Mind Expanding Books

Introduction

This list is a collection of books which will help you to blow expand your mind. This list started from The Quora question What are some of the books that expand your mind.

Table of Contents

• Startups and Business
• Philosophy and Psychology

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

###Startups and Business

• 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
• Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
• 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

###Philosophy And Psychology

• 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 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

###History

• The Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Lawrence James
• The Art of War by Sun Tzu
• 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]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/857333.The_Art_of_Learning() 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

###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
• 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

###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