Summer Reading for the Active or Relaxing Mind!

For those in the northern hemisphere, this is a time of year where you may find your mind and body lying on a beach towel, arm chair or in some other relaxing location treating your mind, body and soul to some downtime, along with a cool beverage. Some amongst us, can’t completely shut off and may still find the act of reading both stimulating and comforting at the same time, and for others it may be the only time of the year when they feel they can make time to catch-up on their reading.

Either way, here is a list of books both fiction and non-fiction, which cuts across classics, business topics and biographies that CEOs of some major companies (LinkedIn, Cisco, Whole Foods, Nokia, Corning, Autodesk, JPMorgan Chase, McKinsey etc) are reading this year. The original article from McKinsey&Company earlier this month, provides the complete reading list.

Here’s a quick peek into some of the books on the list:

  • Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)—Chade-Meng Tan (HarperOne, 2014; nonfiction)
  • Dealing with China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower—Henry M. Paulson (Twelve, 2015; nonfiction)
  • More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First—Steve Hilton with Jason and Scott Bade (WH Allen, 2015; nonfiction)
  • Sapiens; A brief history of humankind – Yuval Noah Harari (McClelland & Stewart, 2014; nonfiction)
  • Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford—Clint Hill and Lisa McCubbin (Gallery Books, 2016; nonfiction)
  • China’s Mobile Economy: Opportunities in the Largest and Fastest Information Consumption Boom—Winston Ma (John Wiley & Sons, 2016; nonfiction)
  • The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks—Joshua Cooper Ramo (Little, Brown and Company, 2016; nonfiction)
  • The Gene: An Intimate History—Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner, 2016; nonfiction)
  • Who Gets What—and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design—Alvin E. Roth (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015; nonfiction)
  • Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies—Nick Bostrom (Oxford University Press, 2014; nonfiction)
  • The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy—Mervyn King (W.W. Norton & Company, 2016; nonfiction)
  • Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion—Gregory Boyle (Free Press, 2011; nonfiction)
  • The Man Who Loved Dogs: A Novel—Leonardo Padura (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; fiction)