Ever since adolescence, [my elder sister Anna] has been an enthusiastic admirer of the great Swedish writer, the Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf, and she infected me so much with her enthusiasm that I decided to become a writer and describe Italian saga "à la Lagerlöf". But things were to take a different turn.

There’s one book that I’ve given 40 copies away probably. And it’s called Reminiscence of a Stock Operator. And for anyone who wants to be a trader or an investor, this is the Bible. It was written in 1932 by a guy who was, at that time, maybe the world’s greatest speculator. Jesse Livermore is the fictional character. And what’s crazy about it is you can read it today in 2020, and it literally is still the Bible. And so every great trader annotates it, tears pages out of it. I used to be able to tell when people would come to interview to work and they’d say, “I really, all I care about is trading.” And I was like, “Well, tell me two books you’ve read about trading.” “Oh, I haven’t read any books.” And I was like, “Okay, here’s a book. Go read it and come back when you’ve read it. But you’re not getting a job, because you lied. Because you lied to me because you really didn’t care that much about trading if you’ve never read a book on it.” But that’s the book. And there’s a terrible anecdote or afterword to it is that two years after he wrote the book, the guy committed suicide because he just couldn’t take the — he lost his fortune yet again. But he put every rule that you need to — you know, the discipline side of it is all in that book. And it’s a quick read; you can read it in three hours.

It was not long after Kenneth Arrow's path-breaking study of social choice, Social Choice and Individual Values, was published in New York in 1951, that my brilliant co-student Sukhamoy Chakravarty drew my attention to the book and to Arrow's stunning "impossibility theorem" (this must have been in the early months of 1952). Sukhamoy too was broadly attracted by the left, but also worried about political authoritarianism, and we discussed the implications of Arrow's demonstration that no non-dictatorial social choice mechanism may yield consistent social decisions.

The people I most often give books to are children, and the book I love giving is Rivka Galchen’s Rat Rule 79. Technically a book written for children, but a book that will delight readers of all ages.