Recession Literature

The best books, articles, and Web sites about the economic collapse.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Saturday, March 22, 2008, at 7:50 AM ET

This is the first installment of "Reading List," in which Slate writers discuss which books, articles, and Web sites they are reading about the subject that interests them most. The weekly column appears in both Slate and the Washington Post's Outlook section.

For connoisseurs of financial folly, commercial irrationality, and general fiscal inanity, these last several weeks have been an all-you-can-eat buffet. In New York, the implosion of Bear Stearns and the serial failure of billion-dollar hedge funds have induced a combination of schadenfreude (I knew those guys never deserved their big salaries) and foreboding (What will this do to the price of that co-op I just bought?). And across the country, the bursting of the real-estate and housing-credit bubble is destroying personal balance sheets.

So what am I, a business/finance journalist and a self-proclaimed expert on bubbles, reading to keep up?