Mark Manson’s 2020 Reading List

The Durants wrote an 11-volume “History of the World” series that took up pretty much all of their adult lives. This small book is the distillations of the lessons from their decades of research.

An impersonal account of human nature and behavior and the structures that form human society. Imagine if an alien visited Earth for a few thousand years and then had to write a report to explain humans back home.

The most definitive historical account of World War II, the Nazi Party and the Holocaust.

The biography of Robert Moses, the most powerful man in New York City for most of the 20th century. The book uses his life to look at the nature of power.

A tome of a book. Pinker tracks the history of violence and makes the counterintuitive and controversial argument that we are less violent today than we have ever been before.

The origination of political science and a brilliant critique of government that is still important today.

The root of Aristotelian ethics and therefore many of the moral ideas that underpin all of western civilization.

A short rumination on death and what makes life worth living by probably the most famous stoic philosopher.

The original memoir. Confessions would inform a millennium of church theology and western philosophy.

Source of Descartes famous “I think, therefore I am.”

The basis of rationalism, a school of philosophical thought that dominated during the Enlightenment.

The basis of empiricism the rival school of philosophical thought during the Enlightenment.

Rationalism and empiricism were united under Kant’s immense observations about the limits of human cognition and reason. Arguably the most important philosophical work since the ancient Greeks.

Probably Nietzsche’s most cogent statement of his views: that traditional morality is subjective and that people must evolve to a higher understanding of what’s valuable and what is not.

A difficult read and a total mind-fuck. Through painstaking logic, Parfit shows that: acting in self-interest is impossible, personhood does not exist, and pretty much anything you do is evil. This is considered by many to be the most important psychological work of the later 20th century.

Haidt puts forth an argument for a personality-driven model of political beliefs. Hugely important to understand why people believe what they believe.

Hoffer’s classic looks at the nature of mass movements, why they happen, and how they organize. Reportedly, this was Eisenhower’s favorite book.

Written almost 500 years ago, this book is just as relevant now as ever. Machiavelli spent his career as an advisor to royalty. This book was his realistic and amoral advice to any would-be ruler or person in power.

Fukuyama’s magnum opus, a sprawling history of all human political systems and why some succeed and others fail.

Written on his death bed, a look at how all of our anxieties and motivations are ultimately rooted in our fear of our own non-existence. Profound and thought-provoking.

The best book on happiness I’ve ever come across. Gilbert’s take is that the problem isn’t that we can’t find happiness, it’s that we often don’t even know what happiness is.

Kegan integrates almost 100 years of developmental psychology research into one elegant model of how humans grow and mature.

The Nobel Prize winner’s authoritative description and explanation of the cognitive biases that wreak havoc on our ability to understand the world.

A wonderful marriage between ancient philosophical wisdom and modern psychological findings. Discusses how old ideas on happiness, success and virtue often have present-day scientific weight to them.

A definitive look at how resilience or the ability to persist in the face of adversity determines our results more than almost anything else.

An incredibly important idea for living in the age of abundance. Schwartz’s work finds that by multiplying our options and choices, we often become less satisfied with whatever we choose. Huge implications for 21st-century life.

Perhaps the most dizzyingly brilliant, fascinating and interesting books I’ve ever read. The book is about paradoxes and how they can explain consciousness. But to understand his thesis, Hofstadter takes you on an unforgettable journey to get there.

A beautiful layman’s explanation of the Big Bang, astrophysics and the theoretical explanations behind our universe.

Sometimes an idea changes how you see the world. Dawkins explains the revolutionary idea in biology of gene selection, completely flipping evolutionary thought on its head.

A tour de force of modern scientific thought. Bryson starts at the Big Bang and brings us all the way up to present day.

A tour de force against the desire to avoid, ignore and deny the role of genetics in human behavior and society.

A wonderful book on how our minds resist accepting data that runs counter to our assumptions and beliefs.

A controversial classic from the 60s, Kuhn argues that large leaps in scientific progress necessarily must come from outside the scientific establishment.

Imagine a self-help book written by the emperor of roughly ⅓ of the planet. Yeah, that’s what this is.

Frankl also survived Auschwitz, but he also happened to be a celebrated psychiatrist. This book argues for a therapeutic model based on a human sense of meaning, with much of it argued from Frankl’s experiences with the Nazis.

Based on the famous line from Robert Frost, Peck’s book is often considered a self-help classic for its realism and sober viewpoints on suffering, love and growth.

Maybe the most condensed piece of wisdom on the market. Can be read in a day, yet practiced for a lifetime.

Incredibly vulnerable, poignant and well-written. Strayed’s responses as an advice columnist are some of the most beautiful pieces of advice I’ve ever come across.

Brown’s best, in my opinion. This book shows how her ideas about vulnerability look in the real world.

Another self-help classic, this time geared towards productivity and discipline. Timeless.