BEST BOOKS TO READ TO UNDERSTAND LIFE – BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
(Last Updated: February 17th, 2020)
Here are two reading lists: the books I’ve been reading lately and my list of all-time best book recommendations. Books are listed in no specific order and with no comments (do your own research!). At the end of each year, I recap everything I read that year with reviews and comments. You can see my lists for 2017, 2018, and 2019 (subscribers only).
This page will be updated regularly. Check back often!
CURRENT READING LISTS (2020)
WHAT I’M READING NOW
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
- Existentialist Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom
ON DECK TO READ SOON
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Ethics by Benedict de Spinoza
- Love and Will by Rollo May
- Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
- Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein
- Lack and Transcendence by David Loy
FAVORITE READS IN 2020 (SO FAR)
- Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman
- Stories From Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
MY ALL-TIME RECOMMENDED READING LISTS
TO UNDERSTAND LIFE
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- The Republic by Plato
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hagglund
- Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
- The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil by Ernest Becker
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
- Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
- Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, and Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD
- The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Decay by Francis Fukuyama
- Lessons of History by William Durant and Ariel Durant
- Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari
- Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
- Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches by Marvin Harris
- Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
- Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
- Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber
- On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche
- Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
- Marriage: A History by Stephanie Coontz
- The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt
- The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker
- The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith
- Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels
TO UNDERSTAND HUMAN NATURE
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
- The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
- The Evolving Self by Robert Kegan
- The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
- Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
- Influence by Robert Cialdini
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- Mindset by Carol Dweck
- Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
