt, as mortgage, as loans, and as an international object of commerce—was born.
Professor Robert Lopez provides an incisive analysis of the economic structure of the Middle Ages. He makes use of modern economic concepts to explain how an underdeveloped economic system gave birth to the commercial revolution through which Europe succeeded in developing itself. The book goes far beyond the familiar picture of medieval European society, with its magnificent cathedrals and imposing castles, to concentrate instead on the walled cities and open countryside, for it was here that the revolution was born. Deftly and concisely, Professor Lopez traces the history of this remarkable economic upheaval which saw the rise of merchants and…
I am an English professor, and for the past decade I’ve focused my attention on the fiction that is money. I’ve also been a magazine writer for many years and came to money by a circuitous route – through writing about food, which led to writing about global hunger, which in turn led to writing about how food gets its price, which finally and lastly led me to the strange ways of Wall Street – options, futures, and the idea that money can be manipulated into a story, a narrative, or as we say in English departments, a plot.
This is one of those lost academic works of genius of the 1950s, in which Burke, an English Professor, uses the idea of “grammar” to explain the motivations of characters in dramatic situations. This book inspired me to write about money as a quite literal “plot”—a way people tell stories about themselves and the universe.
Mr. Burke contributes an introductory and summarizing remark, "What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? An answer to that question is the subject of this book. The book is concerned with the basic forms of through which, in accordance with the nature of the world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing of motives. These forms of though can be embodied profoundly or trivially, truthfully or falsely. They are equally present in systematically elaborated or metaphysical structures, in legal judgements, in poetry and fiction, in political and…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I am an English professor, and for the past decade I’ve focused my attention on the fiction that is money. I’ve also been a magazine writer for many years and came to money by a circuitous route – through writing about food, which led to writing about global hunger, which in turn led to writing about how food gets its price, which finally and lastly led me to the strange ways of Wall Street – options, futures, and the idea that money can be manipulated into a story, a narrative, or as we say in English departments, a plot.
This is one of the most lucid explanations of our modern culture of numbers, and deals with topics ranging from music and architecture to, of course, money. It was the “big think” book that most inspired me to consider money not as something in and of itself, but as an artifact of a culture, transformed by time, place, and the genius of individuals.
Western Europeans were among the first, if not the first, to invent mechanical clocks, geometrically precise maps, double-entry bookkeeping, precise algebraic and musical notations, and perspective painting. By the sixteenth century more people were thinking quantitatively in western Europe than in any other part of the world. The Measure of Reality, first published in 1997, discusses the epochal shift from qualitative to quantitative perception in Western Europe during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. This shift made modern science, technology, business practice and bureaucracy possible.
I started writing about bitcoin and cryptocurrency for the funny dumb crook stories. It was ridiculous and arrogant in a particular way that needed and needs puncturing. Somehow this turned into a second job as a finance journalist specialising in the area. The crypto promoters are reprehensible, but their self-sabotaging foolishness makes their comeuppance extremely satisfying. I feel I’m making the world a better place with this.
For Attack, I knew I had to explain the libertarian origins of bitcoin, and Golumbia’s book supplied my reference list for chapter 2. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand why bitcoin.
The political currents that went into bitcoin include several strains that are now accepted as the normal Silicon Valley political position—the “Californian ideology.” Bitcoin shares an ancestry with Silicon Valley startup culture, internet free speech movements, the right wing of transhumanism, and the neoreactionary political movement.
It’s a short book, but it does its homework thoroughly. Cryptocurrency still follows the bitcoin political template in 2023.
Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a digital currency that will revolutionize everything from online commerce to the nation-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a surprising extent on far-right political thought. The Politics of Bitcoin exposes how much of the economic and political thought on which this cryptocurrency is based emerges from ideas that travel the gamut, from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises to Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists.
Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written…
I am a cryptography professor, which sadly doesn’t mean I spend my time breaking secret messages (at least not every day). I first studied cryptography simply because it was fun and interesting. It still is – but today it is unbelievably important, underpinning the security of almost everything we do in the digital world. I believe that developing a notion of 'cyber common sense’ is a vital life skill since so much of what we do is digital. A basic understanding of cryptography and its societal impact provides a superb foundation for making sense of digital security, so I’ve selected some of my favourite reads to get you started.
Most digital technologies crucially rely on cryptography for their security, but few are entirely built from cryptography. Bitcoin is – simply – cryptography. The idea that money can be created from cryptography is a little bit mind-blowing, even for a cryptographer like myself. Dominic Frisby wrote one of the first, and finest, books about the leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin. He explores not just the incredible story of the founding of Bitcoin, but also gives an accessible explanation of how it works and what role it might play in our wider financial system. If you have let the term 'cryptocurrency’ wash over you but remain just a tiny bit curious, this book is your best route towards enlightenment. Whether you then decide to invest in any cryptocurrency is another matter altogether!
Following the economic crisis of 2008, the website `bitcoin.org' was registered by a mysterious computer programmer called Satoshi Nakamoto. A new form of money was born: electronic cash. Does Bitcoin have the potential to change how the world transacts financially? Or is it just a passing fad, even a major scam?
In Bitcoin: The Future of Money?, MoneyWeek's Dominic Frisby's explains this controversial new currency and how it came about, interviewing some of the key players in its development while casting light on its strange and murky origins, in particular the much-disputed identity of Nakamoto himself.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’ve been writing about cryptocurrency since 2015, and full-time since 2017. I’ve worked for the biggest crypto news site in the world, CoinDesk, but now I write about it every day for a more mainstream audience. Cryptocurrency fits at a nexus at the kind of things I’m drawn to: It’s technological, it’s economic and it freaks people out. Unlike a lot of people who write about crypto, I’ve actually played around with the stuff. I’m not an investor, but I have used it. Using it is really the only way anyone gets to the point of grokking it, and I grok the stuff.
The Infinite Machine is the beach-read Ethereum book.
Ethereum is the second-largest blockchain out there. It’s the one that’s sometimes referred to as The World Computer, because it can function like an actual computer, but no one owns it. Thousands of people are running it.
If that sounds very abstract and weird, well: it is. Cami Russo walks readers through how that functionality got used in the early days, plus a couple of the really big screw-ups made with this complex global machine.
It’s a fun book, for as abstract as it all is. She manages to go out and find a bunch of the relevant characters from those early events and bring them to life.
Most of the talk about cryptocurrency in the mainstream is about Bitcoin, but, the truth is, most of the activity that drives that conversation happens on Ethereum. If you want to understand the weird…
Written with the verve of such works as The Big Short, The History of the Future, and The Spider Network, here is the fascinating, true story of the rise of Ethereum, the second-biggest digital asset in the world, the growth of cryptocurrency, and the future of the internet as we know it.
Everyone has heard of Bitcoin, but few know about the second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, which has been heralded as the "next internet."
The story of Ethereum begins with Vitalik Buterin, a supremely gifted nineteen-year-old autodidact who saw the promise of blockchain when the technology was in its earliest…
I’m a literary scholar by training (my doctorate is in comparative literature), but the more I experienced and thought about how digital technologies were “rewiring” me, the more connections I made to earlier cultural ideas about personhood, privacy, isolation, and community. My first book, The Four-Dimensional Human, used this training to observe digital life from an outsider’s perspective. It was shortlisted for the UK’s largest international non-fiction prize and named a WIRED Book of the Decade. Picnic Comma Lightning continues this project to explore digital realities and illusions, and the books I’ve recommended here have all influenced my own desire to capture the particular poetry of these bizarre, networked times.
Andrew O’Hagan is a contemporary master of the literary essay, and in this book we have three long non-fiction pieces linked by his investigations into the online world. O’Hagan was the ghostwriter for Julian Assange’s doomed autobiography, and here he tells the story of this adventure – it’s a publisher’s nightmare but a dream for the psychoanalyst, as the line between Assange’s invented self and the reality of his life begins to collapse. The other two essays also explore mercurial identities online, with a portrait of the rumored, shadowy inventor of Bitcoin, and the brief life of a Frankensteinian amalgam of O’Hagan’s own making – a cyber-persona who has an address, a credit card, and who can buy drugs on the Dark Web. O’Hagan even manages to meet his creation’s mother.
The slippery online ecosystem is the perfect breeding ground for identities: true, false, and in between. We no longer question the reality of online experiences but the reality of selfhood in the digital age.
In The Secret Life: Three True Stories, Andrew O'Hagan issues three bulletins from the porous border between cyberspace and the 'real world'. 'Ghosting' introduces us to the beguiling and divisive Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whose autobiography the author agrees to ghostwrite with unforeseen-and unforgettable-consequences. 'The Invention of Ronnie Pinn' finds the author using the actual identity of a deceased young man to construct an entirely new…
I started writing about bitcoin and cryptocurrency for the funny dumb crook stories. It was ridiculous and arrogant in a particular way that needed and needs puncturing. Somehow this turned into a second job as a finance journalist specialising in the area. The crypto promoters are reprehensible, but their self-sabotaging foolishness makes their comeuppance extremely satisfying. I feel I’m making the world a better place with this.
The Basilisk Murders is a mystery centred on the Bay Area “transhumanist” subculture—another offshoot of the Californian Ideology that gave rise to bitcoin, and with much of the same style of grandiose bad thinking, ill-directed idealism, and an undercurrent of fraud.
The characters are also into their bitcoins. It’s a rollicking read, and you don’t have to know anything about these people beforehand to learn and understand why they do what they do.
"Was this going to be the end? I wondered as I sprinted down yet another flight of stairs. Was I going to get caught, and get killed, by a geek serial killer?" When Sarah arrives at a tech conference she's meant to be covering for her magazine, she thinks it'll be a few days away from her marriage problems on a tropical island. Instead, she's surrounded by sleazy men who want to build a computer God, thousands of miles from home and her wife. She hates where she is, and the people who are around her. But when someone starts…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’ve been writing about cryptocurrency since 2015, and full-time since 2017. I’ve worked for the biggest crypto news site in the world, CoinDesk, but now I write about it every day for a more mainstream audience. Cryptocurrency fits at a nexus at the kind of things I’m drawn to: It’s technological, it’s economic and it freaks people out. Unlike a lot of people who write about crypto, I’ve actually played around with the stuff. I’m not an investor, but I have used it. Using it is really the only way anyone gets to the point of grokking it, and I grok the stuff.
So this book only has one chapter on cryptocurrency (and it dismisses it), but it’s still a worthwhile addition to this list, and here’s why:
Money does a great job showing readers what a protean thing money really is and has always been. Every time money is about to make a giant change in human history, people think that change is completely crazy and will never work. And then it happens, and before long people seem to believe that money could have never worked any other way.
Does it sound relevant now?
While Goldstein eloquently explains and then dismisses Bitcoin in these pages (in fact, it’s one of the best dismissals I’ve ever read), it’s still a worthy entry for anyone who wants to wrap their heads around why so many people have invested so much in fundamentally changing how money works here in the 21st Century.
The co-host of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched, entertaining, somewhat irreverent look at how money is a made-up thing that has evolved over time to suit humanity's changing needs.
Money only works because we all agree to believe in it. In Money, Jacob Goldstein shows how money is a useful fiction that has shaped societies for thousands of years, from the rise of coins in ancient Greece to the first stock market in Amsterdam to the emergence of shadow banking in the 21st century.
At the heart of the story are the fringe thinkers and world…
