My Reading List

There are certain books that everyone should read, I think we can all agree.  What follows is my own personal list of literary recommendations, not all of which I’ve finished reading yet, but fully intend to.  You don’t have to agree with the contents of these books to find them valuable, of course, and it’s impossible to agree with all of them, owing to the contradictory nature of several of them.  Enjoy!

P.S. I keep adding more books to this list as I find books that I think are worth reading, which is why this list keeps getting longer.  If, at any point, you notice a book disappear, that’s because it was one I hadn’t previously read, and after reading it, I decided it’s not worth recommending.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The bible (a name which I flatly refuse to capitalise, and should indicate my stance on it), and all of the heretical scriptures omitted from it, most notably the book of Enoch and the gospel of Judas

The Prince (1513), by Niccolo Machiavelli

The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), On the Origin of Species (1859), and The Descent of Man (1871), by C R Darwin

Property is Theft! (1840), by P J Proudhon

On the Jewish Question (1843) and The Communist Manifesto (1848), by K H Marx

The Law (1850), by Frédéric Bastiat

Memoirs From the House of the Dead (1862), and Crime and Punishment (1866), by F M Dostoevskiy

The Conquest of Bread (1892), Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1899), and Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), by P A Kropotkin

We (1922), by E I Zamyatin

Mein Kampf (1926), by Adolf Hitler

La Mia Vita (1929), and The Doctrine of Fascism (1932), by Benito Mussolini

My Life (1930), History of the Russian Revolution (1930), and The Revolution Betrayed (1936), by L D Trotsky – these should be read with extreme scepticism

Brave New World (1931), by Aldous Huxley

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), by J A Schumpeter

1984 (1949), by George Orwell

Delusion and Mass-Delusion (1949) and Rape of the Mind (1956), by J A M Meerloo

The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), by C P Snow

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), by Thomas Kuhn

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), by Ayn Rand, et al

Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems (1971), by Jerome Ravetz

Rules for Radicals (1971), by S D Alinsky

The Gulag Archipelago (1973), by A I Solzhenitsyn – fun fact, once banned in the Soviet Union, now required reading in Russian schools

The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival (1978), by J B Glubb

Dinosaur Brains: Dealing with All THOSE Impossible People at Work (1989), by A J Bernstein and S C Rozen

Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas (1993), by Thomas Sowell

Higher Superstition (1994), by P R Gross and Norman Levitt

The Demon-Haunted World (1995), by Carl Sagan

Intellectual Impostures (1997), a.k.a. Fashionable Nonsense (1998), by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont

Who Moved My Cheese? (1998), by Spencer Johnson

The Social Construction of What? (1999), by Ian Hacking

Who Rules in Science (2001), by J R Brown

Democracy: The God That Failed (2001), by H H Hoppe

The God Delusion (2006), by Richard Dawkins

See Something, Say Nothing (2016), by P B Haney and Art Moore

How Innovation Works (2020), by Matt Ridley

The Innovation Delusion (2020), by Lee Vinsel and A L Russell