Your 2026 Reading List: The Books Our Analysts Are Giving and Reading This Season

As the year winds down, December brings with it gift lists, holiday traditions, and a moment to reflect on the year behind us. Here at Morningstar, the research team takes this month to share our favorite reads from the year, collecting a list of titles for gift giving or for using our remaining educational stipends.

This year’s picks dive into many of the key topics circulating throughout 2025: building resilience in uncertain markets, redefining wealth and well-being beyond finances, and of course, navigating the world of artificial intelligence. We hope this list can inspire ideas of what to give during the holiday season or what to add to your 2026 reading list.

Co-Intelligence

by Ethan Mollick

Recommended by Mathieu Caquineau, Senior Principal

Mollick offers clear and insightful perspectives on the history of AI, its potential, and its pitfalls. What I found most valuable is his practical approach to collaboration: Instead of fearing AI or idealizing it, he shows us how to work with it—using its strengths while staying mindful of its limits. The book is a thoughtful and balanced guide for anyone navigating this new era of human-AI partnership.

Careless People

by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Recommended by Gregg Wolper, Senior Analyst; and Todd Trubey, Senior Analyst

Wynn-Williams’ memoir comes from a high-ranking Facebook employee who arrived with a perhaps unrealistic level of idealism. After spending much time working and traveling with Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and other top-level executives, she slowly becomes vastly disillusioned with the gap between their words and their actions. A trove of often-humorous personal stories and a breezy writing style make it an enjoyable as well as eye-opening read, even with the caveat that it’s just one person’s view.

The Singularity Is Nearer

by Ray Kurzweil

Recommended by Monika Calay, Director

I first encountered Ray Kurzweil 17 years ago in a Mental Floss article describing a visionary thinker who believed that, if we can stay alive long enough, we might live long enough to live forever. His new book, The Singularity Is Nearer, updates his original predictions, including artificial general intelligence by 2029 and the Technological Singularity around 2045, when human and machine intelligence converge.

Kurzweil argues that exponential technological progress will lead to breakthroughs such as advanced nano-robots that could maintain and repair the body and eventually interface with the brain, potentially enabling radical life extension and expanding human intelligence.

For business leaders, the book is a call to lift our eyes beyond quarterly cycles and hype-driven headlines. Everyone today is asking, “Are we in an AI bubble?” The real question is: “How are we preparing our organizations for a future that is advancing exponentially?”

If Kurzweil is even partially correct, the next two decades will reshape every industry, redefine human capability, and reward those who plan boldly rather than react cautiously. The challenge now is to build for the world that’s coming and to have the courage to imagine what’s possible.

1929

by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Recommended by Dan Kemp, Chief Research & Investment Officer; and Todd Trubey, Senior Analyst

Sorkin provides a detailed and vivid account of the iconic market crash that reminds us how human behavior and unchecked optimism can drive systemic risk. It’s a compelling read for anyone looking to understand the warning signs of excess and the importance of discipline in volatile markets.

Making Sense of Chaos

by J. Doyne Farmer

Recommended by Dan Kemp, Chief Research & Investment Officer

Making Sense of Chaos challenges traditional economic thinking and introduces complexity theory as a lens for understanding modern markets. It’s particularly relevant for navigating today’s interconnected world and anticipating emergent risks.

Both 1929 and this book provide perspective, one through historical lessons and the other through forward-looking frameworks, that can sharpen our approach to risk and resilience.

The 5 Types of Wealth

by Sahil Bloom

Recommended by Todd Trubey, Senior Analyst

Bloom successfully subverts the consensus assumption that wealth is strictly financial and challenges the presumption that money buys happiness. Beyond a certain low level of income, he notes, a moderate increase or decrease rarely affects how happy you are. Bloom then walks you through his five categories of wealth: time, social, mental, physical, and financial. Within each section, he builds a collage of material from philosophy, social sciences, and narratives to describe the area and why it matters. He also breaks down each type of wealth and offers ways to measure and improve your wealth in that area. It’s not a rigid or overly dogmatic text—you may well benefit a great deal from one section and little from another. Overall, you’ll likely walk away from the book with a less narrow focus on money, a broader appreciation of your other types of wealth, and a sense of how you can increase your wealth going forward.

My Mother’s Money

by Beth Pinsker

Recommended by Christine Benz, Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning

I read a lot of financial books for The Long View podcast, but if I only get to pick one, my favorite from 2025 was Pinsker’s My Mother’s Money. It’s full of incredibly useful guidance for people who are helping older loved ones manage their finances and their healthcare. It’s also helpful for individuals who want to help simplify things for their loved ones; for example, there are tips about how to create a packet of useful information to take along in case you need to go to the hospital. It’s not the sunniest topic, but Pinsker tells the story of her mom with such empathy and love; she’s a wonderful writer.

Dead Companies Walking

by Scott Fearon

Recommended by David Reyna, Senior Analyst

Fearon offers a brutally honest look at why companies fail, showing that much of corporate collapse stems from predictable human flaws: denial, overconfidence, and misreading cycles, not just “bad luck.” His framework is practical, pattern-driven, and grounded in real examples.

The book also emphasizes a disciplined approach to reality-testing, reinforcing the importance of verifying what management says against what the business is actually doing. For anyone who evaluates strategies or managers, this focus on firsthand evidence over narratives feels refreshing.

Fearon introduces clear, repeatable mental models through six failure patterns that are simple, memorable, and broadly applicable. These models help you spot problems early, whether you’re analyzing companies, investment strategies, or organizational behavior.

Ultimately, it makes you a sharper skeptic. Not cynical, just grounded. The book teaches the value of confronting uncomfortable truths early, a lesson that resonates in markets and in leadership.

The Psychology of Money

by Morgan Housel

Recommended by David Reyna, Senior Analyst

Housel shares timeless principles through relatable stories, taking broad concepts like compounding, risk, and luck and making them intuitive. It’s behavioral finance without the jargon, memorable because the stories stick.

The book focuses on behavior over intelligence, emphasizing that how you act with money often matters more than what you know. That idea is both humbling and empowering, and it’s a mindset most people overlook.

It also reframes what “wealth” really means. The notion that wealth is “what you don’t see” (savings, resilience, optionality) changes how you think about financial success and long-term planning.

Finally, it offers practical wisdom for real life. This isn’t a technical investing book; it’s a guide to making financial decisions that fit your personality, risk tolerance, and life circumstances. It gives you frameworks you can actually apply, not just theories.

Barbarians at the Gate

by Bryan Burrough & John Helyar

The King of Capital

by David Carey & John E. Morris

Recommended by Alec Lucas, Director

Investors interested in the historical backdrop to the rise of private credit can learn a lot from Barbarians at the Gate and The King of Capital. Barbarians is a justly famous business book chronicling the late 1988 buyout of RJR Nabisco. Based on more than 100 interviews, it is an engrossing and cautionary tale centered on the flamboyant CEO F. Ross Johnson, whose attempt to enrich himself through a management-led leveraged buyout sparked a bidding war whose aftermath led to asset sales, layoffs, and poor company performance. Along the way, readers are introduced to founders of what are now called “alternative asset managers,” like Henry Kravis of KKR and, briefly, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone. Schwarzman is the royal subject of The King of Capital, and Kravis figures prominently, too. It provides a complementary portrait of the leveraged buyout industry, subsequently rebranded as “private equity.” The authors are sympathetic in their portrayal of Schwarzman but not uncritical, and in a later chapter, they defend the overall results of buyouts—cautionary examples like RJR Nabisco notwithstanding.

Good Investment Reads on Substack

Recommended by Jeff Ptak, Managing Director

I took a break from reading investment and finance-related books this year but have been consuming some interesting investment-related content on Substack, including:

‘PRIV and PRIV Accessories’

An expert deep-dive into the intricacies of the first public/private credit exchange-traded fund. In other hands, this would be a dry read, but Conor MacWilliams writes with verve about the pipes, plumbing, players, and general inscrutabilities involved, pulling no punches.

‘Nadig.com’

You’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who brings the kind of irrepressible curiosity and insight to bear on ETFs (on which he has long been a thought leader), the future of investing, and frontiers, more generally, than Dave Nadig. His Substack puts all that depth and range on full display.

‘FT Alphaville’

We all know high finance can sometimes verge on parody, with self-interest, rationalization, and not a little career risk crowding out reason and economic substance. The FTAV crew knows illogic and satire when it sees it and doesn’t mince words setting the scene. Above all, it’s a fun romp through markets.

‘Investment Ecosystem’

Tom Brakke curates an excellent biweekly roundup of research and writing on portfolio management, investment selection, risk management, and sundry other topics that are must-reads for analysts and allocators. Brakke’s been in and around the fund business for a long time and brings an especially learned eye to it.