Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.
Francis Bacon
The important thing is to be ruthless with the books that are not good. Just stop reading, put them down, usually throw them away, don’t give them away – if you give them away you could be doing harm to people.
Tyler Cowen
The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.
Dr. Seuss
The following are my essential reading – the books, essays, and short stories which have been critical in forming my views about the world. Feel free to email me recommendations (and you can also follow my Goodreads here).
Books
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Kevin Kelly, Vanishing Asia
Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle (books one and two)
Michael Huemer, Understanding Knowledge
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Shigeru Mizuki, Showa: A History of Japan
Homer, The Odyssey (translated by Emily Wilson)
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
Carlo Rovelli, Reality is Not What it Seems
Toby Ord, The Precipice
James Gleick, Isaac Newton
Nicholas Christakis, Blueprint
Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman!
Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
Simon Singh, The Code Book
Michael Huemer, Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism
Sarah Ruden, The Gospels: A New Translation
Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education
Plato, The Republic
Fintan O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves
Michael Palin, Into Iraq
Sam Harris, Waking Up
Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces
Apostolos Doxiadis, Logicomix
Stephen Fry, Mythos
Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments
Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo, Poor Economics
JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit
David Edmonds, Parfit
Bryan Caplan, Open Borders
George Orwell, 1984
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDEST People in the World
W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems
Zachary Carter, The Price of Peace
Jennifer Burns, The Last Conservative
Tyler Cowen, Who is the Greatest Economist of All Time?
Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi
Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Karl Ove Knausgård, So Much Longing in So Little Space
Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions
Short Stories
Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
Scott Alexander, A Modern Myth
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Scott Alexander, It Was You Who Made My Blue Eyes Blue
Essays
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology
Scott Alexander, The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project
Thomas Nagel, Death
Susan Wolf, Moral Saints
Larissa MacFarquhar, How To Be Good
JBS Haldane, On Being the Right Size
Scott Alexander, 1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled
Michael Huemer, In Praise of Passivity
Andy Clark & David Chalmers, The Extended Mind
Scott Alexander, Epistemic Learned Helplessness
Plato, The Apology
Matt Taibbi, Flathead
Tyler Cowen, The High-Return Activity of Raising Others’ Aspirations
Maciej Cegłowski, Scott and Scurvy
Ronan Lyons, Why Ireland’s Housing Bubble Burst
Scott Alexander, My IRB Nightmare
Patrick Collison & Tyler Cowen & Patrick Hsu, What We Learned Doing Fast Grants
Matt Lakeman, An Attempt at Explaining, blaming, and Being Very Slightly Sympathetic Toward Enron
Ben Kuhn, Grad School Is Worse for Public Health Than STDs
Scott Aaronson, On Blankfaces
Scott Alexander, Beware Systemic Change
Patrick Collison & Tyler Cowen, We Need a New Science of Progress
Ned Block, Troubles with Functionalism
David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Nick Bostrom, The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant
Scott Aaronson, Eigenmorality
Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo, The Economic Lives of the Poor
Andrei Shleifer, State versus Private Ownership
Sam Enright 