Core reading recommendations
Our recommendations below, categorized by subject, satisfy all these criteria:
- They are intellectually engaging and enriching.
- They are accessible to intellectually curious high school students, and to highly precocious middle school students, who have interest in the subject.
- They can be read without too much real-time intellectual effort. You do not need to use paper and pencil while reading these books. Of course, putting in intellectual effort can help you derive more value from the books.
- They systematically cover important ideas related to the subject. We have refrained from listing books that cover ideas that are interesting but relatively unimportant in the subject.
In particular, you won't find any books here that we're recommending purely because they're fun. You also won't find any books here that we're recommending purely because they are difficult to read.
For reading recommendations of other types, see:
Mathematics
| Book | Author | ISBN and purchase links | Why we're recommending it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction | Timothy Gowers | ISBN 978-0192853615, Amazon paperback | ?? |
| The Mathematical Experience | Philip J. Davis, Reuben Hersh | ISBN 978-0395929681, Amazon paperback | The book provides excellent insight into the kind of work that mathematicians do, without requiring the readers to grasp a lot of mathematics. |
Statistics and applications to data analysis
| Book | Author | ISBN and purchase links | Why we're recommending it |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century | David Salsburg | ISBN 978-0805071344 | Provides a historical overview of the important developments in statistics and the statistical way of thinking. |
| Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data | Charles Wheelan | ISBN 978-0393347777 (paperback), Amazon link | Explores statistics concepts through a number of simple real-world examples. |
| The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't | Nate Silver | ISBN 978-0141975658 (paperback), Amazon paperback, Amazon Kindle | Explores ideas from statistics and data analysis with the specific goal of understanding the art and science of predicting the future. |
Economics
| Book | Author | ISBN and purchase links | Why we're recommending it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science | Charles Wheelan | ISBN 978-0393337648, Amazon paperback, Amazon Kindle | ?? |
| The Undercover Economist | Timothy Harford | ISBN 978-0345494016, Amazon paperback | This book uses real-world examples and a minimum of mathematical formalism to explain key economic concepts. Moreover, it systematically covers a significant fraction of the typical introductory college economics course, unlike some of the other pop economics literature. |
| The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life | Steven Landsburg | ISBN 978-1451651737, Amazon paperback | The original book was one of the first in the "pop economics" literature. It offers an excellent introduction to the economic way of thinking using real-world examples and purely verbal reasoning (with a minimum of mathematics). A revised edition in 2012 updated some of the numbers so that they make more sense to modern readers. |
While Freakonomics and its sequel Superfreakonomics are much better known than the above books, we would not recommend Freakonomics or Superfreakonomics if your goal is to obtain an understanding of the economic way of thinking, because they do not systematically cover the core economic concepts.
Biology
| Book | Author | ISBN and purchase links | Why we're recommending it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microbe Hunters | Paul de Kruif | Amazon Kindle | ? |