Reading this one now, and Chernow does the thing he always does: takes a name you think you already understand and rebuilds the whole person from the ground up. Rockefeller as this bundle of contradictions, ruthless and devout, secretive and generous, is far stranger and more human than the robber-baron cartoon. It is a brick of a book and I am taking my time. Full verdict once I close it.

Five stars, and genuinely one of the more useful things I read this year. It is Stanford design thinking pointed at your own life, and the core move is treating your path as a series of small experiments instead of one high-stakes bet you have to get right. That reframe pushed me out of my comfort zone in the best way: reaching out to professors, VCs, founders and tech leaders, asking for the conversation, prototyping a version of the life before committing to it. What it really gave me was permission to think about what matters professionally and personally at the same time, and to design for the point where the two intersect in a balanced way rather than forcing a trade. Self-help usually loses me by chapter two. This one I actually did the exercises for, and I am better for it.

Five stars, no notes. I came out of the 2026 World Cup with this brand new, slightly embarrassing hunger for club football and nowhere to point it. This book is what closed the deal. I had flirted with Dortmund back when I lived in Germany, more aesthetic crush than real allegiance, and Hesse walks you through exactly why the Yellow Wall gets under your skin: the fan ownership, the Sudtribune, the stubborn working-class identity no amount of money has managed to buy. By the last chapter I was not reading about a club anymore, I was supporting one. Now I actually check the Bundesliga table on Saturday mornings. Heja BvB!

I went down a full Lorne rabbit hole this year and paired this with the documentary, which was maybe too much Lorne, but no regrets. Morrison’s reporting is unreal: every backstage myth you have heard plus a hundred you have not. It is long and earns most of that length. The thing that stuck with me is the central contradiction of the guy, a total control freak running the most chaotic live show on TV for fifty years. If you love SNL, this is the bible.

Yes I am a grown man who reads the Avatar tie-in novels, and yes I had a great time. Roku and Sozin starting as best friends and curdling into the original tragedy of that whole world is exactly the lore I wanted filled in. Ribay gives it real weight instead of phoning in a cash grab. Easy comfort read for anyone still not over that show.

Five stars, this one got me. Givhan nails why Abloh mattered: he kicked the doors of luxury wide open for a generation that looks like me and my friends instead of the old Paris guard. The more I sit with it the more convinced I am that he was becoming our Ralph Lauren, a designer whose whole language just IS America now (look at his fingerprints on the USMNT designs and how every brand still runs his playbook). The gut punch is how early we lost him, gone at 41 right as he was hitting another gear. Read it, then go look at everything he touched.

This is the book I keep pushing on people who are either panicking about AI or pretending it is a fad. As someone who lives in these tools all day, Mollick’s take is refreshingly practical: quit philosophizing and just invite the AI to the table to see where it actually helps. His “treat it like a person but remember it is not” framing finally gave me words for how I already work. Short, sharp, and it has aged way better than most tech books.