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Paul Jarley’s Blog: My Summer Reading List

Posted By College of Business Administration Office of Communications On In College of Business Administration,Opinions | Comments Disabled

I know it is Monday and responding to suggestions from my tweeps is supposed to happen on Thursdays, but we are in summer session at UCF. This is a time of year when we do crazy things like teach in shorts and offer the same section of a class five times a week so students can complete the whole course in about a month. Answering my Twitter followers on Monday rather than Thursday seems to fit.

Rafael Campos (@rcampos1990 [1]) asked what books I would suggest for a recent college grad.

To put my recommendations into context, you should know that I read widely for work and deeply for fun. I read tons about history (e.g., ancient, American Revolution, World War II), baseball, and classic fiction (e.g., Dickens, Hemingway and Tolstoy). I rarely read “business books”–things you would find in the business section of Amazon or your local book shop. Instead I look for books from other walks of life that might provide insight into leadership and the work that I do. There are three authors whose books I always read: Thomas Friedman, Malcolm Gladwell, and Seth Godin. I’m just finishing The Icarus Deception. I’m also fond of Michael Lewis (The Big Short, Moneyball).

So, with all of that out of the way and in no particular order, here is my list of ten books I’ve just completed or hope to finish this summer:

  • “The Icarus Deception,” Seth Godin
  • “Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children,” Dorie McCullough Lawson
  • “In The Garden of Beasts,” Erik Larson
  • “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk,” Peter Bernstein
  • “My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla”
  • “The Stuff of Thought,” Steven Pinker
  • “Why I Write,” George Orwell
  • “Girls of Atomic City,” Denise Kiernan
  • “Unbroken,” Laura Hillenbrand
  • “Paris: the novel,” Edward Rutherfurd

    • I am also addicted to Flipboard. If you are an iPad user, it is a free app and I curate all of the content I read there into a magazine called UCF Business. You can take a look at it and subscribe by clicking here [2].

    Paul Jarley, Ph.D., is the dean of the UCF College of Business Administration. He blogs every week at http://www.bus.ucf.edu/dean [3]. This post appeared on June 17, 2013. Follow him on Twitter @pauljarley [4]