Curated list of mind expanding books.
- Startups and Business
- Philosophy and Psychology
- Autobiographies and Biographies
- History
- Evolution, Science and Medicine
- Logic and Problem Solving
- Politics
- Economics
- Sexuality
- Education
- Writing
- Theater and Film
- Fiction
- Health
- Design
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Compound Effect | Darren Hardy | 4.40 | 2010 |
| High Output Management | Andy Grove | 4.38 | 1995 |
| How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be : The 25 Principles of Success | Jack Canfield, Janet Switzer | 4.26 | 2007 |
| The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine | Michael Lewis | 4.26 | 2015 |
| The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership | Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, Craig Walsh | 4.21 | 2009 |
| The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers | Ben Horowitz | 4.20 | 2014 |
| Outliers: Story of Success | Malcolm Gladwell | 4.11 | 2008 |
| The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing : A Guide to Move More Profitable | Thomas Nagle, John Hogan, Joseph Zale | 4.09 | 2005 |
| Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children | John Wood | 4.07 | 2006 |
| Hackers and Painters | Paul Graham | 4.06 | 2004 |
| Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap And Others Don't | Jim Collins | 4.05 | 2001 |
| The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses | Eric Ries | 4.04 | 2011 |
| The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal | Jim Loehr, Tony Schwartz | 4.03 | 2005 |
| The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right | Atul Gawande | 4.03 | 2009 |
| Where Good Ideas Come From | Steven Johnson | 4.03 | 2010 |
| Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose | Tony Hsieh | 4.01 | 2010 |
| The Innovator's Dilemma | clayton m. christensen | 4.00 | 1997 |
| Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change | Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson | 3.98 | 2007 |
| The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It | Michael E. Gerber | 3.98 | 1995 |
| Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity | David Allen | 3.98 | 2001 |
| Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way | Richard Branson | 3.97 | 1998 |
| SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance | Steven D. Litt | 3.96 | 2009 |
| The Ten Faces of Innovation | Tom Kelley | 3.96 | 2005 |
| Rich Dad Poor Dad : What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That The Poor And Middle Class Don't | Robert T. Kiyosaki | 3.95 | 1997 |
| Founders At Work: Stories Of Startups Early Days | Jessica Livingston | 3.94 | |
| The Paypal Wars | Eric M. Jackson | 3.94 | 2010 |
| Lean In : Women, Work and the Will to Lead | Sheryl Sandberg | 3.94 | 2013 |
| ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever | David Heinemeier Hansson | 3.93 | 2010 |
| The 22 Immutable Laws Of Branding | Laura Ries and Al Ries | 3.93 | 1998 |
| Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything | Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner | 3.93 | 2006 |
| The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference | Malcolm Gladwell | 3.92 | 2002 |
| The Four Steps to the Epiphany | Steve Blank | 3.92 | 2005 |
| The Curse of the Mogul | Jonathan A. Knee, Bruce C. Greenwald, Ava Seave | 3.91 | 2009 |
| David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants | Malcolm Gladwell | 3.90 | 2013 |
| Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto | Adam Werbach | 3.89 | 2009 |
| The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | 3.88 | 2007 |
| Contagious: Why Things Catch On | Jonah Berger | 3.88 | 2013 |
| Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change | Louis V Gerstner, Jr | 3.88 | 2003 |
| Linchpin: Are You Indispensable | Seth Godin | 3.87 | |
| The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future | Chris Guillebeau | 3.85 | 2012 |
| Too Big to Fail | Andrew Ross Sorkin | 3.85 | 2011 |
| The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less | Barry Shwartz | 3.84 | 2005 |
| The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything | Guy Kawasaki | 3.82 | 2004 |
| Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business | Jeff Howe | 3.82 | |
| Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age | Clay Shirky | 3.82 | |
| Zero to One | Peter Thiel, Blake Masters | 3.75 | |
| One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com | Richard Brandt | 3.75 | |
| Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think | Kenneth Cukier | 3.70 | 2013 |
| The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich | Timothy Ferriss | 3.61 | 2012 |
| The Accidental Billionaires : The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal | Ben Mezrich | 3.50 | 2009 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion | Gregory Boyle | 4.41 | 2010 |
| Education and the Significance of Life | Krishnamurti | 4.38 | 2008 |
| Man's Search for Meaning | Viktor E. Frankl | 4.33 | 2006 |
| The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size | Tor Norretranders | 4.30 | 1999 |
| Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen | Christopher McDougall | 4.27 | 2009 |
| Prometheus Rising | Robert Anton Wilson | 4.26 | 2010 |
| The Concise 48 Laws of Power | Robert Greene | 4.25 | 2011 |
| The Hero with a Thousand Faces | Joseph Campbell | 4.24 | 1972 |
| Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind | Shunryu Suzuki, David Chadwick | 4.23 | |
| The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present | Eric Kandel | 4.22 | 2012 |
| Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion | Robert B. Cialdini | 4.18 | 2006 |
| Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern | Douglas Hofstadter | 4.16 | 1996 |
| The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy : With Illustrations | Matthew Stewart | 4.15 | 1997 |
| How to Win Friends and Influence People | Dale Carnegie | 4.14 | 1998 |
| Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life | Shakti Gawain | 4.13 | 2002 |
| Bulfinch's Mythology | Thomas Bulfinch | 4.13 | 1998 |
| Ego Is the Enemy | Ryan Holiday | 4.12 | 2016 |
| Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! | Anthony Robbins | 4.11 | |
| Predictably Irrational | Dan Ariely | 4.10 | 2008 |
| Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience | Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi | 4.10 | 1990 |
| Thinking, Fast and Slow | Daniel Kahneman | 4.09 | 2011 |
| Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy | William Barrett | 4.09 | |
| The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World | David Deutsch | 4.08 | |
| Metaphors We Live By | George Lakoff, Mark Johnson | 4.08 | 2003 |
| Grit | Angela Duckworth | 4.08 | 2016 |
| In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto | Michael Pollan | 4.07 | 2008 |
| The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature | Steven Pinker | 4.07 | 2003 |
| The History of Western Philosophy | Bertrand Russell | 4.06 | 2008 |
| Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them | Joshua Greene | 4.05 | 2013 |
| Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking | Susan Cain | 4.04 | 2012 |
| The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind | Michio Kaku | 4.04 | 2014 |
| Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized | James Ladyman, Don Ross, et al | 4.04 | 2007 |
| Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto) | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | 4.04 | 2012 |
| Mindset: The new psychology of success | Carol S. Dweck,Ph.D. | 4.04 | 2006 |
| The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business | Charles Duhigg | 4.03 | 2012 |
| The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic | Dan Ariely | 4.00 | |
| Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence | David Perkins | 4.00 | 1995 |
| The Art of War | Sun Tzu | 3.95 | 2005 |
| Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength | Ron P. Baumeister, John Tierney | 3.95 | 2011 |
| A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future | Daniel H. Pink | 3.95 | |
| Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel | Rolf Potts | 3.92 | |
| Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities | Dean Radin | 3.91 | 2013 |
| Prisoner's Dilemma | William Poundstone | 3.91 | 1993 |
| The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature | Steven Pinker | 3.90 | 2007 |
| Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge | Edward O. Wilson | 3.90 | 1999 |
| Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average | Joseph T. Hallinan | 3.87 | 2009 |
| You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation | Deborah Tannen | 3.86 | 2007 |
| Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy | Michael Bruce, Steven Barbone | 3.85 | 2011 |
| What the Dog Saw: and other adventures | Malcolm Gladwell | 3.82 | 2009 |
| Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior | Geoffrey Miller | 3.82 | |
| Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis | Eric Berne. | 3.81 | |
| This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking | John Brockman | 3.81 | 2012 |
| Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking | Daniel C. Dennett | 3.80 | 2014 |
| Jonathan Livingston Seagull | Richard Bach | 3.80 | |
| Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story | Jim Holt | 3.77 | 2012 |
| The Social Contract | Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maurice Cranston | 3.75 | |
| The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas | Michael S. Gazzaniga | 3.70 | 2006 |
| Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid | Robert J Sternberg | 3.68 | 2003 |
| Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Others | Sherry Turkle | 3.62 | 2011 |
| How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic | Madsen Pirie | 3.55 | 2006 |
| Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life: Winifred Gallagher | Winifred Gallagher | 3.54 | |
| The Fine Art of Small Talk: How To Start a Conversation, Keep It Going, Build Networking Skills -- and Leave a Positive Impression | Debra Fine | 3.36 | 2005 |
| Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You: Sam Gosling | Sam Gosling | 3.33 | |
| Gifs of Immperfection | Brene Brown |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption | Laura Hillenbrand | 4.39 | 2010 |
| Long Walk to Freedom | Nelson Mandela | 4.31 | 1995 |
| My Life and My Work | Henry Ford | 4.29 | |
| Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character | Richard Feynman | 4.29 | 1997 |
| The Autobiography of Malcolm X | Malcolm X, Alex Haley | 4.29 | |
| Elon Musk: Inventing the Future | Ashlee Vance | 4.25 | 2015 |
| The Last Lecture | Randy Pausch | 4.25 | 2008 |
| Freedom in Exile | Dalai Lama XIV | 4.24 | 1991 |
| Madame Curie: A Biography | Marie Curie | 4.22 | 2001 |
| Wings of Fire | A.P.J. Abdul Kalam | 4.20 | 2011 |
| An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth | Chris Hadfield | 4.14 | 2013 |
| The Diary of a Young Girl | Anne Frank | 4.10 | 1993 |
| Steve Jobs | Walter Issacson | 4.09 | 2011 |
| My Experiments with Truth | Mahatma Gandhi | 4.07 | 1993 |
| The Story of My Life | Helen Keller | 4.07 | 1990 |
| Losing My Virginity: The Autobiography | Richard Branson | 3.97 | 1999 |
| Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker | Kevin Mitnick | 3.95 | 2011 |
| An Autobiography: Toward Freedom | Jawaharlal Nehru | 3.85 | 1989 |
| iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It | Steve Wozniak | 3.82 | 2007 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind | Yuval Noah Harari | 4.42 | 2014 |
| The Discoverers | Daniel J. Boorstin | 4.34 | 2012 |
| One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War | Michael Dobbs | 4.20 | 2008 |
| The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet | David Kahn | 4.18 | 1996 |
| From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present | Jacques Barzun | 4.12 | 2001 |
| Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future | Ian Morrisage | 4.09 | 2010 |
| The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide | Robert Jay Lifton | 4.07 | 1986 |
| God Created The Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History | Stephen Hawking | 4.06 | |
| Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II | Madhusree Mukerjee | 4.05 | 2010 |
| El Tiempo Entre Costuras | María Dueñas | 4.04 | 2009 |
| Guns, Germs, And Steel : The Fates Of Human Societies | Jared M. Diamond | 4.00 | 2005 |
| Discovery of India | Jawaharlal Nehru | 3.98 | |
| The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.) | Matt Ridley | 3.98 | 2010 |
| Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground | Kevin Poulson | 3.96 | 2011 |
| The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World | Steven Johnson | 3.91 | |
| The Rise and Fall of the British Empire | Lawrence James | 3.89 | 1997 |
| The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires | Tim Wu | 3.89 | 2010 |
| Spycraft | Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, Henry R. Schlesinger | 3.81 | |
| Civilization: The West and the Rest: Niall Ferguson | Niall Ferguson | 3.78 | 2011 |
| The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate | Robert D. Kaplan | 3.68 | 2012 |
| The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century | Thomas L. Friedman | 3.66 | 2006 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asimov's New Guide to Science | Isaac Asimov | 4.36 | 1985 |
| Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid | Douglas R. Hofstadter | 4.30 | 1979 |
| The Little Schemer | Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen, Duane Bibby, Gerald J. Sussman | 4.27 | 1995 |
| Scientific Genius: A Psychology of Science | Dean Keith Simonton | 4.25 | 1988 |
| Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World | Kevin Kelly | 4.24 | 1995 |
| A Short History of Nearly Everything | Bill Bryson | 4.19 | |
| The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain | Terrence W. Deacon | 4.17 | 1998 |
| A Brief History of Time | Stephen Hawking | 4.12 | 1998 |
| The Selfish Gene | Richard Dawkins | 4.11 | |
| Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind | Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen | 4.11 | 2009 |
| The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World | Elkhonon Goldberg | 4.07 | |
| The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene | Richard Dawkins | 4.07 | 1999 |
| Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe | Peter D. Ward, Donald Brownlee | 4.06 | 2003 |
| Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers | Mary Roach | 4.05 | 2004 |
| Darwin's Dangerous Idea | Daniel C. Dennett | 4.03 | |
| The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future | Kevin Kelly | 4.02 | 2016 |
| The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us | Noson S. Yanofsky | 4.00 | 2013 |
| The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition | Thomas S. Kuhn | 3.99 | 1996 |
| At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity | Stuart Kauffman | 3.97 | 1996 |
| The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom | Yochai Benkler | 3.95 | 2006 |
| Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence | Hans Moravec. | 3.95 | 1990 |
| How to Find a Habitable Planet | James kasting | 3.93 | 2010 |
| The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution | Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending | 3.91 | |
| Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives | David Sloan Wilson | 3.90 | 2007 |
| The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains | Nicholas Carr | 3.85 | 2011 |
| Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human | Richard Wrangham | 3.83 | 2009 |
| Heaven in a Chip: Fuzzy Visions of Society and Science in the Digital Age | Bart Kosko | 3.82 | 2000 |
| The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex | Murray Gell-Mann | 3.81 | |
| Tomorrowland: Our Staggering Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact | Steven Kotler | 3.80 | 2015 |
| Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity | Dean Keith | 3.74 | 1999 |
| Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense | Jonathan D. Moreno | 3.45 | 2007 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| What Is the Name of This Book?: The Riddle of Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles | Raymond M. Smullyan | 4.24 | 2011 |
| A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science even If You Flunked Algebra | Barbara Oakley | 4.22 | 2014 |
| How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method | George Polya | 4.16 | 2015 |
| Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge | William Poundstone | 4.05 | 1989 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? | Michael J. Sandel | 4.25 | |
| The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion | Jonathan Haidt | 4.16 | 2012 |
| Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right | Arlie Russell Hochschild | 4.15 | 2016 |
| Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime | John Heilemann, Mark Halperin | 4.10 | 2010 |
| The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies | Bryan Caplan | 3.96 | 2007 |
| Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict | Michael Klare | 3.73 | |
| The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream | Barack Obama | 3.70 | 2006 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Origin of Wealth | Eric D. Beinhocker | 4.23 | 2006 |
| Every Shot Counts: Using the Revolutionary Strokes Gained Approach to Improve Your Golf Performance and Strategy | Mark Broadie | 4.23 | 2014 |
| Economic Facts and Fallacies | Thomas Sowell | 4.18 | 2008 |
| Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years | David Graeber | 4.17 | 2011 |
| Capital in the Twenty-First Century | Thomas Piketty | 4.01 | 2014 |
| 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism | Ha-Joon Chang | 3.97 | |
| The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't | Nate Silver | 3.96 | |
| Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis | James Rickards | 3.96 | 2011 |
| The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World | Niall Ferguson | 3.88 | |
| The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It | Paul Collier | 3.85 | 2007 |
| The Thank You Economy | Gary Vaynerchuk | 3.83 | 2011 |
| Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart | Ian Ayres | 3.70 | |
| A Farewell to Alms : A Brief Economic History of the World | Gregory Clark | 3.67 | 2007 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern | Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha | 4.02 | 2010 |
| The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities | Dossie Easton, Catherine A. Liszt. | 3.83 | 2004 |
| The Sex Myth | Brooke Magnanti | 3.50 | 2015 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas | Seymour A. Papert | 4.32 | 1993 |
| How Children Fail | John Holt | 4.22 | 1995 |
| Teaching as a Subversive Activity | Neil Postman, Charles Weingartner | 4.19 | 1971 |
| Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood | A. S. Neill, Albert Lamb | 4.09 | 1995 |
| The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance | Josh Waitzkin | 4.08 | 2016 |
| Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture | Kirsten Olson, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Parker J. Palmer | 3.92 | 2009 |
| Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist | John Brockman | 3.72 | 2005 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hat Box: The Collected Lyrics of Stephen Sondheim | Stephen Sondheim | 4.77 | |
| On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft | Stephen King | 4.31 | 2002 |
| Clear and Simple as the Truth | Francis-Noël Thomas, Mark Turner | 4.06 | 1996 |
| The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century | Steven Pinker | 4.03 | 2014 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Different Every Night: Putting the play on stage and keeping it fresh | Mike Alfreds | 4.69 | 2008 |
| Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre | Keith Johnstone | 4.27 | |
| The Actor and the Target | Declan Donnellan | 4.25 | 2006 |
| In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing | Walter Murch | 4.24 | 1995 |
| Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair | Frank Hauser, Russell Reich | 4.21 | |
| How to Stop Acting | Harold Guskin | 4.17 | 2003 |
| A Practical Handbook for the Actor | Melissa Bruder, Lee Michael Cohn, Madeleine Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previtio, Scott Zigler, David Mamet | 3.87 | 1986 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thinking Shakespeare: A How-to Guide for Student Actors, Directors, and Anyone Else Who Wants to Feel More Comfortable With the Bard | Barry Edelstein. | 4.62 | |
| Hamlet and Revenge | Eleanor Prosser | 4.50 | 1971 |
| Shakespeare's Metrical Art | George T. Wright | 4.39 | 1991 |
| Hamlet in Purgatory | Stephen Greenblatt | 3.98 | 2002 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov | 4.32 | 1996 |
| Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace | 4.31 | 1995 |
| The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky | 4.30 | 2002 |
| Pride And Prejudice | Jane Austen | 4.24 | 2000 |
| A Prayer for Owen Meany | John Irving | 4.22 | 1990 |
| Letters From The Earth | Mark Twain | 4.22 | 2004 |
| One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | Ken Kesey | 4.18 | 1963 |
| Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | 4.18 | 2002 |
| Steppenwolf: A Novel | Hermann Hesse, Basil Creighton | 4.11 | 1999 |
| The Glass Bead Game | Hermann Hesse, Richard and Clara Winston | 4.11 | 2002 |
| War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy | 4.11 | 1998 |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë | 4.10 | |
| Germinal | Emile Zola | 4.10 | 2004 |
| If on a Winter's Night a Traveler | Italo Calvino and William Weaver | 4.08 | 1982 |
| The Wall: (Intimacy) and Other Stories | Jean-Paul Sartre, Lloyd Alexander | 4.07 | 2010 |
| Sense and Sensibility | Jane Austen | 4.06 | 2003 |
| The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde | 4.06 | 1998 |
| Watership Down: A Novel | Richard Adams | 4.05 | 1975 |
| One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gregory Rabassa | 4.04 | 2003 |
| The Death of Ivan Ilych | Leo Tolstoy | 4.04 | |
| Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | 4.02 | 2012 |
| Bleak House | Charles Dickens | 4.00 | 2006 |
| J'accuse | Emile Zola | 3.99 | 1998 |
| Catch 22 | Joseph Heller | 3.98 | 2004 |
| The House of Mirth | Edith Wharton | 3.94 | 2006 |
| Confessions of a Mask | Yukio Mishima | 3.91 | 1998 |
| De L'esprit Des Lois | Montesquieu | 3.91 | 1995 |
| Love in the Time of Cholera | Gabriel García Marquéz | 3.9 | 1985 |
| Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes | 3.85 | 2003 |
| Mansfield Park | Jane Austen | 3.84 | 2003 |
| Wuthering Heights | Emily Bronte | 3.82 | 2002 |
| Père Goriot | Honoré de Balzac | 3.82 | 1997 |
| Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | 3.80 | 2002 |
| The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger | 3.79 | 2001 |
| Eugénie Grandet | Honoré de Balzac | 3.79 | 2003 |
| Candide | Voltaire | 3.76 | 1991 |
| Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | 3.65 | 2004 |
| Confessions | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | 3.61 | 2003 |
| Lettres persanes | Montesquieu | 3.54 | |
| The Director | David Ignatius | 3.43 | 2015 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Kingkiller Chronicle | Patrick Rothfuss | 4.55 | 2007 |
| The Lord of the Rings | J.R.R. Tolkien | 4.47 | 2005 |
| A Song of Ice and Fire | George R.R. Martin | 4.45 | 2005 |
| Harry Potter | J.K. Rowling | 4.44 | 1997 |
| Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality | Eliezer Yudkowsky | 4.38 | 2015 |
| Discworld | Terry Pratchett | 4.32 | 2001 |
| The Dark Tower | Stephen King | 4.27 | |
| His Dark Materials | Philip Pullman | 4.25 | |
| The Last Wish - Saga | Andrzej Sapkowski | 4.2 | 1993 |
| The Chronicles of Narnia | Clive Staples Lewis | 4.24 | 2002 |
| The City & The City | China Mieville | 3.91 | 2009 |
| The Broken Empire | Mark Lawrence | 3.87 | 2011 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lonesome Dove | Larry McMurtry | 4.47 | 1999 |
| The Help | Kathryn Stockett | 4.45 | |
| The Book Thief | Markus Zusak | 4.36 | |
| All the Light We Cannot See | Anthony Doerr | 4.31 | 2014 |
| The Pillars of the Earth | Ken Follett | 4.29 | 2002 |
| Kane and Abel | Jeffrey Archer | 4.27 | 2004 |
| Emma | Jane Austen | 3.99 | 2003 |
| Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy | Jostein Gaarder and Paulette Moller | 3.88 | 1996 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell | Tucker Max | 3.51 | 2006 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sherlock Holmes | Arthur Conan Doyle | 4.30 | 1998 |
| The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | Agatha Christie | 4.20 | 2006 |
| The Eight | Katherine Neville | 4.17 | |
| Memory Man | David Baldacci | 4.05 | 2015 |
| The Girl on the Train | Paula Hawkins | 3.88 | 2015 |
| The Da Vinci Code | Dan Brown | 3.79 | 2006 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams | 4.38 | |
| Ready Player One | Ernest Cline | 4.31 | 2011 |
| Ender's Game - Saga | Orson Scott Card | 4.30 | 1994 |
| The Player of Games | Iain M. Banks | 4.26 | 1997 |
| The Fifth Sacred Thing | Starhawk | 4.25 | 1994 |
| Hyperion | Dan Simmons | 4.21 | 1989 |
| The Diamond Age | Neal Stephenson | 4.19 | 2000 |
| Dune Chronicles | Frank Herbert | 4.19 | 2006 |
| Foundation | Isaac Asimov | 4.13 | 2004 |
| Snow Crash | Neal Stephenson | 4.02 | 2000 |
| Fahrenheit 451 | Ray Bradbury | 3.97 | 2006 |
| Little Brother | Cory Doctorow | 3.94 | 2008 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| House of Leaves | Mark Z. Danielewski | 4.13 | 2000 |
| Dracula | Bram Stoker | 3.98 | 1986 |
| Frankenstein | Mary Shelley, Maurice Hindle | 3.75 | 2003 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Queen's Gambit | Walter Tevis | 4.11 | |
| The Bone People | Keri Hulme | 4.06 | 1986 |
| Cat's Eye | Margaret Atwood | 3.92 | 1998 |
| Xeelee Sequence | Stephen Baxter | 3.69 | 1992 |
| Ghost Fleet | P.W. Singer and August Cole | 3.62 | 2015 |
| Future Crimes | Marc Goodman | 3.42 | 1990 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Convict Conditioning | Paul Wade | 4.13 | 2012 |
| Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness | Scott Jurek, Steve Friedman | 3.95 | 2012 |
| 8 Weeks to Optimum Health | Andrew Weil | 3.86 |
| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction | Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel | 4.38 | 1977 |
| Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability | Steve Krug | 4.24 | 2014 |
| The Design of Everyday Things | Donald Norman | 4.18 | 2002 |
- @hackerkid for starting the list.
- @geritol for building the framework for maintaining the list.
- All the contributors for keeping the list updated by adding new books.
To the extent possible under law, Vishnu Ks has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.