Bloomberg Picks 30

Here's a list we missed late last month. Though the post is rather cryptically titled Hellhound Bites Citigroup, Schwarzman Finds Gold Mine: Top Business Books, Bloomberg's James Pressley explains exactly why they put the list together:

With so many business books being published each month, we're often asked for recommendations. Here are 30 of our favorite hardbacks published this year.

I've taken out the author's brief descriptions of each book (head on over to the original post for those), and have taken the liberty to break the books up into a few categories. You'll notice while perusing the titles that the list tends toward larger narratives (many of the financial crisis), biographies and financial history, which I'm a big fan of, and I think makes a lot of sense for Bloomberg and its readers.

A quick note: Many of the books I put in the "Economics" category are, at least in part, about the economic crisis. The books I chose to list in the "Economics" category are those that offer a detailed prescription to the crisis, rather than just documenting the causes and events of it (not that the latter is a lesser task). The books in the "Economics" category were also, by-and-large, written by economists, while those in the "Histories & Narratives of the Economic Crisis" were written by journalists and participants on Wall Street.

Histories & Narratives of the Economic Crisis

• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis, W.W. Norton
• Chasing Goldman Sachs: How the Masters of the Universe Melted Wall Street Down... and Why They'll Take Us to the Brink Again by Suzanne McGee, Crown Business
• The Devil's Casino: Friendship, Betrayal, and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers by Vicky Ward, John Wiley & Sons
• Diary of a Very Bad Year by Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager by n+1, Harper Perennial
• The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein, The Penguin Press
• On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System by Henry M. Paulson Jr., Business Plus
• The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It by Scott Patterson, Crown Business
• The Rise and Fall of Bear Stearns by Alan C. Greenberg, Simon & Schuster
• The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane by Randall Lane, Portfolio
• The Invisible Hands: Hedge Funds Off the Record-Rethinking Real Money by Steven Drobny, John Wiley & Sons

Economics

• Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert B. Reich, Knopf
• Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram G. Rajan, Princeton University Press
• Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy by Joseph E. Stiglitz, W.W. Norton
• Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being by George A. Akerlof and Rachel E. Kranton, Princeton University Press
• Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone, Hill and Wang
• 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson & James Kwak, Pantheon
• Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, The Penguin Press

Financial History & Biographies

• American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900 by H.W. Brands, Doubleday Books
• Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.—How the Working Poor Became Big Business by Gary Rivlin, HarperBusiness
• Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster by Paul Ingrassia, Random House
• The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick, Simon & Schuster
• The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora's Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance by Michael Perino, The Penguin Press
• High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg by Niall Ferguson, The Penguin Press
• King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone by David Carey & John E. Morris, Crown Business
• More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite by Sebastian Mallaby, The Penguin Press
• No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller by Harry Markopolos, John Wiley & Sons
• The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon by John Paul Rathbone, The Penguin Press
• War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire by Sarah Ellison, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Other

• You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier, Knopf

Looking over the list, I'm reminded once again what a good year this has been for business books.

If you're an entrepreneur looking for ideas or nuts-and-bolts books on business, this list may not be a great help to you (We'll provide you one that will be on December 15th). But if you're an investor in or student of markets and business, it doesn't get much better than this.