I received numerous requests for book recommendations in the last few weeks. The rise in the mercury clearly correlates with an increase in reading under umbrellas on the beach.

Here are a few books I really enjoyed over the last few years. Note that my tastes are far ranging and eclectic and cover everything from sci-fi soap operas to behavioral economics.

Beach Reads and Page Turners

• A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle
• Bill the Vampire by Rick Gualtieri
• Circling the Sun by Paula McLain
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
• Infinity Born by Douglas E. Richards
• Last Days of Night by Graham Moore
• Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell
• Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
• Star Force (Book Series) by BV Larson
• The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel by Garth Stein
• The Martian by Andy Weir
• The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant by Drew Hayes
• We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis Taylor

Non-Fiction

• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
• Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
• Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan
• Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance
• How to live: a life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell
• Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
• Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
• Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
• SuperFreakonomics by Levitt & Dubner
• Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton
• The Big Short by Michael Lewis
• The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
• The Greatest Trade Ever by Gregory Zuckerman
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson
• The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor–and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car! by Tim Hartford
• The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely
• What if by Randall Munroe