Of course, this isn’t a complete list.

1. Classical & Stoic Wisdom

  • Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
  • Seneca – On Anger
  • Miyamoto Musashi – The Book of Five Rings
  • Jonas Salzgeber – The Little Book of Stoicism
  • Donald J. Robertson – How to Think Like a Roman Emperor
  • Viktor Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning

2. Psychology, Habits & Decision-Making

  • Dale Carnegie – How to Win Friends and Influence People
  • James Clear – Atomic Habits
  • Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga – The Courage to Be Disliked
  • Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow
  • Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass Sunstein – Noise
  • Morgan Housel – The Psychology of Money
  • Spencer Johnson – Who Moved My Cheese?
  • Mark Manson – The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
  • Mark Manson – Everything Is F*cked

3. Modern Productivity, Purpose & Minimalism

  • Tiago Forte – Building a Second Brain
  • Cal Newport – Digital Minimalism
  • Simon Sinek – Start with Why
  • Simon Sinek – Find Your Why
  • Simon Sinek – Leaders Eat Last
  • Simon Sinek – The Infinite Game

4. Risk, Uncertainty & Complex Systems

  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb – The Black Swan
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Antifragile
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Skin in the Game
  • George S. Clason – The Richest Man in Babylon
  • Robert Greene – The 48 Laws of Power
  • Robert Greene – The 33 Strategies of War
  • Robert Greene & 50 Cent – The 50th Law
  • Sun Tzu – The Art of War

5. Society, History & Economics

  • Yuval Noah Harari – 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
  • Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs, and Steel
  • Mary Beard – SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
  • Peter L. Berger – The Capitalist Revolution
  • Srdja Popovic & Matthew Miller – Blueprint for Revolution
  • Henry Hazlitt – Economics in One Lesson
  • Frédéric Bastiat – The Law

6. Science & Technology

  • Bill Bryson – A Short History of Nearly Everything
  • Carlo Rovelli – The Order of Time
  • Hannah Fry – Hello World
  • Max Tegmark – Life 3.0
  • Hans Rosling et al. – Factfulness
  • Vaclav Smil – Numbers Don’t Lie
  • Alan Sokal & Jean Bricmont – Fashionable Nonsense
  • Aurélien Géron – Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow
  • Hadley Wickham & Garrett Grolemund – R for Data Science

7. Memoirs, Biographies & Personal Stories

  • David Goggins – Can’t Hurt Me
  • Edward Snowden – Permanent Record
  • Mihajlo Pupin – From Immigrant to Inventor
  • Dean Nicholson – Nala’s World
  • Fredrik Backman – Anxious People
  • Marc-Uwe Kling – Qualityland
  • Phil Knight – Shoe Dog