The resources below have either significantly influenced or clarified my thinking, or resonate strongly with me. This list is heavily biased to the past few years when I started tracking my reading more carefully.
Books
- Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History
- Alain De Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion
- John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
- Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
- Samuel Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering
- Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
- Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
- Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States
- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory
- Isabel Briggs Myers, Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type
- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: Or On Education
- James Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
- Katharine Tait, My Father, Bertrand Russell
You can see a roughly chronological and more complete list of books I’ve read here.