Mind Expanding Books

Curated list of mind expanding books.

Table of Contents

• Startups and Business
• Philosophy and Psychology

• Autobiographies and Biographies
• History
• Evolution, Science and Medicine
• Logic and Problem Solving
• Politics
• Sexuality
• Education
• Writing
• Theater and Film
• Humor
• Fiction
• Health
• Design

Books

###Startups and Business

• Zero to One by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
• Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
• Linchpin: Are You Indispensable by Seth Godin
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap And Others Don't by Jim Collins
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank
• Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger
• David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't by Nate Silver
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
• The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Shwartz
• Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson
• The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything by Guy Kawasaki
• Founders At Work: Stories Of Startups Early Days by Jessica Livingston
• The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
• ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever by David Heinemeier Hansson
• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber
• Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh
• Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way by Richard Branson
• The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr, Tony Schwartz
• The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right by Atul Gawande
• The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau
• Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Kenneth Cukier
• The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, Craig Walsh
• The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk
• Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe
• Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
• The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing : A Guide to Move More Profitable by Thomas Nagle, John Hogan, Joseph Zale
• Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children by John Wood
• The 22 Immutable Laws Of Branding by Laura Ries and Al Ries
• Rich Dad Poor Dad : What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That The Poor And Middle Class Don't by Robert T. Kiyosaki
• Outliers: Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
• The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich by Thomas Ferriss
• How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be : The 25 Principles of Success by Jack Canfield, Janet Switzer
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
• SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Litt
• Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto by Adam Werbach
• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
• Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change by Louis V Gerstner, Jr
• The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley
• Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin
• The Innovator's Dilemma by clayton m. christensen
• The Paypal Wars by Eric M. Jackson
• Origin of Wealth by Eric D. Beinhocker
• One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard Brandt
• Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky
• Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart by Ian Ayres by Ian Ayres
• The Curse of the Mogul by Jonathan A. Knee, Bruce C. Greenwald, Ava Seave
• The Accidental Billionaires : The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich
• Lean In : Women, Work and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg

###Philosophy And Psychology

• The Art of War by Sun Tzu
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• What the Dog Saw: and other adventures by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Fine Art of Small Talk: How To Start a Conversation, Keep It Going, Build Networking Skills -- and Leave a Positive Impression by Debra Fine
• Gifs of Immperfection by Brene Brown
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
• Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
• The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic by Dan Ariely
• Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid by Robert J Sternberg
• Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life by Shakti Gawain
• In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan
• Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life: Winifred Gallagher by Winifred Gallagher
• You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua Greene
• Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average by Joseph T. Hallinan
• Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion by Gregory Boyle
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind by Michio Kaku
• Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt
• Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Others by Sherry Turkle
• Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities by Dean Radin
• Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett
• The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business by Charles Duhigg
• The Concise 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
• Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone
• The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas by Michael S. Gazzaniga
• Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You: Sam Gosling by Sam Gosling
• The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
• The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present by Eric Kandel
• A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink
• Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis by Eric Berne.
• How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic by Madsen Pirie
• Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, David Chadwick
• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch
• This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman
• Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett
• Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy by Michael Bruce, Steven Barbone
• The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
• The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy : With Illustrations by Matthew Stewart
• Bulfinch's Mythologyby Thomas Bulfinch
• Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson
• Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized by James Ladyman, Don Ross, et al
• Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern by Douglas Hofstadter
• Education and the Significance of Life by Krishnamurti
• Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell
• The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Norretranders
• Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence by David Perkins
• Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior by Geoffrey Miller
• The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maurice Cranston
• Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts

###Autobiographies and Biographies

• Elon Musk: Inventing the Future by Ashlee Vance
• My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi
• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
• Wings of Fire by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
• An Autobiography: Toward Freedom by Jawaharlal Nehru
• The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
• Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
• Freedom in Exile by Dalai Lama XIV
• Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson
• My Life and My Work by Henry Ford
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman

###History

• Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru
• The Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Lawrence James
• The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson
• The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn
• The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.) by Matt Ridley
• One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs
• The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert Jay Lifton
• Civilization: The West and the Rest: Niall Ferguson by Niall Ferguson
• The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin
• From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun
• The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu
• Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
• The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
• Guns, Germs, And Steel : The Fates Of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond
• Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morrisage
• A Farewell to Alms : A Brief Economic History of the World: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark
• Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II by Madhusree Mukerjee
• The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate by Robert D. Kaplan
• God Created The Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History by Stephen Hawking
• [The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/<1911 class="The_World_Is_Flat"></1911>) by Thomas L. Friedman

###Science and Medicine

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition by Thomas S. Kuhn
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
• The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
• Asimov's New Guide to Science by Isaac Asimov
• The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain by Terrence W. Deacon
• The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending
• Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity by Dean Keith
• At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity by Stuart Kauffman
• The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler
• Heaven in a Chip: Fuzzy Visions of Society and Science in the Digital Age by Bart Kosko
• The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us by Noson S. Yanofsky
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
• Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense by Jonathan D. Moreno
• Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives by David Sloan Wilson
• Darwin's Dangerous Idea Daniel C. Dennett
• The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World by Elkhonon Goldberg
• Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham
• The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex by Murray Gell-Mann
• Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind by Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen
• How to Find a Habitable Planet by James kasting
• Scientific Genius: A Psychology of Science Dean Keith Simonton
• The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene Richard Dawkins
• Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe Peter D. Ward, Donald Brownlee
• Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence by Hans Moravec.
• The Little Schemer by Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen, Duane Bibby, Gerald J. Sussman
• Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World by Kevin Kelly

###Logic and Problem Solving

• What Is the Name of This Book?: The Riddle of Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles by Raymond M. Smullyan
• How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method by George Polya
• Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge by William Poundstone

###Politics

• Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict by Michael Klare
• The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier
• The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan Caplan
• Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? by Michael J. Sandel
• Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann, Mark Halperin
• Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis by James Rickards
• The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
• Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell

###Sexuality

• Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern by Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha
• The Sex Myth by Brooke Magnanti

###Education

• The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin
• How Children Fail by John Holt
• Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture by Kirsten Olson, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Parker J. Palmer
• Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood by A. S. Neill, Albert Lamb
• Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas by Seymour A. Papert
• Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist by John Brockman
• Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman, Charles Weingartner

###Writing

• Hat Box: The Collected Lyrics of Stephen Sondheim by Stephen Sondheim
• Clear and Simple as the Truth by Francis-Noël Thomas, Mark Turner
• The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker

###Theater and Film

• In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing by Walter Murch
• Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone
• A Practical Handbook for the Actor by Melissa Bruder, Lee Michael Cohn, Madeleine Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previtio, Scott Zigler, David Mamet
• The Actor and the Target by Declan Donnellan
• How to Stop Acting by Harold Guskin
• Different Every Night: Putting the play on stage and keeping it fresh by Mike Alfreds
• Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair by Frank Hauser, Russell Reich

###Shakespeare

• Thinking Shakespeare: A How-to Guide for Student Actors, Directors, and Anyone Else Who Wants to Feel More Comfortable With the Bard by Barry Edelstein.
• Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt
• Hamlet and Revenge by Eleanor Prosser
• Shakespeare's Metrical Art George T. Wright

###Humor

• I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell by Tucker Max

###Fiction

• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
• The Help by Kathryn Stockett
• Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder and Paulette Moller
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino and William Weaver
• The Eight by Katherine Neville
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
• Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• Steppenwolf: A Novel by Hermann Hesse, Basil Creighton
• The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, Richard and Clara Winston
• The Wall: (Intimacy) and Other Stories by Jean-Paul Sartre, Lloyd Alexander
• The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky
• Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Emma by Jane Austen
• Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
• The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk
• The Bone People by Keri Hulme
• Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima
• The City & The City by China Mieville
• Letters From The Earth by Mark Twain
• One Hundred Years of Solitude byGabriel Garcia Marquez, Gregory Rabassa
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
• Watership Down: A Novel by Richard Adams
• Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
• The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

###Health

• 8 Weeks to Optimum Health by Andrew Weil

###Design

• Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel
• Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

License

To the extent possible under law, Vishnu Ks has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.