Here’s 52 books you might want to read

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

  1. Antifragile
  2. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
  3. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism
  4. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
  5. Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
  6. Letters to a Young Poet
  7. Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
  8. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
  9. On Doing Nothing: Finding Inspiration in Idleness
  10. We Learn Nothing: Essays
  11. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel
  12. The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
  13. The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European
  14. Montaigne (Zweig)
  15. Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
  16. The Crossroads of Should and Must: How to Find and Follow Your Passion
  17. Leonardo Da Vinci: The Biography
  18. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
  19. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
  20. The Meek One
  21. Man’s Search For Meaning: The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust
  22. If This Is A Man/The Truce
  23. Brave New World
  24. 1984
  25. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
  26. The Artist’s Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self
  27. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
  28. Magellan
  29. How to Win Friends and Influence People 
  30. Think On These Things
  31. Hannibal and Me
  32. Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II
  33. The Prophet
  34. The Gold Standard: Rules to Rule By (watch Entourage, the series, first)
  35. Milk and Honey
  36. Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
  37. The Sun and Her Flowers
  38. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
  39. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
  40. Norwegian Wood
  41. Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character as Told to Ralph Leighton
  42. Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger
  43. The Big Fat Surprise
  44. The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
  45. Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History
  46. Atlas Shrugged (small print version. Not the nicest to read.)
  47. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir
  48. Thinking, Fast and Slow
  49. Stories of Your Life and Others
  50. Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People
  51. Investing: The Last Liberal Art
  52. 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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