A great book list from The FarnamStreetBlog on recommended reading that answer the question: What books would you recommend someone read to improve their general knowledge of the world?
What Books Would You Recommend Someone Read to Improve their General Knowledge of the World?
Inspired by a reader’s question to me, I thought I’d ask our followers on Facebook and Twitter for an answer to the question: What books would you recommend someone read to improve their general knowledge of the world. I must say the number and quality of the responses overwhelmed me.
I’ve read a bunch of them, but there is still a number of titles I’ll have to tackle. I’ve already read 19 or 20 of them, some so long ago they would probbly be worth re-reading again and there are two from the list I recently purchased and have started or will start soon enough. The books I’ve read…
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
- A Short History of Nearly Everything
- Slaughterhouse Five
- Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- The Prince
- The Art of War: The Essential Translation of the Classic Book of Life
- Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
- The Denial of Death
- Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
- Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
- The Grapes of Wrath
- Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation―each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives―and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic. - The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
- How To Lie With Statistics
- 1984
- Godel, Esher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
- Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life
My own personal additions to a Recommend Reading To Improve Your General Knowledge of the World? book list
- Man’s Search For Meaning
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- and I’m thinking of others to add…