2020 Reading list

Charles Coverdale
2 min readFeb 25, 2020

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It has certainly been a year. Unsurprisingly, having lived through the Melbourne lockdown during 2020 (twice!), I have found more time to read than in any previous year.

I also drove from Brisbane to Melbourne round trip three times— giving ample a chance to catch up on ‘those books’ that I mention in conversation almost weekly but have actually never read (or listened to) start to finish.

Below is a list of all the books I got through in this wild year. Included are all 3 formats: paperbacks, epubs, and audiobooks.

Biography + Autobiography:

The Man who Solved the Market — Gregory Zuckerman

The Education of an Idealist — Samantha Power

American Spy — Lauren Wilkinson

No Room for Small Dreams — Shimon Peres

A Bigger Picture — Malcolm Turnbull

My Story — Julia Gillard

Lazarus Rising — John Howard

The Audacity of Hope — Barack Obama

The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man — John Perkins

Tribe of Mentors — Tim Ferriss

The Insider — Christopher Pyne

Remembering Bob — Suzie Pieters-Hawke

Let My People Go Surfing — Yvon Chouinard

Dreams From My Father — Barack Obama

Trust — Pete Buttigieg

Shortest Way Home — Pete Buttigieg

Best Foot Forward — Adam Hills

A Private War — Marie Brenner

A Promised Land — Barack Obama

Economics and business leadership:

This is Marketing — Seth Godin

Randomistas — Andrew Leigh

Economics in two lessons — John Quiggin

Indistractable — Nir Eyal

Hooked — Nir Eyal

Why We’re Polarised — Ezra Klein

The Charisma Myth — Olivia Fox Cabane

How to make the world add up — Tim Harford

The Lean Startup — Eric Reis

Debt: The First 5000 Years — David Graeber

If Then — Jill Lepore

The Black Swan — Nassim Taleb

The Almanac of Naval Ravikant — Eric Jorgenson

Military:

Leadership Strategy and Tactics — Jocko Willink

Extreme Ownership — Jocko Willink

The Commando — Ben Mckelvey

History/Science/Climate:

Guns, Germs and Steel — Jared Diamond

The Anarchy — William Dalrymple

Jerusalem — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The World Until Yesterday — Jared Diamond

The Bush — Don Watson

A Life on Our Planet — David Attenborough

Fiction:

The Rules of Backyard Cricket — Jock Serong

Blue Moon — Lee Child

The Martian — Andy Weir

Stoner — John Edward Williams

The Invisible Man — H.G.Wells

The Rosie Project — Graeme Simsion

The Rosie Effect — Graeme Simsion

The Pact — Thomas Keneally

Quarterly Essays:

Quarterly Essay 76: Red Flag — Peter Hartcher

Quarterly Essay 47: Political Animal: The making of Tony Abbott — David Marr

Quarterly Essay 44: Man Made World — Andrew Charlton

Quarterly Essay 74: The Prosperity Gospel — Erik Jensen

Quarterly Essay 77: Cry Me A River — Margaret Simons

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