Law360 Surveys Peter Barnes and Scott Michel Alongside Fellow Tax Professionals About Their Summer Reading

What do tax professionals read in their spare time? A wide variety of books, it turns out. Professionals in the state tax, controversy, white collar, high-net-worth and other areas recommended nine works covering everything from weighty policy discussions and historical fiction to light fiction and motivational texts.

Here, Law360 looks at the books enjoyed by the tax lawyers, professors and analysts who spoke with Law360.

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"The Let Them Theory" by Mel Robbins and Sawyer Robbins

Also in the self-improvement vein, Peter Barnes, Of Counsel at Caplin & Drysdale and a senior lecturing fellow at Duke University School of Law, recommended "The Let Them Theory" by Mel Robbins. The book's message is simple, he said: Stop trying to control others — which you can never do anyway — and learn how to focus on controlling yourself.

Barnes said he found the book a good reminder not to waste time on professional jealousy. 

"It's so easy to get caught up in the internal workings of the tax profession — who's up, who's down, who got the client, who got the promotion," he said. "What really matters is what I do. Am I growing, am I helping my clients more, am I helping my students more?"

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"Trust" by Hernan Diaz

The novel "Trust" by Hernan Diaz is set in New York in the 1920s and composed of four narratives about a family of financiers. Scott Michel, a Member of Caplin & Drysdale whose practice focuses on tax controversy and white-collar criminal law, said he has always enjoyed books about historical New York.

In the four sections, Michel said, the author presents different perspectives on the same characters and, largely, the same events, with noticeable differences depending on the narrator, "leaving it up to the reader to find 'the truth.'"

The book also contains "excellent studies of characters interacting in the context of extreme wealth during a period of great prosperity, with some pointed foreshadowing of the economic and other disasters soon to come," he said.

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