Core reading recommendations

KEEP IN MIND: Over 2 million books are published per year. Out of these, it's very unlikely that the books that you're assigned in school are the ones that cover the most important material, or are best to learn from. Doing the reading assigned in school won't necessarily make you well educated. You can educate yourself by reading select books on your own.

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:

• Reading recommendations for books with a contested thesis
• Math reading recommendations

These books use real-world examples and a minimum of mathematical formalism to explain key economic concepts.

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.