Carlos Rodrigo / 100 books

100 books

I asked Claude for a list of books everyone should read, then updated it with books I want to read. I’ll link to my notes as I read them. Have a recommendation?

The Epic of Gilgamesh — Anonymous — The oldest surviving great story: a king’s search for immortality and his acceptance that he will die.
The Iliad — Homer — Rage, honour and grief during the final weeks of the Trojan War.
The Odyssey — Homer — A clever veteran’s ten-year journey home, and the model for every adventure story since.
Oedipus Rex — Sophocles — A king’s investigation into a plague that leads back to himself.
The Histories — Herodotus — The first work of history: the Persian Wars, told through travel, myth and inquiry.
The Republic — Plato — What justice is, and what a just city and a just soul would look like.
Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle — Happiness as a lifetime of practised virtue, not a feeling.
The Art of War — Sun Tzu — Strategy in short maxims: win by knowing yourself, your opponent and the terrain.
Tao Te Ching — Laozi — Short verses on simplicity, humility and acting by not forcing.
The Analects — Confucius — Sayings on character, duty and how a good society is held together.
The Bhagavad Gita — Anonymous — A dialogue on a battlefield about duty, action and letting go of results.
**Meditations** — Marcus Aurelius — A Roman emperor's private notes to himself on staying calm, fair and humble.
One Thousand and One Nights — Anonymous — Scheherazade tells stories to survive, with stories nested inside stories.
The Divine Comedy — Dante Alighieri — A journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise that maps the whole medieval world.
The Prince — Niccolò Machiavelli — A cold, practical handbook on how power is won and kept.
Essays — Michel de Montaigne — The man who invented the essay by honestly studying himself.
Hamlet — William Shakespeare — A prince who thinks too much about death, revenge and what is real.
Discourse on the Method — René Descartes — Doubt everything, then rebuild knowledge from “I think, therefore I am.”
Gulliver’s Travels — Jonathan Swift — Satire disguised as a travel book, mocking human pride at every scale.
**Candide** — Voltaire — A comic demolition of the idea that everything happens for the best.
**The Wealth of Nations** — Adam Smith — How specialisation, trade and self-interest make nations prosperous.
**Pride and Prejudice** — Jane Austen — First impressions, class and money, in the sharpest comedy of manners.
Frankenstein — Mary Shelley — The first science-fiction novel: a creator who abandons what he created.
Democracy in America — Alexis de Tocqueville — A Frenchman’s study of the strengths and dangers of democracy.
The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas — A wrongly imprisoned man’s long, patient revenge.
Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë — An orphan who refuses to give up her self-respect for love or security.
Moby-Dick — Herman Melville — One captain’s obsession with a white whale, and everything else about the sea.
Walden — Henry David Thoreau — Two years in a cabin, testing how little a good life really needs.
On the Origin of Species — Charles Darwin — Natural selection, the idea that explains all of life.
On Liberty — John Stuart Mill — Why society should limit its power over the individual.
Great Expectations — Charles Dickens — An orphan’s rise, and what money and status do to character.
Les Misérables — Victor Hugo — Justice, mercy and redemption through one man’s life in 19th-century France.
Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky — A student commits murder to prove a theory, and conscience takes over.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche — A prophet announces the death of God and calls people to create their own values.
Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad — A journey up the Congo River into the brutality of colonialism.
The Metamorphosis — Franz Kafka — A salesman wakes up as an insect, and his family shows who they really are.
The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald — Wealth, longing and the hollow side of the American Dream.
All Quiet on the Western Front — Erich Maria Remarque — The First World War from a young German soldier’s trench.
A Room of One’s Own — Virginia Woolf — The argument that creative work needs money and a room of one’s own.
==Brave New World — Aldous Huxley — A future where people are controlled through pleasure instead of fear.==
The Stranger — Albert Camus — A man condemned less for his crime than for not feeling what is expected.
The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — A children’s book about what adults forget to see.
Ficciones — Jorge Luis Borges — Short stories about labyrinths, infinite libraries and invented worlds.
==Animal Farm — George Orwell — A revolution of farm animals that slowly turns into the tyranny it overthrew.==
==Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl — What the concentration camps taught a psychiatrist about why people keep going.==
The Diary of a Young Girl — Anne Frank — A teenager’s voice from two years in hiding.
==Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell — Surveillance, propaganda and the control of truth itself.==
The Second Sex — Simone de Beauvoir — How women have been defined as “the other.”
The Origins of Totalitarianism — Hannah Arendt — How Nazism and Stalinism became possible.
Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison — A Black man in America whom society refuses to see.
Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe — An Igbo community and one proud man before and during colonial rule.
To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee — Racial injustice in the American South, seen through a child’s eyes.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities — Jane Jacobs — Why lively streets work and top-down planning so often fails.
The Guns of August — Barbara Tuchman — How miscalculation, pride and rigid plans led Europe into the First World War in a single month.
Silent Spring — Rachel Carson — The book about pesticides that started the environmental movement.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Thomas Kuhn — Science advances through paradigm shifts, not just steady accumulation.
The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin — Two letters on race and America, as urgent as when they were written.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Malcolm X and Alex Haley — A life of reinvention, from prison to political leadership.
The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov — The Devil visits Soviet Moscow in a wild satire.
Slaughterhouse-Five — Kurt Vonnegut — The firebombing of Dresden, told by a man unstuck in time.
Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino — Marco Polo describes impossible cities to Kublai Khan.
The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins — Evolution seen from the point of view of the gene.
Gödel, Escher, Bach — Douglas Hofstadter — How self-reference and strange loops might give rise to meaning, minds and the “I.”
Cosmos — Carl Sagan — A tour of the universe and of how humans learned their place in it.
The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood — A theocracy that strips women of every freedom.
A Brief History of Time — Stephen Hawking — Black holes, the Big Bang and the nature of time, explained for everyone.
The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro — A butler looks back on a life of loyalty and regret.
The Fifth Discipline — Peter Senge — Systems thinking applied to organisations that need to learn faster than they fail.
Guns, Germs, and Steel — Jared Diamond — Geography, crops and animals as the reasons some societies came to dominate others.
A Short History of Nearly Everything — Bill Bryson — How we know what we know, from the Big Bang to us, told with humour.
Poor Charlie’s Almanack — Charlie Munger — Munger’s latticework of mental models from many disciplines, used to think and invest better.
Postwar — Tony Judt — How Europe rebuilt itself from the ruins of 1945, through the Cold War, to unification.
Thinking in Systems — Donella Meadows — Stocks, flows and feedback loops: a short primer on why systems behave as they do.
The Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch — Good explanations as the engine of progress, and why progress has no ceiling.
Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman — The two systems of thought, and the biases that come with fast thinking.
Why Nations Fail — Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson — Inclusive institutions, not geography or culture, as the reason nations grow rich or stay poor.
Antifragile — Nassim Nicholas Taleb — Some things grow stronger from shocks and disorder, and how to be one of them.
Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari — How shared stories let one species of ape take over the planet.
SPQR — Mary Beard — A thousand years of ancient Rome, from village to empire.
The Silk Roads — Peter Frankopan — World history retold from the networks that linked East and West.
The Vital Question — Nick Lane — Energy, cells and why complex life appeared only once in four billion years.
Superforecasting — Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner — What the best forecasters do differently, and how to get better at predicting.
The Gene — Siddhartha Mukherjee — The history of the gene, from Mendel’s peas to editing human DNA.
Algorithms to Live By — Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths — Lessons from computer science for everyday decisions like scheduling, searching and when to stop.
Behave — Robert Sapolsky — Why we act as we do, explained from the second before an action back to evolution.
Scale — Geoffrey West — The hidden laws that link the growth of organisms, cities and companies.
The Order of Time — Carlo Rovelli — Physics suggests that time is very different from how we experience it.
Educated — Tara Westover — A girl raised without school who ends up with a Cambridge PhD.
Factfulness — Hans Rosling — Why the world is better than we think, and the instincts that mislead us.
Until the End of Time — Brian Greene — From the Big Bang to the far future, and where mind and meaning fit in a universe that is running down.
The Last Stargazers — Emily Levesque — What the life of an astronomer at the great telescopes is really like.
The Scout Mindset — Julia Galef — How to want to see things as they really are, not as you wish them to be.
The Dawn of Everything — David Graeber and David Wengrow — Early human societies were far more varied and experimental than the usual story says.
Americanah — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — Love, migration and race between Nigeria, the US and the UK.
An Immense World — Ed Yong — How other animals sense the world, and how little of it we perceive.
Chip War — Chris Miller — How the semiconductor became the world’s most critical technology, and the contest to control it.
Material World — Ed Conway — Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium: the physical materials beneath the digital economy.
Our Moon — Rebecca Boyle — How the Moon shaped Earth, life and human history.
Our Brains, Our Selves — Masud Husain — A neurologist’s patients show how brain changes can alter who we are. Winner of the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.
Nexus — Yuval Noah Harari — A history of information networks, from stone tablets to AI, and what they mean for power and truth.

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