Mark Manson is a self-help author, personal development consultant, entrepreneur, and blogger. He blogs under his own name at MarkManson.net, and has authored three books:
Not only is Manson a successful author (“The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” alone sold 3+ million copies), he is also an avid reader–he read 66 books in 2017 and 63 books in 2018.
I was curious to find out which books he loved the most, so I did some research and compiled together this list of all his book recommendations:
Author Mark Manson and myself.
TO UNDERSTAND LIFE:
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Republic by Plato
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil by Ernest Becker
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, and Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo
TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD:
The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Decay by Francis Fukuyama
Lessons of History by William Durant and Ariel Durant
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches by Marvin Harris
Zealot by Reza Aslan
Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber
On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche
Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
Marriage: A History by Stephanie Coontz
The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt
The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker
The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith
Race Against the Machines by Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels
Average is Over by Tyler Cowen
TO UNDERSTAND HUMAN NATURE:
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
The Red Queen by Matt Ridley
The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
The Evolving Self by Robert Kegan
The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
Influence by Robert Cialdini
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Mindset by Carol Dweck
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
This is Water by David Foster Wallace
FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2017:
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo
Godel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
The Sixth ExtinctionL An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt
FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2018:
I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux
The Evolving Self by Robert Kegan
The Three-Body Problem Trilogy by Cixin Liu
Democracy for Realists by Christopher Aachens and Larry Bartels
The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt
FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2019 (so far):
Circe by Madeline Miller
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hagglund
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
The Second Mountain: A Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
How many books on Manson’s list have you read?
If there’s a book on here that you think is a must-read, let me know in the comments below!
You may also want to check out book recommendations from these great authors:
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This article was based on several articles. The sources can be found here, here and here.
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