Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger by Ken Perenyi. In a similar vein to Kevin Mitnick's The Art of Deception about his life as a hacker, this book by Ken Perenyi is about his experiences as a very successful forger, and the amount of detail he provides about the kinds of scams that he'd pull, or the types of details that went into forging specific types of artwork was really fascinating. It's a book that I think about often when writing criminal characters in my own work, but it's also a book I think about just in terms of how captivating it was to read about the world he was a part of.


Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner. While they've continued the work in subsequent books and a long-running podcast, this first "Freakonomics" book, when it came out, was mind-blowing. I had never seen someone use the study of economics (something that I attempted to understand in college and was not good at ) to explain, like, normal things. I'd always assumed that economics was some fancy study of larger market conditions that were largely divorced from people's everyday lives, and it was really cool to see these guys take those same principles and apply them to everyday situations to explain them better.


Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain. I really miss Anthony Bourdain. The guy was an incredible chef, author, and culinary critic. Like Caveat Emptor above, Bourdain's book has a way of transporting the reader into the world of working in professional kitchens, and all of the chaos that surrounds that lifestyle. It's one of those jobs that is almost entirely unique and most people just would not understand or have any visibility into unless they or someone they knew worked one of those jobs. Professional kitchens sound like absolutely bonkers places to work, and this book was a real journey.


The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. Overall, I've really enjoyed most of Malcolm Gladwell's books, each of which focus on a different subject, but this is the original breakthrough book and still one of the best. Similar to Freakonomics, it applies a thought process usually reserved for academics and "big picture" thinkers and applies it to everyday problems and questions that come up in people's normal lives. More than anything, it's a book about better understanding the forces that impact our world, and I always find books like that both illuminating and interesting.