The last month of the year traditionally gives us the chance to reflect on what we’ve done and how we want to move forward. It’s also a great moment to give a friend or lover or parent or child a nice gift. Like a book. Here’s my list of 52 all-time favorite books.
The list
- Antifragile
- Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
- Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism
- Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
- Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
- Letters to a Young Poet
- Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
- Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
- On Doing Nothing: Finding Inspiration in Idleness
- We Learn Nothing: Essays
- How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel
- The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
- The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European
- Montaigne (Zweig)
- Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
- The Crossroads of Should and Must: How to Find and Follow Your Passion
- Leonardo Da Vinci: The Biography
- 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
- The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
- The Meek One
- Man’s Search For Meaning: The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust
- If This Is A Man/The Truce
- Brave New World
- 1984
- Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
- The Artist’s Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self
- On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
- Magellan
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
- Think On These Things
- Hannibal and Me
- Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II
- The Prophet
- The Gold Standard: Rules to Rule By (watch Entourage, the series, first)
- Milk and Honey
- Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
- The Sun and Her Flowers
- The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
- The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
- Norwegian Wood
- Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character as Told to Ralph Leighton
- Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger
- The Big Fat Surprise
- The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
- Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History
- Atlas Shrugged (small print version. Not the nicest to read.)
- What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
- Stories of Your Life and Others
- Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People
- Investing: The Last Liberal Art
- The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking
You cannot go wrong with any work by Matt Ridley, David Deutsch or Walter Isaacson. And last but definitely not least: Elephant in the Brain.
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