Marshall is an avid reader and keeps a stack of all-time favorite reads on the top shelf of his bookcase. He profiles the three best books he reads in any given year in an annual letter, archived below. Send Marshall a note if you would like to hear about a recent favorite selection.

Previous Best Books Lists

• 2023 Download PDF

• 2022 Download PDF

• 2021 Download PDF

By some accounts, Robert Caro is the best living biographer on earth. Anticipating that it would take nine months, he worked on his first book, The Power Broker, for seven years. It was published in 1974 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Since then – yes, for almost 50 years – he has been working on a five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. Four volumes have been published, and, at age 89, he is now racing the clock to finish the final one. Caro’s overarching subject is power, especially political power, and how it really works and impacts the lives of ordinary people, for better and worse.

Caro paused to publish this short, semi-memoir about his work, research, and writing process in 2019. It is akin to getting a glimpse inside the process of a true master, like a Jordan, Federer, or Buffett. Realizing early in his career that his efficient writing lacked depth, he took measures to slow himself down. He writes multiple drafts long-hand and then takes to a typewriter to commit the writing more permanently to paper. Despite this “go slow” approach when writing, he also holds himself to production standards of at least 1,000 words a day. It is all logged by tally marks on the inside wall of his office closet.

He considers research, not writing, the hard part. I was astounded by the time invested and the depth of research on his subjects. He and his wife, Ina, both New Yorkers through-and-through, moved to the edge of the Texas Hill Country in the late 1970s to better understand the place where a young Lyndon Johnson grew up and its influences on Johnson’s boyhood. Caro shares dramatic moments with specific documents or interview subjects that, after years of grinding, produced hard-won insights that changed his entire perspective on his subject.

Most of all, it is the “all in” nature of his devotion to his craft that astounds. I also highly recommend a companion documentary, “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” on Caro, his process, and his relationship with his long-time editor.

Working

Robert A. Caro

2020

Do you ever wonder why people don’t simply behave rationally or logically? Are you ever confounded by other’s decisions, like when they vote for a candidate (that Democrat or that Republican) that clearly no clear-headed person would ever cast a vote for?

Alchemy is written to help us. It is a useful guide to understanding the world around us and how it really works. Sutherland, as Vice-Chairman of one of the world’s leading advertising agencies, has had a front row seat in observing and trying to anticipate human behavior. He’s led a career’s worth of ad campaigns – described as “well-funded behavioral experiments on a grand scale” – and has learned that the models of human behavior devised and promoted by economists (who assume that all people will act rationally all the time) and other conventionally rational people are wholly inadequate at predicting human behavior. So much so, that at his firm, Ogilvy, he established a division tasked only with producing counter-intuitive solutions to problems. Here they’ve found some very useful solutions that were not logical at all, like a fast food outlet that increased sales of a product by pushing prices up.

“This book is intended as a provocation, and is only accidentally a work of philosophy. It is about how you and other humans make decisions, and why these decisions may differ from what might be considered ‘rationality’…It often diverges dramatically from the kind of logic you’ll have been taught in high school math lessons or in Economics 101. Rather than being designed to be optimal, it has evolved to be useful.”

With many engaging stories from his experience testing consumer behavior, Sutherland is irreverent, funny, and wise. He challenges the notion that human behavior can be predicted by hard rules, as in physics or mathematics, and brings to light a gap that is a blind spot for many of us between what’s expected and what really happens in practice. Alchemy is a worthy complement to works like Cialdini’s Influence and Kahneman and Tversky’s Thinking Fast and Slow.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

Rory Sutherland 

2021

You may well know of Anne Lamott. She is a celebrated writer. Her tome, Bird by Bird, is often cited as one of the best books on writing written, and she has written many other well-loved works in both fiction and non-fiction. This piece, like a lot of her non-fiction, is quite autobiographical. It is her synthesis of how love has somehow pulled her (and others) through a lot of darkness to the occasional light. She describes it as a “swag bag” of general instructions to her son and grandson on getting through some of the hard stuff that inevitably comes along.

I think Lamott’s writing is so loved because it is excellent, open and raw, and hilariously self-deprecating. At age 70, she’s had plenty of the real world’s raw lessons. It is better to let her do the talking:

“This is the main instruction that I would leave my family in my swag bag of spiritual truths: be goodness with skin on…We are called to be the love that wears socks and shoes…if you want to have loving feelings, do loving things.”

“One day at a time, and somehow one hour at a time, love will be enough to see us through, get us back on our feet and dust us off…Love gives us a shot at being the person we were born to be, not the charming actor or bodyguard we became, not us on our tightropes holding our breath as we strive for greatness (or at any rate not falling on our butts). When all is said and done, and against all odds, love is sufficient unto the day. Could I be wrong? Obviously. But I don’t think I am.”

“When I first got sober, a man told me that upon waking every morning, instead of citing the standard, flowery recovery prayer, he said “Whatever,” and at night when he turned off his light to go to sleep, he said, “Oh, well.” In between, he practiced simplicity – he stayed sober, worked on acceptance, tried to be of service to others…This is a perfect plan for living.”

This short book is a very enjoyable bit of soul food.

Somehow: Thoughts on Love 

Anne Lamott

2024