What non-fiction books do you recommend reading?

Marenco said:
It's good to see some people still reading books :D
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Well the fact that you said that is evidence of our cultural decline. None of my younger coworkers straight out of college read books, they listen to video or sound clips to get their information.
 
I believe that George Orwell's "1984" has been moved to the Non fiction Shelves.
 
Deep Survival by Lawrence Gonzales
Modeling for All Scales by Howard Odum
Life and Death of Planet Earth by Peter Ward
Circles by James Burke
The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris
Cartoon Guide to Physics by Larry Gonick

XNN
 
You will absolutely love "How to Resist Tyranny by Dropping Out and Going Galt" by George Larrick. This stunning nonfiction book explores liberty and individual freedom and it's very hard to put down. Don't miss out—google it today.
 
ResponsibleIdiot said:
What are your own personal book recommendations?
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This is an abridged selection of my reading, some of the books which have had the most significant formative impact on my way of thinking. It's just a list, do with it what you will...

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The Bible -- If you haven't read it, just do it. There's a reason it's the most-printed, most-read book in history.

Book of Proverbs -- A good starting point for the "practically minded" individual

The Apostle's Creed -- This creed was recited by the apostles of Jesus, it doesn't get any more simple than that.

The Nicene Creed -- The foundational creed of the broad tent of orthodoxy for over 1,500 years. If you cannot recite this creed, that's a diagnosis that you are in severe spiritual danger.

The London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689 -- A relatively modern explication of the non-negotiable foundations of Christian doctrine.

Westminster Larger Catechism -- A good survey of the core beliefs of the church, with many pastoral applications to the practical problems of life.

God in the Dock, CS Lewis -- The modern mind views God exactly backwards.

The Defense of the Faith, Cornelius van Til -- A faithful and systematic presentation of the body of Christian doctrine, aimed at the modern audience.

The Antichrist, Arthur W Pink -- A vastly misunderstood topic, even among Christians. This book was remedial for my own thinking on the subject, in many ways.

Preparations for Sufferings, John Flavel -- One of the most difficult books I've ever read, but also one of the most worthwhile. If you are a believer and you want to take it to the next level, this is the book for that. Spiritual warfare CQB-training.

The Writings of Epicurus -- This is how I describe Epicurus: if atheism were true, Epicurus would be the perfect philosopher. Although Epicurus's unbelief is deplorable, and has many negative consequences on his outlook on life (especially the inescapability of death), his ruthless realism is a breath of fresh air that is rarely seen these days in the departments of philosophy.

Discourse on Metaphysics, Gottfried Leibniz -- Leibniz was one of the greatest philosophers in history. His metaphysical views are founded squarely on God and Leibniz provides a sweeping survey of metaphysical thinking, demonstrating many of the most powerful thinking tools humanity has ever devised.

Desiderata, Max Ehrmann -- God's wisdom is not found only in the Bible and Nature; pagan philosophers and poets also have residual wisdom by virtue of God's common grace.

The Four Noble Truths, The Dalai Lama -- Same as above.

The Great Learning, Confucius

On the Nature of Things, Lucretius

Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell -- This book started it all for me. While Sowell is not an Austrian, his devastation of the total nonsense of the vast majority of modern economic "common wisdom" is scalding and bleached my mind of every last residue of the excuses that people make for outrageous scam projects justified in the name of "the public good". This book was an absolute epiphany for me, and falls into the "once seen, cannot be unseen" category. Once your eyes are opened to the lies, you can never see the world the same again.

Human Action, Ludwig von Mises -- If you only ever read one book on economics, just read this. It's widely regarded as the final word on the topic for a reason. Mises's presentation is so thorough and so clear, that it leaves practically nothing more to be added.

Marxism Unmasked, Ludwig von Mises -- Mises was a master of dismantling Marxism at every level. One of his best.

Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard -- I'm not a pure Rothbardian, but I'm pretty close to it. Rothbard's laser-precise logic dismantles 90+% of the things that we take for granted that governments "obviously" must do.

Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt -- The classic. Just read it.

The Law, Frederic Bastiat -- I've lost count of how many times I've re-read this book. Written about 200 years ago but reads like it's fresh off the press, truly timeless, and endlessly quotable.

That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen, Federic Bastiat -- Another "brain breaker". We are inculcated from youth into so many economic fallacies that it beggars belief. Bastiat mercilessly takes a scalpel to all of the nonense and just cuts it right out of your mind without flinching.

The Politics of Obedience, Etienne de la Boetie -- I've read this many times over. One of the most impassioned pleas for human freedom outside of the Gospel itself.

A Plea for Voluntaryism (The Voluntaryist Creed), Auberon Herbert -- Herbert feels like a forgotten thinker among American libertarians but his Creed is one of the best defenses of pure liberty, that is, pure voluntary social order, ever written. The free online PDF is in terrible condition, so I retyped the entire thing by hand for my own reference. That's how good it is.

Meta Math!, Gregory J. Chaitin -- A good introduction to the topic of Algorithmic Information Theory. The topic may not be everybody's cup of tea, but the book is written for a popular audience. AIT has had an enormous impact on my thinking.

Fundamentals of Piano Practice, Chuan C. Chang -- I am an amateur pianist. This book revolutionized my playing and boosted my playing ability by many orders of magnitude. Non-pianist musicians can also benefit from the principles taught here.

The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers -- A powerful defense against the modern "sentient AI"-mania. Chalmers throws the gauntlet down on consciousness-itself and argues from first principles why consciousness is unexplainable by any known method. He does not preclude the possibility of the development of new methods of thinking that could explain consciousness, but Chalmers robustly defends the assertion that the current thinking methods of philosophy and the known methods of science lack any mechanism to explain consciousness at all.

The Prince, Nicolo Machiavelli -- It's really as good as all the hype. Just read it. Many insights that apply to modern life just as much as to life at the time of Machiavelli.

The Ego and Its Own, Max Stirner -- I'm definitely not a Stirner-ite, and a lot of what Stirner says in this work is opposed to the Gospel. Nevertheless, it's another good "brain breaker", as Stirner forces you out of your comfort-zone and forces you to look at the world from an almost alien perspective.

Infinity and the Mind, Rudy Rucker -- If you like stretching your brain, this book will do it in many ways. I would compare it to Godel-Escher-Bach, but more compressed and focused on the mathematics of infinity itself. The common perception of mathematics is that "all the answers have already been found" but this is nonsense. Rucker's book is a great way for non-mathematicians to understand just how enormous the frontiers of mathematics really are -- truly infinite.

Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, Kanazawa & Miller -- I don't believe in Evolutionary Psychology, but the thinking methods of Evo Psych are very useful in analyzing and debunking modern mythology. This book presents a popularly-accessible introduction to Evo Psych. And yes, beautiful people really do have more daughters.

The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker -- Pinker debunks the modern myth that the mind begins as "a blank slate" and our life experiences are solely responsible for coding up who we are. This is obvious to many people, but Pinker provides a systematic debunking, which is useful for arguing with Woke zombies, etc. Pinker isn't exactly conservative, but he doesn't shy away from following research through to its logical conclusions.

Getting Things Done, David Allen -- This changed my systems of self-organization. I don't do "pure" GTD anymore, but I started with it, and then tailored it to my needs. If you feel you need to get better organized, this book is the place to start.

Algorithms To Live By, Christian & Griffiths -- This is a great book for better understanding the nature of algorithms. Algorithms are a lot more practical than non-experts tend to think. It isn't all just math-y abstractions. Written for a popular audience.

The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, CS Lewis -- A great read with many lessons for modern theory of crime, law and punishment.

The Medicalization of Everyday Life, Thomas Szasz -- Szasz throws the entirety of modern psychology into the dumpster like Ron Swanson throwing out his spyware computer.

Your god is too small, JB Phillips -- A good book for addressing many common misconceptions about biblical theology. If you are not a Nicene-confessing Christian believer, you almost certainly hold one or more of the dozens of theological fallacies that Phillips addresses in this book. Check it out.

Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut -- More relevant today than when it was written. Just read it.

Government, Money and International Politics, Hans Hermann Hoppe -- A great debunking of the scam of "reserve currency". Hoppe exposes, step-by-step, how the whole accounting scam works, who's getting ripped off, and who's walking away with the real wealth in hand.

For Good and Evil: the impact of taxes on the course of civilization, Charles Adams -- One of the only books I've been able to find documenting the history of taxation. Adams doesn't oppose all taxation, but he documents the absurdity of a lot of it.

Common LISP, a gentle introduction to symbolic computation, Touretzky -- This is a technical book, but if you're interested in the history of computing, this is a great book to read. It's oriented to a semi-technical audience.

Introduction to Higher Mathematics, Constance Reid -- This is a book on higher mathematics targeted to the popular audience (you only need high-school math to understand it). Brief and enjoyable.

Origin of Wealth, Eric D. Beinhocker -- Beinhocker is definitely not Austrian, but the methods used in this book would be compatible with certain aspects of Austrian methodology, which makes them really interesting. A lot of "brain breaker" elements to this book. Will definitely make you think about things in a different way.

Choose Yourself, James Altucher -- Altucher is a lost and broken man, but he has a lot of street-smarts in the fullest possible sense of that term. Self-made millionaire, twice-over, and full of a lot of life-lessons and insights you won't find anywhere else.

How to reassess your chess, Jeremy Silman -- If you like chess but got stuck at novice or class-level, Silman will shake you back to reality. His criticisms are biting and sadly relevant to 90+% of us, but he will shake you out of your slumber and force you to start thinking actively at the board.

Legal systems very different from ours, David Friedman -- You know nothing about law. You don't even know what you don't know, until you read this.

An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity, Li & Vitanyi -- This is a graduate-level textbook but it has had such an enormous impact on my thinking (in the area of AIT) that I cannot fail to mention it. Not for the faint of heart (it will help to have an undergraduate education in CS, but you can self-study also.)

Programming the Universe, Seth Lloyd -- If the universe is a Simulation, then Lloyd's sober-minded perspective presented in this short book is what the "source code" would surely look like. This is not fanciful speculation about trans-dimensional aliens, it's just basic mathematical and physical insights applied to the idea of a programmable universe. Paraphrase: "If you want to know what it would be like to be inside a Quantum Computer, look around you. We are living in a universe that is observationally-indistinguishable from living inside a Quantum Computer." Written for a popular audience.

Information Theory, David MacKay -- This is an undergraduate textbook (technical). This is the single best book on information theory (with applications to Comp. Sci.) that I've found and the topic of information theory has been enormously formative on my thinking, so I've included this book here.

Universal Artificial Intelligence, Marcus Hutter -- Undergraduate textbook (technical), but worth reading if you want to understand the broader computational context inside of which AI lives. AI is not unbound by the constraints of mathematics and physics. AI, no matter how much energy it is allowed to consume, is constrained by hard mathematical limits and Hutter addresses this subject from the standpoint of pure theory, giving a truly universal theory of what artificially intelligent systems are capable of.

Mining Massive Datasets, Ullmann et. al. -- Undergraduate textbook (technical). If you have a couple years of Comp. Sci. this textbook explains the entire foundation of the post-Google technology stack. It doesn't work the way that most people might naively think it does, even many people in CS or Machine Learning fundamentally misunderstand how it all works in practice. Modern Big Data systems operate on statistical principles that are noisy, not exact. It's probabilistic data-structures and probabilistic algorithms all the way down. Comp. Sci. and Machine Learning are close cousins, they are much more closely related than many people realize, and this books explains all of that.

Does P=NP?, Scott Aaronson -- Aaronson gives a survey of graduate-level papers on this topic, a sort of "state of the union" for P versus NP. Accessible to undergraduates but definitely a technical paper. Included because of its sheer importance.

A philosophical treatise on Universal Induction, Hutter et. al. -- Another technical paper (undergraduate Comp. Sci.) Included because the Universal Prior (Solomonoff's inductive prior) is arguably the single most important object in all of mathematics because it is secretly lurking behind every other structure in math. Understanding this is probably the biggest Aha-moment I have ever experienced. It is mind-meltingly important, impossible to exaggerate.

More Sex Is Safer Sex, Steven Landsburg -- Landsburg is not an Austrian, but he unwittingly uses a lot of Austrian methodology of social-science (praxeology) in this book. Click-bait title but Landsburg uses rigorously economical thinking to break a lot of popular reasoning fallacies about economics and society in general.

Surreal Numbers, Claus Tondering -- Beautiful paper on some beautiful math. Accessible to a general audience with high-school math.

The Demand for Money and the Time-Structure of Production, Jorg Guido Hulsmann & Hans Hoppe -- If you want to really understand how natural money would work in an unhampered market in money production, read this.

The Ethics of Money Production, Jorg Guido Hulsmann -- One of the most important books for understanding the true scale of the social and cultural cost of inflation. Hidden Austrian gem.

The Unseen Realm, Michael Heiser -- This topic has been influencing a lot of my thinking over the last few years. I don't know if I'm "Heiserian" or not, but he's talking sense.

Divine Proportions, Rational Trigonometry, Nicholas J. Wildberger -- Technical but accessible to anyone with high-school math. Wildberger is a real mathematician in the sense that Mises was a real economist. He's not afraid to break away from dogma and challenge unexamined beliefs. Wildberger is a finitist and I'm definitely not a finitist (and I think his metaphysical arguments all flop) but I still appreciate his style, and I think we need a lot more of Wildberger's style in mathematics and a lot less of the stuffy, bureaucratic type of thinking that characterizes a lot of math departments nowadays.

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This is only a partial list, but that's a lot of the most important books I've read.
 
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