Books

These are some of the books that I have found to be the most compelling.

General Fiction & Classics

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• American War by Omar El Akkad
• The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
• The Assault by Harry Mulisch
• Diary by Chuck Palahniuk
• Ethan Frome by Edith Warton
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
• Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Ignorance by Milan Kundera
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
• The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman
• Looking for Alaska by John Green
• The Map of Salt and Stars by Zeyn Joukhadar
• More by Hakan Güday
• Only Time Will Tell by Jeffrey Archer
• Ordinary People by Judith Guest
• The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
• Ross Poldark by Winston Graham
• A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
• A Separate Peace by Jon Knowles
• The Sins of the Father by Jeffrey Archer
• Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway
• Wicked by Gregory Maguire

Science Fiction & Fantasy

• 1984 by George Orwell
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• Earth Afire by Orson Scott Card
• Earth Unaware by Orson Scott Card
• Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
• Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
• The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
• I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
• Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey
• The Martian by Andy Weir
• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
• Orbital Decay by Allen Steele
• A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Retrograde by Peter Cawdron
• Star Wars: Heir to the Jedi by Kevin Hearne
• A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
• The Swarm by Orson Scott Card
• The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
• Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin
• World War Z by Max Brooks

Biography & Memoir

• The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
• The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession by Mark Obmascik
• The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis
• The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
• A Brain Wider Than the Sky by Andrew Levy
• Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth
• Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins
• Educated by Tara Westover
• Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance
• Endurance by Scott Kelly
• Five Presidents by Clint Hill
• H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
• Henry Clay: The Essential American by David S. Heidler & Jeanne T. Heidler
• Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
• I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
• In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park
• Memoirs by Ludwig von Mises
• Midnight in Broad Daylight by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto
• Moneyball by Michael Lewis
• Naked by David Sedaris
• Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
• Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
• Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty by Daniel Schulman
• The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis
• A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
• The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

History

• An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson
• Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson
• Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story about Copper by Bill Carter
• The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
• A Century of War by John V. Denson
• Conceived in Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard
• Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson
• Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight
• Founding Myths by Ray Raphael
• George Washington’s Secret Six by Brian Kilmeade
• The Great Bridge by David McCullough
• The Great Upheaval by Jay Winik
• The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
• The Idea of America by Gordon S. Wood
• In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson
• Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution by Kathleen DuVal
• The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War by Fred Kaplan
• Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum
• The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
• A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
• The Radium Girls by Kate Moore
• Rome: An Empire’s Story by Greg Woolf
• Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland
• The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
• The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznick
• Voices of a People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
• What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe
• Why American History Is Not What They Say by Jeff Riggenbach
• The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman

Economics & Sociology

• Debts, Defaults, Depressions, and Other Delightful Ditties from the Dismal Science by Bryan Taylor
• Economics for Real People by Gene Callahan
• Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
• The End of Alchemy by Mervyn King
• The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley
• Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
• Human Action: A Treatise on Economics by Ludwig von Mises
• Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
• Man, Economy, and the State by Murray N. Rothbard
• Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail by Chris Clearfield
• Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler
• On Borrowed Time by John Tilton
• Organizational Behavior: Human Behavior at Work by Jown W. Newstrom
• A Short History of Man by Hans Hermann Hoppe
• The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson
• Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner
• The Tariff History of the United States by F. W. Taussig
• That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen by M. Frédéric Bastiat
• Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution by Ludwig von Mises
• Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

Business and Finance

• All About Asset Allocation by Richard A. Ferri
• Berkshire Beyond Buffett by Lawrence A. Cunningham
• Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang
• Buffet’s Bites by L.J. Rittenhouse
• Buffetology and The New Buffetology by Mary Buffett
• Business Adventures by John Brooks
• Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Philip A. Fisher
• The Education of a Value Investor by Guy Spier
• Flash Boys by Michael Lewis
• Get Rich with Dividends by Marc Lichtenfeld
• Good to Great by James C. Collins
• A History of the United States in Five Crashes by Scott Nations
• The Manual of Ideas by John Mihaljevic
• Measuring and Improving Social Impacts by Marc J. Epstein
• Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking by Bethany McLean
• Save, Spend, Invest, Give by Daniel Pecaut
• Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham
• The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey
• University of Berkshire Hathaway by Daniel Pecaut
• The Warren Buffett Way by Robert G. Hagstrom

Politics & Political Science

• Anatomy of the State by Murray N. Rothbard
• The Assault on Reason by Al Gore
• Common Sense by Thomas Paine
• Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn
• The End of America by Naomi Wolf
• For a New Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard
• A Foreign Policy of Freedom by Ron Paul
• Good to Be King by Michael Badnarik
• How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky
• The Law by M. Frédéric Bastiat
• Liberty Defined by Ron Paul
• The Market for Liberty by Morris Tannehill
• No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority by Lysander Spooner
• On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry Thoreau
• The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hostadter
• Shortest Way Home by Pete Buttigieg
• Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice by Mark J. Plotkin

Psychology, Self-Improvement, and Leadership

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
• An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield
• Attitude by Jay Wright
• Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
• Everything All at Once by Bill Nye
• The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey, Zach Kleinman
• Mastery by Robert Greene
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Power of Negative Thinking by Bob Knight
• The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout

Education

• The 20Time Project: How Educators Can Launch Google’s Formula for Future-Ready Innovation by Kevin Brookhouser
• Firefly Classrooms: 10 Elements of Authentic Tasks That Make Learning Visible and Social by Troy Cockrum
• Teaching with Love and Logic by Jim Fay and David Funk

Religion & Mythology

• Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
• A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong

Science & Health

• Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker
• Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal
• The Brain Fog Fix by Dr. Mike Dow
• Cosmos by Carl Sagan
• Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease by Robert H. Lustig
• Fit for Life by Harvey Diamond and Marilyn Diamond
• The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman
• The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
• The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
• The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf
• Migraine by Oliver Sacks
• Of a Feather by Scott Weidensaul
• Origins by Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
• Physics of the Future by Machio Kaku
• The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Stephen Brusatte

Music & Dance

• Creative Dance for All Ages by Anne Green Gilbert
• Effective Performance of Band Literature by W. Francis McBeth
• Evoking Sound by James Jordan
• Exploring Orff by Arvida Steen
• Harmonic Materials by Howard Hanson
• The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia
• Jazz: A History of America’s Music by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns
• The Kodaly Method I: Comprehensive Music Education by Lois Choksy
• Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
• The New Face of Jazz by Cicily Janus
• Now’s the Time: Teaching Jazz to All Ages by Doug Goodkin
• Orff-Schulwerk Today by Jane Frazee
• Teaching Movement & Dance by Phillis S. Weikart

Poetry

• The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath
• Good Poems for Hard Times edited by Garrison Keillor
• How to Read Poetry Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster
• Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda
• Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein

Plays

• The Fifth Column by Ernest Hemingway
• Macbeth by William Shakespeare
• Philoktetes by Sophocles
• Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

Graphic Novels

• Annihilation: Conquest by Keith Giffen
• Black Panther by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Destroyer by Victor LaValle
• The Extinction Parade by Max Brooks
• The Hedge Knight by George R.R. Martin
• Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson
• Nowhere Men by Eric Stephenson
• Saga by Brian K. Vaughan
• Silver Surfer by Dan Slott
• The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman
• Whispers by Joshua Luna