Booth Faculty's Summer Reading List 2026

Faculty Pascal Noel speaking at Management Conference

We asked a few Chicago Booth faculty members for their current book recommendations. See their picks below.

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

Ethan Mollick

"Mollick emphasizes GenAI's role as a tool that can enhance our abilities to analyze, create, and innovate. He also helps the reader understand the mechanisms behind GenAI—how it processes information, the sources it draws from, and the inherent biases that can shape its outputs, all of which are important to understand when using these tools."

Philip G. Berger
Wallman Family Professor of Accounting

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Herman Melville

"I recently reread Moby-Dick. What struck me this time around was Ahab! A man who led an entrepreneurial enterprise but through his own self-absorption betrayed his investors, coworkers, and customers. A perfect lesson in what not to do in the entrepreneurial ecosystem."

Scott F. Meadow
Kaplan McCormack Family Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship

A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains

Max Bennett

"This book provides a fascinating history of the development of living intelligence over hundreds of millions of years, providing perspective along the way on the development, challenges, and promise of artificial intelligence."

Pascal Noel
Singh Family Professor of Finance

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America

Gabriel Winant

"I recently had coffee with Gabriel Winant. He is a labor historian at the University of Chicago, and he saw my article in The New York Times and suggested we meet given our overlapping interests. I am reading his book (The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America) and it is broadly related to my own research on how manufacturing decline in the United States is related to the rise of health care. His approach is very different as a historian, but his stories and narratives are fascinating and memorable, and it brings some of my own economic modeling to life."

Matthew Notowidigdo
David McDaniel Keller Professor of Economics and Business and Public Policy Fellow

How to Disagree Better

Julia Minson

"In our increasingly polarized world, this book helps communicate both why it is important to understand the perspectives of those who disagree with us and how to best go about it. It is well written, engaging, and communicates very important insights."

Abigail Sussman
V. Duane Rath Professor of Marketing and Beatrice Foods Co. Faculty Scholar

Alexander Hamilton

Ron Chernow

"I just re-read Ron Chernow's remarkable biography of Alexander Hamilton. I had read the biography before I saw the Hamilton musical, and have since seen the musical a few times. The book so wonderfully captures the improbable birth of our country and the equally improbable role that Hamilton played as a founding father."

George Wu
John P. and Lillian A. Gould Professor of Behavioral Science