Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power by Zachary Karabell
Brown Brothers are conservative bankers. They are willing to invest and take risks, but they do so with their own money. They have been around for over two centuries. Part of their ethos is to not get involved with too many things and work behind the scenes. They are still often involved in the "non-public" part of Wall Street. They exited contriversaral industries (such as cotton produced by slaves) when seeing that it is not the best financial investment. They helped grease international trade by providing letters of credit for those visiting other countries. Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of future US presidents was once a partner.
The story follows a mostly chronological narrative, though does jump around a bit. Both the history of the firm as well as that of individual people and times are followed. Brown Brothers seem to be exactly what you would expect to think of "bankers" rather than the high-flying wall street types that have become predominant recently. They have relationships and influence without flash.
Our modern financial system is relatively new. It has also been hit with many "black swan" spikes. The concept of "retirement" was unknown just a few generations ago. People worked until they couldn't work anymore. Today people often long for the days past, without fully comprehending everything that would entail. 
High frequency stock traders will pay enormous amounts to shave small fractions of a seconds off of electronic communication time. Some of this could be beneficial for computer technology if they were willing to contribute back to open source projects. Alas, they like to keep their work very secret. After all, speed helps them to make make money. By being crazy fast they can perform time-base arbitrage, acting on changes in prices in one location before they have changed in another. They even brag about the benefits of ultra-fast speed, even when it does not benefit them. High frequency traders can use the speed to "get in between" a buyer and seller, making near riskless profits.
The Secret Life of Food explores the role the futures market plays in the food we consume. The United States once had many different future's markets, some of which had their own specific niches. The markets have since consolidated, with specific commodities coming and going. Successful commodities need to have sufficient uncertainty in their yield as well as a wide variety of participants. The markets define specific standards for the product being produced. Participants include producers (often farmers growing the crops ), consumers (usually large corporations that require the crops as inputs) and speculators (financial players who have no intention of taking delivery.) At times speculators have achieved great gains by cornering the market. (Though there have also been huge loses in failed attempts to corner.) The futures markets are used to help smooth costs, and help prevent wild swings in the processed food products commonly consumed. Significant sustained price swings can often take a year or so to appear in the prices of processed food.
Thirteen Bankers describes the control that bankers have managed to btain over our current financial system. It begins with a history of banking and moves towards the "innovation" that has occurred in banking. Only a few generations ago, banking was a relatively low paying conservative industry. However, bankers introduced more and more complex instruments that allowed them to make more and more money. Bankers are also heavily involved in the regulation of banking, making it difficult to implement some needed regulation. Big banks have also become "too big to fail" The government's willingness to let institutions fail at the start of the 2009 financial crisis ended up "forcing" the government to bail out the remaining banks. There was a huge liquidity crisis that could not be resolved. The perverse impact was that the big risky banks end up getting bigger, while the small diverse banks were wiped out. "Too big to fail" banks take riskier and riskier bets because they know they can get bailed out.
In boomerang, Michael Lewis explores some of the sovereign players in the financial markets meltdown of 2009. He plays up the country stereotypes. Iceland is populated by men that do not listen to their wive.s After conquering the fishing industry, they figure they must be naturally gifted at investment banking also. Greek are loners who think everyone else is cheating, so must cheat themselves. The Irish had always suffered, yet they had a rapid economic turnaround. They guaranteed all banks, leaving each long-suffering Irishman with a huge share of debt.
in Crashed, Adam Tooze explores the interrelated economic meltdowns of the past decade and the resultant political actions. The approach is perhaps too detailed. However, in some ways it needs the details to bring out the relationships between activities in many different companies and countries. He openly admits a left-of-center viewpoint with that calls in to question some of the decisions made. (The investment bankers that really triggered the mess were the ones to quickly recover their full bonuses. The average Joe, however, often suffered through demands of austerity.) Governments often have a "built in" stimulus that triggers increased benefits (such as unemployment) when the economy takes a turn for the worse. Cutting government spending for these can further extend the pain of the recession. 
In the 1980s, corporate takovers and buyouts were all the rage. Wall Street could get filthy rich at the expense of actual companies. They also found ways to further enrich their wealth by illegally trading on advance private information. Den of Thieves covers the stories of some of this trading among the people that were actually caught. White collar criminals ended up serving time in prison and paying multi-million dollar fines. Long-lived brokerage houses that were caught up in the scandal vanished. And in the end, you are wondering how many other guilty parties escaped unscathed. The book makes insider trading appear similar to speeding on highways. It is illegal, but so rampant that nobody expects to get caught. Traders could employ all sorts of other schemes (of various legality) to manufacture money, much to the chagrin of taxpayers and shareholders. Have times really changed since then? 30 years later, wall street has changed, but still suffers from the greed complex outlined in the book.
Benjamin Graham was patron saint of value investing. His book, The Intelligent Investor, still pops up on best seller lists, decades after he passed away. Other investors, such as Warren Buffett see him as a significant influence on their investing style. Graham's investing style puts the focus on long term value, regardless of short term market fluctuations. Depending on the dedication of the investor, they can employ screens to narrow down the the list of companies to consider. (Doing these screens were much more difficult a century ago when he started investing.)
Ray Dalio earned a fortune building up his investment company and playing the markets. In Principles, he attempts to distill some of the principles that guided him in his life and work. He stresses that these are his principles and that everyone should have their own. The first principle is to embrace reality and deal with it. Being overly concerned with changing parts of the world that you can't control can lead to defeatism. Instead focus on what is real and what you can do. Related to that, don't get too hung up about how you think things should be. This can distract from finding out how things really are. The world is constantly evolving. You need to continue to evolve also.
The Map and the Territory is Alan Greenspan's look at the Great Recession of 2008 and the impact on the markets. It comes across a bit as "we messed up, but there were problems with our data so it wasn't really our fault." HE does have some interesting insights on entitlement programs (like social security.) Since people are paying into them, they don't think of them as "charity", even when the government provides them much more in benefits than they take out. His analysis also shows that the programs have depressed wages - primarily of lower earning families. However, these are wages that "were never seen", thus they don't have political objections. He also acknowledged that most of the economic models failed to predict the great recession. He is very conservative and finds issue with welfare states. He finds free market capitalism the best tool for raising everybody up. (But he acknowledges that there will be people that suffer from the obsolescence of their previous jobs.) Training programs can help people adapt to new skills needed. However, these programs have often been encumbered by politics. He further laments the extreme political stratification. Washington get-togethers once were balanced between Republicans and Democrats, but now seem to be overwhelmingly one or the other, leaving little cross aisle communication. (This can be seen today with the supreme court confirmation hearings - both sides seem to feel their side has "won", and have little respect for the other side.)
The Quants is the story of some of the key players in the rise of algorithmic trading and the rise of hedge funds. These were people with backgrounds primarily in fields like Math that parlayed their skills into creating complicated models of the financial world to help make obscene riches on wall street. Their models supposedly reduced risk to manageable levels while producing outsize returns. However, they tended to rest on a backbone of people reacting rationally (adhering to Fama's Efficient Markets Hypothesis.) Alas, they often failed to account for some of the "black swans" and human behavior. This lead to catastrophic failure and the great recession of 2007. 
Out of the ashes of the dot-com crash rose the housing bubble. Low interest rates and relaxed underwriting standards allowed anyone to buy a home. Loans were available for anybody, reagardless of their ability to pay. (In some cases, borrowers were encouraged to lie outright.) Lenders offered low teaser rates with options to limit payments further. They would gather fees when the loan was made and then securitized the loans to sell them to others. Borrowers would be expected to refinance or sell their property after the teaser rates expired. This system would work as long as home values are rising. However, once the prices start to fall (or even increase at slower rates), the house of cards would start to fall as teaser rates expired.
Before Michael Lewis was a popular non-fiction writer, he worked on wall street. Liar's Poker is the story of wall street of the 80s and his experience there. The language and the characters involved are all of the salty, unsavory types. These are not the people you would want to meet your family. They were a frat in all the bad ways. Yet somehow they managed to make tons of money. (However, they could just as easily lose a lot or see the great money-making scheme whisked away from them.) Some traders manage to be in the ideal middleman position where they can make money with minimal risk.
The Ascent of money tells the story of the rise of finance as a key part of our economy. It starts with the basic trading units, and then goes on to the derivatives and the derivatives of the derivatives. As finance has become more important, people have continued to react irrationally to things. People also tend to underestimate the irrationality of others, leading to financial crises.