Stephen King once said that the key to being a great writer is to read and lot, and this is true for being a great thinker as well. One of the realizations I’ve made as I’ve become more well-read is how often you find that someone has had the same thoughts as you and has put effort into them. This allows you to move more rapidly through terrain.
Originally, I intended for this to be a list focused on philosophy and logic, but as I was putting the list together, I found that I’d be sending you out to read increasingly minute takes on the same thing. For this reason, I decided to split the list into topics, and only post 5 books each topic. This is not exhaustive, but the goal it to maximize the breadth of a field, rather than going into detail.
Table of Contents
Political Science
Epistemology and Logic
Ethics
History
Strategy
Reading People and Persuasion
Mental fortitude
Economics
Business
Biology and Sex
Psychology
Continental European Literature
American Literature
Russian/Soviet Literature
British literature
Political Science
“The Republic” by Plato
“Politics” by Aristotle
“The Great Political Theories” Volume 1 and Volume 2 by Michael Curtis
“The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
“On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill
Epistemology and Logic
Dialogues by Plato
Rhetoric by Aristotle
Categories by Aristotle
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper
Ethics
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals – Immanuel Kant
Utilitarianism – John Stuart Mill
Ethics – Baruch de Spinoza
Beyond Good and Evil – Friedrich Nietzsche
History
A History of the English Speaking Peoples by Sir. Winston Churchill
Europe: A History by Norman Davies
History: The Ancient Civilizations That Defined History by Roman Collins
A history of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
Strategy
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
Reading People and Persuasion
Covert Persuasion by Kevin Hogan
What every body is saying by Joe Navarro
Emotions Revealed by Paul Ekman
Influence by Dr. Robert Caldini
Mental Fortitude
Letters by Seneca the younger
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Economics
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Das Kapital by Karl Marx
The Road to Serfdom by F.A Hayek
Capitalism and freedom by Milton Friedman
The General theory of employment, interest and money by John Maynard Keynes
Business
Competitive advantage by Michael Porter
The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg
The Firm, the market and the law by R.H. Coase
The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle by Joseph Schumpeter
Common stocks and uncommon profits by Philip A. Fischer
Biology and Sex
The Red Queen: Sex and the evolution of human nature by Matt Ridley
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
The Rational Male by Rollo Tomassi
The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
Psychology
Dangerous personalities by Joe Navarro
The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious by C.G. Jung
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
Thinking fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Snakes in Suits by Robert Hare
Continental European Literature
Faust by Goethe
The Inferno by Dante
An enemy of the people by Henrik Ibsen
All the best by Voltaire
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
American Literature
Catcher in the rye by J.D Sallinger
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Soviet and Russian Literature
A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Trial by Franz Kafka
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
British Literature
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Lord of the flies by William Golding
Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
