The Eight Books That Built My Taste

And why I loved each one

People often ask me what I read, partly out of curiosity, partly because they’re trying to reverse-engineer something. They want to know what built me. What made me write like this, think like this, work the way I do.

Here’s the thing: I’m a terrible reader by most standards. I don’t read the books you’re supposed to read in venture. No Zero to One, no Blitzscaling, no biographies of billionaires with their tidy three-act structures. I tried, god, I tried. I have a copy of The Hard Thing About Hard Things somewhere with exactly eleven pages dog-eared before I gave up and went back to reading about Roman dinner parties.

I read two things, mostly. Philosophy and urban fantasy.

I’ll spend three hours parsing a single paragraph of Cicero, then immediately devour 400 pages about vampire politics in one sitting. I oscillate between writing that requires marginalia and a dictionary and writing that requires snacks and the complete suspension of my critical faculties.

One scratches my intellect until it bleeds; the other soothes my nervous system like a weighted blanket. I need both, the rigor and the ridiculousness, the architecture and the escape, to stay remotely functional.

Last month alone: a treatise on Renaissance aesthetics, followed by a book where the main character’s biggest problem is choosing between two immortal lovers, followed by Wittgenstein, followed by something called “Archangel’s Sun.” I’m not proud. Actually, that’s a lie, I AM proud of this reading diet. It keeps me honest.

I’ve always been suspicious of people who brag about only reading nonfiction, as if imagination were some kind of weakness, as if story were less true than fact. The same people who read nothing but business books and then wonder why their writing sounds like everyone else’s. Reading, for me, has never been about the accumulation of information. Anyone can Google. It’s about texture. It’s about finding sentences that rewire your brain slightly, that make you see the familiar at a different angle.

The philosopher in me needs the fantasy novels. They remind me that all thinking is worldbuilding. And the part of me that reads fantasy needs philosophy to remind me that even the wildest imagination has structure, has rules, has taste.

About taste: I think about it constantly. Not taste as in knowing which fork to use or which founders to back (though that too), but taste as a form of knowledge. As a way of perceiving the world with both critical thought and feeling. Most people think taste is about consumption (knowing what’s good). But taste is really about discernment: knowing why something is true.

These eight books built whatever taste I have. They’re not the books I’d recommend at a dinner party (well, maybe Bourdain). They’re not easy. Some of them are genuinely painful to get through. But they’re the books that fundamentally altered how I move through the world.

They’ve followed me across countries, career shifts, through the peculiar loneliness of being good at something you’re not sure you love. I return to them the way other people return to prayer, when I need to remember who I am underneath all the performance.

If you’ve ever asked me for book recommendations and I’ve deflected, these are the real answers. The ones I’d hand you with strong coffee and the warning that we’d need at least three hours.

Here’s an Amazon list of all the books. No, this is not affiliated.

1. Against Interpretation: Susan Sontag

I found this book in a bookstore in Delhi when I was twenty and insufferable. I was the kind of person who couldn’t watch a movie without immediately explaining what it “meant.” Every conversation was an autopsy. I was murdering everything I loved with analysis.

Sontag saved me from myself. The first essay alone, where she argues that our obsession with meaning is actually a form of violence against art, made me put the book down and stare at the wall for twenty minutes. She writes: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

That sentence. Jesus. It changed everything.

She’s not saying don’t think. She’s saying that sometimes thinking is a way of not feeling. That interpretation can be a defense mechanism against actually experiencing something. That we dissect beauty because we’re afraid of being changed by it.

After Sontag, I stopped explaining my feelings to death. I stopped needing every founder to have a perfect narrative arc. I started trusting founders who could hold a little mystery, who didn’t feel compelled to over-justify every instinct. The best founders I’ve backed, the ones building the weird, necessary things, they all have this quality. They can let something be powerful without needing to explain why.

There’s a line she has about silence: “Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.” Sometimes the most profound response to beauty or truth is to shut up.

In venture, we’re trained to pattern-match, to extract signal from noise, to always be interpreting. But Sontag taught me that sometimes you need to just sit with something. Let it be strange. Let it be uncomfortable. The companies that change everything usually feel wrong at first. They resist interpretation because they’re creating new categories.

Why you should actually read it: Because we live in a world that has to explain everything immediately. Every experience needs to be captioned, hashtagged, analyzed in real-time. Your brain has probably forgotten how to just... experience things. Sontag will remind you that understanding and explaining are not the same thing. That sometimes attention without analysis is the highest form of respect.

2. Zafarnama: Guru Gobind Singh Ji (Get Navtej Sarna’s translation. The others miss the poetry.)

I need to tell you what this is first, because most people don’t know, and that ignorance pains me. The Zafarnama, or the “Epistle of Victory”, is a letter written by the tenth Sikh Guru to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. Context: Aurangzeb had just murdered the Guru’s four sons. Two were bricked alive into a wall. They were seven and nine years old.

You’d expect rage. You’d expect grief so heavy it breaks language.

Instead, you get 111 verses of the most dignified defiance ever put to paper. The Guru writes to his enemy with a kind of terrifying composure. He doesn’t beg. He doesn’t threaten. He states facts with the cool precision of a surgeon: “You are a king of broken promises. I am a man with nothing left to lose. Let’s discuss what happens next.”

There’s a couplet that I think about maybe once a week: “When all avenues of justice are exhausted, it is righteous to draw the sword.” Not angry. Not vengeful. Righteous. That distinction, between rage and righteousness, it’s everything.

I first read this properly after crashing out after a nasty work burnout. When I was so angry I could barely function. I wanted to burn everything down, salt the earth, send the kind of emails that lawyers have nightmares about. The Zafarnama taught me that the opposite of rage isn’t passivity, it’s exactness. That you can fight without becoming cruel. That strength and grace are not opposites but partners.

In my work, this matters more than you’d think. Venture is full of betrayals, small and large. Founders who lie to you. Co-investors who snake deals. LPs who string you along. The temptation is always to match energy. To become as ruthless as the game demands. The Zafarnama reminds me that you can stand in the fire without becoming the fire. That moral clarity is its own form of power.

Why you should actually read it: Because we’ve forgotten what dignified resistance looks like. We either rage-tweet or we fold. This text will teach you that restraint can be the highest expression of strength. That sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is write a very precise letter.

3. Self-Reliance: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everyone quotes the same three lines from this essay. “Trust thyself.” “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” But they miss the part that actually matters. The part about the specific loneliness of original thought.

Emerson isn’t writing a motivational poster. He’s writing about the psychological cost of thinking for yourself in a world that punishes originality. There’s this passage about how society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members, and yeah, the gendered language is dated, but the point stands: the world wants you to be predictable because predictable is manageable.

When I started in venture, I was desperate for validation. Every investment thesis needed three comparable companies. Every decision needed consensus. I’d sit in partner meetings parroting whatever Naval or PG had tweeted that week, thinking I sounded smart. I was a walking, talking echo chamber with a good vocabulary.

Emerson made me stop. Not immediately. It took maybe fifty readings of this essay, usually at 2 AM when I couldn’t sleep, wondering if I was just bad at this job. But eventually, something clicked. He has this line: “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Not your success. Not your reputation. The integrity of your own mind.

That shifted everything. I started championing companies that I couldn’t explain properly. I started writing things that made people uncomfortable. I started saying no to the obvious wins that felt dead inside. The IRR might have suffered initially, but the work became real.

Why you should actually read it: Because sooner or later, you’ll be in a room where everyone disagrees with you, and you’ll have to decide whether you trust yourself or trust the room. Self-Reliance isn’t about confidence because any idiot can be confident. It’s about building the fortitude to withstand the pressure of thinking differently. Most people break. This essay is about how not to.

4. Letters to Lucilius: Seneca

Everyone’s doing Stoicism wrong. They think it’s about cold showers and not caring about anything and becoming some sort of productivity robot who journals every morning about death. They quote Marcus Aurelius like he’s the ancient Roman version of a LinkedIn influencer.

Seneca’s different. He’s writing these letters while Nero (his student, by the way) is actively trying to kill him. He’s one of the richest men in Rome, drowning in the exact luxury he’s philosophizing against. He’s a hypocrite who knows he’s a hypocrite, writing about virtue while owning multiple villas.

The letters read like texts from your smartest friend who’s having a breakdown but handling it fairly well. He’ll go from discussing the nature of virtue to complaining about his health to making fun of other philosophers to genuinely profound insights about friendship, all in the same letter. Letter 49, where he talks about how we treat time like it’s infinite when it’s the only thing we can’t buy back…I’ve read it probably thirty times.

My favorite thing about Seneca is that he never says “don’t feel.” He says, “feel everything, but don’t let feelings make decisions for you.” There’s this bit where he talks about grief, how it’s natural and necessary but shouldn’t become performance. That we sometimes extend our suffering because we think it proves we cared.

He taught me emotional competence, not emotional absence. The difference between being sensitive and being fragile. How to care about outcomes without being controlled by them, which, in venture and in life, is basically the whole game.

Why you should actually read it: Because life doesn’t calm down. You will always be over or underwhelmed. There’s a reason ‘whelmed’ isn’t a word (it is, actually, it just doesn’t mean what you think it does lol). Seneca gives you tools to stay functional when everything’s on fire, without becoming deadened to beauty or joy. He’s proof that you can be both successful and thoughtful, ambitious and philosophical. Also, his insults are incredible.

5. On Duties: Cicero

Nobody reads Cicero anymore, which is insane because he basically invented public intellectualism. He was trying to run Rome while also having opinions about literature, philosophy, and the proper way to tell a joke. He was the first person to realize that thinking and doing weren’t separate activities. That you could be both theoretical and practical without apology.

On Duties is him trying to figure out how to be good when goodness is complicated. Not abstract philosophical goodness, but real-world, “I have to make decisions that affect thousands of people” goodness. He’s writing this while Rome is literally collapsing, Julius Caesar was just assassinated, and he’s trying to save the Republic through essays. The ambition of it. The futility of it. The beauty of trying anyway.

There’s this section on friendship that destroyed me. He argues that the worst thing you can do to a friend is enable their worst qualities out of loyalty. That real friendship sometimes means saying the hard thing. That harmony isn’t the same as agreement. I think about this every time a founder friend asks for advice and what they really want is permission to do the thing they know is wrong.

But the part that really shaped me is his discussion of decorum. Not etiquette, but the idea that how you do something is inseparable from what you do. That elegance and ethics are related. That beauty and morality might actually be the same thing viewed from different angles.

This completely changed how I work. I stopped believing that being good at business meant being ugly about it. I started caring about how deals get done, not just whether they close. I started thinking about taste as an ethical position, not just an aesthetic one.

Why you should actually read it: Because we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that being serious means being joyless, that being professional means being boring. Cicero reminds you that the life of the mind and the life of action are the same life. That you can care about both philosophy and power without being a hypocrite. Plus, his shade-throwing, like all the Roman dudes, is just fantastic.

6. Taste: Giorgio Agamben

This is the book I’m most embarrassed to recommend because it’s genuinely difficult to read. Agamben writes like he’s allergic to clarity. Every sentence requires three others to understand it. I had to read most paragraphs four times, out loud, while pacing, possibly crying.

But what he’s actually saying is that taste isn’t preference. It’s not about liking things. Taste is a form of knowledge that can’t be reduced to rules. It’s knowing something is true through feeling rather than through logic. It’s the gap between what you can explain and what you know.

He traces this idea through medieval philosophy, which sounds unbearable, but he’s really asking: how do we know what we know? How can you be certain about something you can’t prove? Why does something feel right before you can explain why it’s right?

This matters because in venture, the best decisions usually feel insane at first. They resist frameworks. You back a founder not because their deck makes sense but because something in their presence reorganizes your understanding of what’s possible. That’s taste. Not preference, but perception.

After reading Agamben, I stopped trying to justify every decision with data. I started trusting the feeling of recognition, that weird certainty when you encounter something true, even if you can’t articulate why. The best founders trigger this. The best ideas trigger this. The best people trigger this. They’re not convincing; they’re obvious, but only if you’re paying the right kind of attention.

Why you should actually read it: Because we’ve confused data with truth, metrics with meaning. Agamben reminds you that the most important things can’t be measured. That taste isn’t about luxury or aesthetics, it’s about developing a faculty for recognizing truth in its wild state, before it’s been domesticated into argument.

7. Kitchen Confidential: Anthony Bourdain

Bourdain was the first person who made me realize that work could be a form of love. Not love for what you produce, but love for the act itself. The daily, unsexy, often painful act of giving a damn when it would be easier not to.

The book smells like cigarettes and fish guts and that particular 3 AM exhaustion where you’re not sure if you’re about to cry or laugh. He writes about kitchens like they’re churches and pirates ships at the same time. Sacred spaces full of criminals and saints (mostly criminals) trying to make something beautiful before the next rush destroys them.

The chapter about his time in Tokyo changed how I think about mastery. He describes watching a sushi chef who’d been making the same cuts for forty years, and instead of being bored, the chef approached each piece of fish like it was the first and last time he’d ever touch one. That kind of attention. That kind of presence. Bourdain calls it “the faith of repetition,” and I think about it every time I read another pitch deck, have another founder coffee, write another investment memo.

But what really got me was how he wrote about failure. He’d been a junkie, a terrible chef, a worse businessman. Failed restaurants, failed relationships, failed attempts at being a normal person. And instead of hiding it, he made it the foundation of everything. Not in a redemption arc way (he hates redemption arcs) but in a “this is what I am, let’s work with it” way.

He taught me that professionalism isn’t about perfection; it’s about showing up destroyed and doing good work anyway.

Why you should actually read it: Because it will make you give a damn again. Not about success or metrics or whatever game you’re playing, but about the work itself. About the weird honor of doing difficult things well, even when no one’s watching. Especially when no one’s watching.

8. The Physiology of Taste: Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

This book shouldn’t work! It’s written by a French lawyer in the 1820s who loved food more than law and decided to write 500 pages about it. He makes up scientific theories that are completely wrong. He includes recipes that would probably kill you. He goes on tangents about his aunt’s digestive system.

And yet.

Brillat-Savarin understood something everyone else missed: pleasure is a form of intelligence. Not a reward for intelligence, but intelligence itself. The ability to distinguish, to prefer, to savor, these aren’t separate from thinking. They ARE thinking, just in a different register.

His famous line, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are”, isn’t really about food. It’s about consciousness. About how desire and discernment are the same mechanism. How appetite shapes perception. How what you hunger for determines what you can see.

There’s this chapter about the proper way to eat an ortolan (a small bird you’re supposed to eat whole, bones and all, with a napkin over your head to hide your shame from God) and it’s simultaneously the most ridiculous and most profound thing I’ve ever read about pleasure. He treats joy like it’s a discipline, not an accident.

In venture, we pretend we’re rational actors making logical decisions about future cash flows. Bullshit. We’re driven by hungers we barely understand, for significance, for vindication, for the specific pleasure of being right when everyone else was wrong. Brillat-Savarin taught me to at least be honest about my appetites. To recognize that what I’m hungry for shapes what companies I can see, what founders I trust, what futures I can imagine.

Why you should actually read it: Because we’ve turned pleasure into a guilty secret, something to optimize or eliminate. This book argues that joy is a skill. That knowing how to enjoy things properly is inseparable from knowing how to think properly. That the opposite of serious isn’t playful, it’s dead.

What This Built

These eight books didn’t make me better at my job, exactly. They made me weirder at it. They gave me permission to trust the strange, to back the difficult, to write things that don’t sound like everyone else’s writing. They taught me that taste isn’t about knowing what’s good, it’s about knowing what’s true, and being brave enough to choose it even when it seems insane.

I still read urban fantasy novels. Last week I read one where the main character’s biggest problem was choosing between an angel and a vampire, and I enjoyed every ridiculous page. Because after you spend three hours parsing Agamben’s prose, sometimes you need 400 pages of supernatural romance to remember that not everything needs to be hard.

The fantasy novels keep the philosophy honest. They remind me that all important thinking happens through story anyway. And the philosophy keeps the fantasy novels from being mere escape. Even vampires, it turns out, have ethics.

If I’ve learned anything from this reading diet, it’s this: taste isn’t built through consumption, but through contrast. Through the productive confusion of putting different kinds of beauty next to each other and seeing what happens. Through reading things that shouldn’t work together until somehow, in the privacy of your own mind, they do.

So yes, read the business books if you must. Read the founder biographies and the management theories and the productivity hacks. But also read something useless. Something difficult. Something that has nothing to do with your job except that it changes how you see everything, including your job.

The books that build you are rarely the books that were meant to build you. They’re the ones you stumble into, resist, return to, fight with, and eventually recognize as the architecture of your own mind. These eight built mine. God knows what will build yours.

But whatever you do, don’t just read nonfiction. That way lies madness, or worse, LinkedIn thought leadership.