Robby’s Recommended Reading List

The ability to mentally wander through space, time, and into the minds of others is at the heart of human cognition, but it also forms the basis of fictional storytelling. As such, it’s vital that you enter the minds of some of the greatest thinkers in human history in order to structure your own thinking.

Harold Bloom on why you should read great works:

“Because you will be haunted by great visions: of Ishmael, escaped alone to tell us; of Oedipa Mass, cradling the old derelict in her arms; of Invisible Man, preparing to come up again; like Jonah, out of the whale’s belly. All of them, on some of the higher frequencies, speak to and for you. We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of all pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.”

Fiction

• The Complete Works of Shakespeare, William Shakespeare

• 1984, George Orwell

• Animal Farm, George Orwell

• The Road to Wigen Pier, George Orwell

• Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

• The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

• A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

• The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

• Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

• The Bible (designed to be read as a living literature)

• The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

• On the Road, Jack Kerouac

• Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

• Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes

• Candide, Voltaire

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll

• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

• War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

• Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche

• A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

• Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, Robert M. Pirsig

• The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

• The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling

Neuroscience, Psychology, & Health

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

• The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

• Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche

• Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson, Ph.D.

• 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Jordan Peterson, Ph.D.

• Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson, Ph.D.

• The Parasitic Mind, Gad Saad, Ph.D.

• The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt, Ph.D. & Greg Lukianoff, Ph.D.

• Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Carl G. Jung, M.D.

• Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Carl G. Jung, M.D.

• The Moral Judgment of the Child, Jean Piaget, Ph.D.

• Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl

• Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time, Dean Buonomano, Ph.D.

• In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, Eric R. Kandel, M.D., Ph.D.

• The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health, Emeran Mayer, M.D.

• How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D.

• The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, Norman Doidge, M.D.

• Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping, Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D. 

• Apprentice to Genius: The Making of a Scientific Dynasty, Robert Kanigel 

• Phantoms in the Brain, V.S. Ramachandran, M.D., Ph.D. 

• The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity, Norman Doidge, M.D.

• Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Matthew Walker, Ph.D.

• How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker, Ph.D.

• Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Steven Pinker, Ph.D.

• Memory Rescue, Daniel Amen, M.D.

• Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, Daniel Amen, M.D.

• Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently, Beau Lotto, Ph.D.

• Food, Mark Hyman, M.D.

• The Big Fat Surprise, Nina Teicholz

• Eat to Beat Disease, William Li, M.D.

• The Plant Paradox, Steven Gundry, M.D.

• Boundless, Ben Greenfield (designed to be used like an encyclopedia)

• Head Strong, Dave Asprey

• Genius Foods, Max Lugavere

• Food Fix, Mark Hyman, M.D.

• The Mind-Gut Connection, Emeran Mayer, M.D.

• Grain Brain, David Perlmutter, M.D.

• The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks

• Bitten, Kris Newby

• The Salt Fix: Why the Experts Got It All Wrong--and How Eating More Might Save Your Life, James DiNicolantonio, Pharm. D.

• Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don't Have To, David Sinclair, Ph.D.

• The Complete Guide to Fasting, Jason Fung, M.D.

Other Non-fiction

• The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Matt Ridley

• Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, Ph.D.

• Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Ph.D.

• How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, Bjørn Lomborg, Ph.D.

• Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Hans Rosling Ph.D., Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling

• Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom, Ph.D.

Shakespeare: The Invention of Human Personality

Jordan Peterson: The Psychological Significance of Biblical Stories