Our Most Recommended Books
Looking for a good book? We have the world’s largest collection of expert book recommendations. Over the past decade, we’ve asked hundreds of experts to pick the five best books in their field—and to explain in detail why those particular books are so important. The results of this 10+ year project are listed below. These are books that have been recommended over and over again, suggesting they are some of the most important books ever written. The experts who picked them for us range from philosophers to politicians, economists to novelists, eminent historians to comedians. With one or two noteworthy exceptions, our most recommended books are not the latest books being promoted by publishers, but books that have stood the test of time. Many are already out of copyright and available for free, though if your budget can stand it, there’s a lot to be said for the informative introduction and footnotes that a good editor, selected by an established publisher, can provide.
Top of our most recommended books is On Liberty, an essay written by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill and published in 1859. It’s a foundational text for liberal democracy and a paean to the importance of individuals’ rights. But novels dominate the list of our most recommended books, suggesting that fiction remains one of the most powerful tools for understanding the world around us and the challenges of the human condition.
Our book recommendations are listed in order, so our most recommended books appear at the top. Each entry includes the number of experts who have recommended that particular book. Click on each book to find out what experts we interviewed said about it in greater detail.
On Liberty
by John Stuart Mill
Is diversity of opinion valuable? Why should we care about free speech? When can someone legitimately interfere in our lives to stop us from doing something? What should restrict the scope of our personal liberty?
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill was originally published in 1859, but his exploration of these questions still feels incredibly contemporary. On Liberty remains a central text of the modern liberal tradition, as our interviews below with philosophers, politicians, historians and political commentators make clear.
“On Liberty is the classic statement of traditional liberal values about the limits of state coercion. It’s an eloquent argument for personal liberty on the grounds that it’s the condition in which human beings are most likely to flourish and be happy.” Read more...
“Mill points out that very often, throughout history, people have thought that they were certainly right, and then turned out to be quite wrong.” Read more...
Peter Singer on Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
Peter Singer, Philosopher
Nineteen Eighty-Four
by George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel written in 1948. Often a standard text in school for teenagers, 1984 is many people’s first introduction to totalitarianism. Ominously prescient in some ways, (such as the scope for surveillance to reach into our lives through the ubiquity of screens) and wide off the mark in others (Big Brother’s omnipresent, unitary police state is not a reality we live with in the West), it makes fascinating reading.
Some of Orwell’s inventions from 1984 entered the English language, like ‘Thought Police,’ ‘Big Brother’ ‘Newspeak’ and of course, the general concept of an ‘Orwellian’ society or future.
“In terms of how technology is working in our modern surveillance powers, it’s a terrifyingly prophetic book in some of its implications for 21st-century human life. Orwell would deny that it was prophecy; he said it was a warning. But in fact, distinguished Orwell scholar Professor Peter Davis once made a list of all the things that Orwell got right, and it was a couple of fairly long paragraphs, and it was really rather terrifying.” Read more...
“Nineteen Eighty-Four is seriously read in China by intellectuals, who see similarities between the world of George Orwell and present-day China.” Read more...
The best books on Dystopia and Utopia
Chan Koonchung, Novelist
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Middlemarch by George Eliot (real name: Mary Ann Evans), was first published in 1871. The novel is set in the fictitious English town of Middlemarch during 1829–1832, and follows several distinct, intersecting stories with a large cast of characters. It is one of Five Books’ most recommended books.
“I think one does often turn to novelists to get a sense of other people’s lives. It was written in 1871, but it’s written about a period 40 or so years before, the period when Ada Lovelace flourished. It’s about an intelligent woman trapped by the expectations and the circumstances of the society she finds herself in.” Read more...
“Middlemarch is staggeringly brilliant, but it’s a labour of love—it’ll take even the most diligent weeks to read…. It’s one thing to enjoy a book, and quite another to to cherish the time spent with a set of characters. I’m envious of anyone getting to know Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate, Mary Garth and Casaubon for the first time. If I could wipe my memory clean and go back and reread it fresh, I would.” Read more...
War and Peace (Book)
by Leo Tolstoy
Which translation of the book War and Peace is best? What kind of reviews did Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece get when it was published? Why has the book War and Peace been chosen by philosophers, historians and novelists as one of the most important ever written? Find out more about one of our most recommended books by reading the expert commentary about War and Peace below.
The audiobook of War and Peace is narrated by the RADA-trained actor, the late Neville Jason.
“Classics of literature often seem intimidating, especially when they’re long. What’s interesting about them is that often they’re very easy reads, especially once you adjust to the language, which normally takes a few chapters. For me, War and Peace was, literally, a beach read. I read it on holiday the year I turned 19. I spent the days on the beach clutching it in the sand. At night, I stayed awake in the hut where we were staying to find out what happened next by the light of a small lamp, long after everyone else had gone to sleep and trying my best not to disturb anyone.” Read more...
“One of the key questions that Tolstoy asks in the appendix is the central question of War and Peace: how can we explain the fact that, on orders, millions of people go out and kill one another, when they know that killing another human being is morally wrong?” Read more...
Cécile Fabre, Philosopher
Scoop
by Evelyn Waugh
“The older I got and the more wars I covered – I have done about 18 – the more true it became”–Veteran BBC journalist Martin Bell on Evelyn Waugh’s journalistic satire Scoop.
“I think it is the best description of a foreign correspondent’s career, and I doubt it will ever be bettered.” Read more...
Richard Beeston, Foreign Correspondent
“Everything about this book is perfect, from the prose to the characters to the Swiss-clock workings of the plot.” Read more...
Andy Borowitz recommends the best Comic Writing
Andy Borowitz, Comedians & Humorist
“What he’s making is an incredibly modern, intimate, psychological diagnosis of the human condition.” Read more...
Simon Yarrow, Historian
“A lot of people think becoming a Christian is a decision you make. St Augustine doesn’t really think that.” Read more...
A N Wilson recommends the best Christian Books
A N Wilson, Biographer
Frankenstein (Book)
by Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley started writing the Frankenstein story when she was 18, and it was published in London two years later. Her chilling tale of how Victor Frankenstein put together a creature by sewing together human parts is said to be the first true science fiction story. If you’ve never read it, or read it a long time ago, it’s definitely worth picking up again, as the subtleties of the original book, entitled Frankenstein: the Modern Prometheus, may have been displaced in your mind by the various cartoons and monster-movies connected to the original only by the name ‘Frankenstein’ (and some people, who haven’t read the book, think Frankenstein is the name of the monster, rather than the name of the scientist who put the creature together).
Read below why it’s one of the books most frequently recommended by the experts we’ve interviewed—on subjects as diverse as fear of death, women and society, and transhumanism.
“Frankenstein can be seen as an experiment—or almost a laboratory—that brings together science and literature…Frankenstein is very much a novel for the twenty-first century. Mary Shelley was trying to push the boundaries of science and technology. The details of the science have changed, but the big questions remain as important for us today as they were for her. “ Read more...
Nick Groom, Literary Scholar
“Shelley had no truck with modesty and restraint, or doing what was expected of her. She let her imagination go as far as it could.” Read more...
Sarah Perry recommends the best Gothic Fiction
Sarah Perry, Novelist
The Looming Tower
by Lawrence Wright
The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright is a detailed narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews. Find out below why it is one of Five Books’ most recommended books.
“Reading this one book gives you an excellent grasp of the human story and the context from which al-Qaeda emerged.” Read more...
Audrey Kurth Cronin, Political Scientist
“Former counterterrorism agent John O’Neill, who died in 9/11, is the hero of this book. He played a central part in trying to take Al-Qaeda apart.” Read more...
The best books on Osama bin Laden
Peter Bergen, Journalist
Man's Search for Meaning
by Viktor Frankl
***Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl has been recommended 5 times in our expert interviews***
In Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps, argued for the existentialist belief that even in the worst possible conditions, as human beings we still have control over how we think about our situation. The original title of the book, when it was first published in 1946, was Saying Yes to Life Anyway: A Psychologist Survives the Concentration Camp.
“What’s interesting about his account, which I found absolutely fascinating, is the way he explores the importance of meaning in life as the key to survival.” Read more...
“Frankl says, let me tell you and show you how I and my friends lived in the concentration camps. And if I can do it there, and suffer at that level, so you can you.” Read more...
The Odyssey
by Homer and translated by Emily Wilson
“Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home.”
Odyssey, opening lines (Emily Wilson translation)
If you’re interested in Homer and the poem of the Odyssey, the 2017 translation by Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is a great place to start. Not only is it a highly readable translation, but the introduction provides a lot of context and historical background for anyone wondering who Homer was, when the poem was first written down etc.
Many of us would love to listen to the Odyssey, as that’s how it was first delivered back in 700 BCE. Fortunately, the American actress Claire Danes has narrated the audiobook—so stick in your headphones, put your feet on the sofa, and press play.
“There are so many books of the historical facts behind Troy and its fall, and many magnificent translations of Homer. I particularly recommend Emily Wilson’s Odyssey.“ Read more...
“I still have an image of Odysseus in my head from when I was a child – he’s very Anglo-Saxon and stubbly, a bit like Michael Fassbender” Read more...
Max Porter on the Books That Shaped Him
Max Porter, Novelist
“We tend to see ourselves as not unlike rats, creatures driven by the short-term reward centres in our brains. But what Gilbert does fantastically well is to argue that, actually, humans are better at long-term thinking than almost any other animal. A chimpanzee may strip off the leaves from a branch to make a tool to poke into a termite hole, but that chimp will never make a dozen of those tools and put them aside for next week. Yet this is exactly what humans do.” Read more...
The Best Books for Long-Term Thinking
Roman Krznaric, Philosopher
“Dan Gilbert, a dear friend of mine at Harvard, is the best writer in our field and one of our greatest thinkers. He is extremely creative and insightful.” Read more...
The Iliad
by Homer
“The rage of Achilles—sing it now, goddess, sing through me
the deadly rage that caused the Achaeans such grief
and hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters,
Leaving their naked flesh to be eaten by dogs
and carrion birds, as the will of Zeus was accomplished”
—Iliad, opening lines (Stephen Mitchell translation)
The Iliad, a Greek poem dating from around 700 BCE, is a defining text of western literature. If you want to see what academics say about it and its author(s), Homer, start with our interview with Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek Emeritus at Oxford University, below.
Which translation of the Iliad should you read? British actor and author Stephen Fry recommends either Robert Fagles’s translation (1969), or that of poet and translator Stephen Mitchell, which was published in 2011.
Of course all those millennia ago, the Iliad would have been principally listened to, and modern technology means that’s once again easily possible by listening to the poem as an audiobook. Our own Iliad audiobook is the Robert Fagles translation, magnificently narrated by the British actor—and veteran of the British Classics scene—Derek Jacobi. You can also opt for the audiobook of the Stephen Mitchell translation, which is narrated by the English-American actor Alfred Molina.
So find a fireside to settle down next to, imagine a bard who has memorised hundreds of lines of poetry, plug in your headphones, and press play.
“It is worth remembering of course that Homer’s Iliad doesn’t cover the causes of the War … the Apple of Discord, the Judgement of Paris, birth of Achilles and Abduction of Helen and so on – nor the end of the war. The action of the Iliad begins in the final year of the ten year siege of Troy and dramatises the weeks that begin with the feud between Agamemnon and Achilles and end with the death of Hector.” Read more...
“Part of the Iliad’s brilliance is that it only takes four or five days of the action but you feel like it captures the 10 years’ war as a whole. There is a choice that Achilles has to make. He is told that he has two alternative fates: he could stay away from the war and live out a long life and nobody would ever know or remember him. Or he could go and win eternal fame and glory, but would have a short life. In a way, that is a version of a dilemma that keeps coming back.” Read more...
The best books on Ancient Greece
Christopher Pelling, Classicist
The Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, is the founding text of modern economics. But as our interviews with experts below make clear, its author, Adam Smith, was a moral philosopher and no unabashed cheerleader for the capitalist system he saw flourishing around him in Glasgow, a city grown rich from trade with the American colonies:
“The Wealth of Nations is, of course, one of the most famous, though certainly not most read or understood, books of all time. It was first published in 1776. In fact, I was once asked on an exam in high school ‘Who invented capitalism in 1776?’” Read more...
“It’s a long book and it covers many things. But it’s particularly important for the history of reading.” Read more...
William St Clair on Reading the Romantics
William St Clair, Historian
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë was published in 1847 and achieved immediate success. This essential classic book is still relevant in today’s world. It is a successful mixture of romantic novel and gothic fiction.
“I think Charlotte Brontë’s most accomplished book is Villette. It’s probably a better book, it’s tighter and more sophisticated in some ways. But there’s something about Jane Eyre that is just deeply emotionally compelling for me.” Read more...
Lucy Atkins, Journalist
“It wasn’t until my third reading of the book that I realised Brontë had slipped the supernatural into Jane Eyre.” Read more...
Sarah Perry recommends the best Gothic Fiction
Sarah Perry, Novelist
“The beginning is hard going. Once you get past that, then suddenly you’re into these beautiful and inspiring descriptions of nature.” Read more...
“Thoreau can be thorny to read but Walden is a tremendously important work in the history of environmental thinking and in the history of understanding our relationship with nature.” Read more...
Republic
by Plato
In Ancient Greek, Plato’s famous dialogue was known as Politeia. The Romans called it Res Publica, the title we now use. Below, philosophers and political scientists recommend which edition of Plato’s Republic to read and explain, in detail, why it remains a work of such significance:
“It’s very readable even if you aren’t a professional philosopher. Take the story of ‘The Ring of Gyges,’ which raises the question of whether you would continue to act like a good person if you had a ring of invisibility that let you get away with doing whatever you wanted to do. That’s a fascinating thought experiment that anybody can appreciate.” Read more...
The best books on World Philosophy
Bryan Van Norden, Philosopher
“Living today in Trump’s America, I am constantly reminded of specific passages in the Republic, most saliently his warnings of how a demagogue might arise in the midst of a democracy by fanning up resentments and fears.” Read more...
Rebecca Goldstein on Reason and its Limitations
Rebecca Goldstein, Philosopher
“What Michael Lewis points out very forcefully is that they were deliberately created by Wall Street banks in order to produce non-transparent securities that could not be adequately evaluated by the rating agencies, which then could be sold to less sophisticated investors, who would buy the idea that this junk debt actually had triple A ratings. So what this book does quite brilliantly is show that there was actually a high degree of intentionality in creating the crisis. “ Read more...
Francis Fukuyama recommends the best books on the The Financial Crisis
Francis Fukuyama, Political Scientist
“If I had any criticism of the book, it’s that he makes it seem too obvious. It becomes mysterious how anyone could have been confused.” Read more...
The best books on Unexpected Economics
Tim Harford, Economist
“I think that the most important contributions, the best books, in the philosophy of religion are these two little books that David Hume writes” Read more...
The best books on Atheist Philosophy of Religion
Graham Oppy, Philosopher
“Hume is the main man….It’s an interesting question whether he’s a good writer or not. I’ve always thought him a good writer, but I know some people read Hume and find him difficult. It’s partly just a question of period style. He does tend to write in very long sentences. I think that was just the typical writing of the time. In the 18th century people put a lot of commas and semicolons in, and there weren’t so many full stops. Present day readers can find that quite awkward.” Read more...
Julian Baggini, Philosopher
Here Comes Everybody
by Clay Shirky
Here Comes Everybody, How Change Happens When People Come Together by Clay Shirky is an enlightening exploration of how technology can empower social and political organizers. Shirky is simply the best person at articulating what’s very weird and new about what’s going on. Read what Five Books experts have to say about this highly recommended book.
“It’s a really great book for anyone who wants to understand the social media revolution and how it completely changed the economics of organisation.” Read more...
The best books on 21st Century Foreign Policy
Anne-Marie Slaughter, International Relation
“If you had to pick one individual who was the sharpest and most prescient commentator on the web and the internet it would be Clay.” Read more...
Tyler Cowen, Economist
Pride and Prejudice (Book)
by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice was published more than 200 years ago, in 1813, but the book still speaks to us across the centuries. Written by Jane Austen when she was only 20, its original title was First Impressions. Like many great books, it was initially rejected by publishers and did not appear till years later, now under the title we know it by, Pride and Prejudice. By then, Austen had already had commercial success with Sense and Sensibility, a novel that also compares and contrasts two characters with the qualities (flaws) signalled in the title of the book.
Pride and Prejudice was a trailblazing book, not least because it has served as the template for every romance novel and Mills & Boon written since. The countless book and screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice speak to a story that has universal appeal, its characters and plotline appearing in everything from Bridget Jones’s Diary to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
But Pride and Prejudice is more than just a happily-ever-after story. Philosophers and literary scholars are just some of the experts we’ve interviewed who have chosen Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as essential reading on their topic. Along with many other people, it is Austen scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks’s favourite Austen book. As she explains below, it’s also a serious work. Exploring that theme, she produced Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition, published by Harvard University Press, which includes over 2,000 annotations to the text.
You can read all our interviews featuring Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—and browse some of the original reviews and 19th century commentary on the book—below.
“I think it’s always been my favourite, as it’s many people’s favourite among Austen’s novels. But I was always vaguely embarrassed by that as a scholar, because I didn’t think it was the best.” Read more...
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Literary Scholar
“The book is about the pleasure of being wrong. We forget that wrongness can be deeply pleasurable, but thankfully we have literature and art to remind us.” Read more...
Kathryn Schulz, Journalist
” I think it’s probably his happiest book. Which is a little weird to say but it does have the most sincere and overt love relationship of all of his works, between the father and the son. It’s very purely represented. You can’t doubt the importance of that love and the sustained power of it, and its priority both for the characters and the premise of the book as a whole.” Read more...
“In my view, The Road is the greatest novel ever written, and McCarthy one of the most important writers of the last hundred years. Its bleakness is interspersed with sentences so beautiful I wept.” Read more...
“It’s challenging, learned, filthy, and hilarious. In it, Joyce pushes the boundaries of language and the novel form. It’s easy to see how it was thwarted and censored four times during publication. At first, no one wanted to print it, because they could’ve been found liable for publishing pornography. Ulysses is one of those great novels that demands a level of concentration one can only get in isolation. Yes, it’s difficult and frustrating, but that’s because it wants to frustrate you—and the payoff is immense pleasure: no book gets closer to the ineffable experience of human play and tragedy, of being a fleshy mass of blood and bones in the modern world. It pays dividends for the reader who pays it serious attention. Reading Joyce, you feel incredibly close to the mind of a writer whose conviction was that he could do anything with language; no novel I’ve ever read has been more daring or eye-opening” Read more...
“This novel is still—after nearly a century—powerful, innovative and exhilarating. There is more going on in one sentence in Ulysses than there is in most contemporary novels.” Read more...
Robin Robertson on Books that Influenced Him
Robin Robertson, Novelist
Moneyball
by Michael Lewis
This is about a guy using econometrics to predict which baseball players will do better in advancing wins, a remarkable use of economic thinking.
“I like this book because statistics is a very dry subject, but Lewis makes the numbers come to life by integrating them into Beane’s life story.” Read more...
Timothy J. Jorgensen, Biologist
“What the book is really about is a guy who is using some econometrics to predict which players will do better in advancing wins, which is a remarkable use of economic thinking.” Read more...
Books that Show Economics is Fun
Daniel Hamermesh, Economist
“I miss Douglas Adams. He’s been dead since 2001. He occupied that area for me between friend and acquaintance. He was, I suppose, a work friend. The first book I ever wrote that did anything was The Companion to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I got to work with Douglas on it. Douglas Adams was a genius. A lot of the pleasure in reading Douglas Adams is in jokes that are elegantly and delightfully tuned while also commenting on the human condition.” Read more...
“This is a tale with countless humorous moments, and it’s so bizarre that I instantly fell in love with it.” Read more...
Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman and translated by Robert Chandler
Life and Fate, the masterpiece by Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, is one of our most recommended books (even in history book interviews—even though it’s a novel). Modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, it bore witness to the horrors of both the Soviet experience of World War II and the Holocaust. Sadly for Grossman, it was considered too harmful to be published in his lifetime.
If you want to listen to Life and Fate as an audiobook, there’s no unabridged version, BUT there is a dramatised version, starring Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant, that lasts a manageable 8 hours.
(Stalingrad is the precursor to Life and Fate, newly translated into English.)
“Life and Fate…is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II. But, in fact, it is more than just a fiction because it is based on very close reporting from his time with the soldiers. It is a deliberate act of literary homage to Tolstoy as one can see in the title. It is definitely the War and Peace of the 20th century.” Read more...
The best books on World War II
Antony Beevor, Military Historian and Veteran
“It’s the first novel to come out of the 1940s and 50s that attempts a comparative indictment of Hitlerism and Stalinism, the two varieties of totalitarianism that Grossman knew too well.” Read more...
The Best Vasily Grossman Books
Maxim D Shrayer, Literary Scholar
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
by David S Landes
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998) was written by Harvard economics and history professor David Landes (1924-2013). An unlikely bestseller that took on Adam Smith’s key question—why some nations are rich and others poor—it’s also a great read. See what our experts have said about this book and why it’s so important below:
“Landes argues, for example, that the most significant invention of the last 800 years was the mechanical clock, because until you…can reliably subdivide time, you can’t have capitalism” Read more...
The best books on Negotiating the Digital Age
Nick Harkaway, Novelist
“It’s the most erudite examination of what causes economic development and growth that’s been written in many decades.” Read more...
The best books on Understanding the Burmese Economy
Sean Turnell, Economist
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
The novel Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, was first published under the pen name Ellis Bell in 1847, just a year before Emily’s death in 1848. Below, in our interviews with literary critics and journalists, you’ll see why many people still view it as one of the greatest novels ever written in English. Also worth looking at are the contemporary reviews, some of which were found in Emily’s desk after her death. These are available on the web (see links below), but are also included in the Norton Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights.
“Wuthering Heights is a strange novel in a lot of ways. It’s a standalone—there’s not really another book like it.” Read more...
“In Wuthering Heights once again it’s the landscape that underlines the choices the characters must make. Cathy must choose between the grand house in the lush valley: protected, comfortable and tame; or the wild, exhilarating bleakness of Wuthering Heights.” Read more...
Rachel Hickman recommends the best Novels Set in Wild Places
“Possibly more so than any other leader today, she lives strong values in her every decision. There is no more powerful leadership story.” Read more...
Brett Wigdortz, Nonprofit Leaders & Activist
“For more than two decades, every conversation in Burma or about Burma has ended up being about Aung San Suu Kyi.” Read more...
The best books on Human Rights
Steve Crawshaw, Journalist
“If I had to pick just one self-contained book that lays out Dawkins’s philosophy and methodology, and shows his literary skills, I would have to pick this one.” Read more...
Jerry Coyne, Biologist
“In the Dawkins book I chose, The Blind Watchmaker, he brilliantly explains how complex mechanisms and structures are put together by the process of evolution. It is true that he makes certain theological points that I don’t agree with.” Read more...
Kenneth Miller recommends the best Arguments against Creationism
Kenneth Miller, Biologist
“Most military historians and most students of war will say there’s never been a book as important as Clausewitz’s On War.” Read more...
The Best Military History Books
Hew Strachan, Military Historian and Veteran
“The key message is that strategic principles that we, as practitioners, might use in war depend on what the nature of war is. Which is where we get to a shifty terrain because there are any number of ideas about what the nature of war is.” Read more...
The best books on Military Strategy
Antulio Echevarria II, Military Historian and Veteran
“What the rest of Great Expectations shows is that having Christmas lasting all the way through your life might not be a good thing. Having a Santa Claus figure who keeps throwing gifts and money at you when they’re not necessarily wanted or deserved might be a handicap.” Read more...
The best books on Dickens and Christmas
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Literary Scholar
“It is one of the most perfect novels ever written.It’s got a wonderful plot. It’s about good and bad money, you don’t know who Pip’s benefactor is, you’re wrong-footed—as he is—all the time. It’s about terrible damage. It’s got this fantastic suspense about what happens to Magwitch. It’s sad, but also it’s got wonderful humour in it and wonderful characters. It’s got Wemmick, one of the first commuters. It’s just brilliant.” Read more...
The Best Charles Dickens Books
Jenny Hartley, Biographer
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Recommended five times on Five Books by economists, politicians and others, Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s brilliant dystopian masterpiece.
“It shows the ways in which technology, our need for certain creature comforts and consumer culture can be used to manipulate us.” Read more...
The best books on Alternative Futures
Catherine Mayer, Politician
“It is a hilarious, and also very prescient, parody of utopias. Huxley goes back to the idea that coming together and forming a community of common interests is a great idea – it’s the basis of civil society. At the same time, when communities of common interests are taken to utopian degrees the self starts to dissolve into the larger community, you lose privacy and interiority; that becomes frightening. In Huxley’s parody, the people are convinced that they are melding together and that they are completely happy, but in the end it is utterly empty.” Read more...
Ellen Wayland-Smith, Miscellaneous
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird was the only novel published by Harper Lee during her lifetime, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. This celebrated novel depicts the racism she observed as a child in her hometown in Alabama. To Kill a Mockingbird was first published in November 1960. Subsequently an early 1957 version was published in 2015 under the title Go Set A Watchman.
“It’s dated in many ways; it’s extremely sentimental. But it’s beautifully done – you can’t take a thing away from it.” Read more...
Scott Turow, Thriller and Crime Writer
“The case is about racism, but it’s also about white sexual fear of the black man, and the failed effort of white America to stop intermixing. I think the notion of the scary black man still permeates the American justice system today. I don’t think To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the greatest pieces of literature ever, but it is a very good window into the ingrained sexual fear that permeated at least the southern American justice system.” Read more...
The best books on Sex and Society
Eric Berkowitz, Journalist
On the Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin
On the Origin of Species is Charles Darwin’s book on evolution that changed our understanding of the world, and our place in it, irrevocably. It is one of Five Books’ most recommended books.
“An educated person is someone who knows at least a little bit about the major disciplines in human endeavour. And in biology, this is what you need to know – not only historically but also contemporaneously, because Darwin was right, and still is right, about so many things.” Read more...
Jerry Coyne, Biologist
“It is one of the most important books written, and I always urge people to read it.” Read more...
Mark Kurlansky, Science Writer
“If you want to get a perspective on how the politics of power and ruthlessness work, or simply see some of the thinking behind Game of Thrones, this short, slightly fragmentary book, written in the 16th century, is still the best around.” Read more...
Summer Reading: Philosophy Books to Take On Holiday
Nigel Warburton, Philosopher
“The Prince is an occasion piece. It was written in 1513 after the Medici had been returned to power. Machiavelli was out of a job—he’d been tortured and fired—and couldn’t afford to live in Florence. And his obsession with politics and international affairs was such that he couldn’t let go. So he started a correspondence with his friend Francesco Vettori and, from that correspondence, arose The Prince. It was a book about how to deal with the crisis of Italy after the French invasions. Machiavelli’s response, in The Prince, was that the only way Italy was going to maintain its independence, and freedom, and drive out the barbarians—which is a term he always used for northern Europeans—was to beat them at their own game, to be more violent, more vicious, more brutal, and more faithless” Read more...
The Best Italian Renaissance Books
Kenneth Bartlett, Historian
The Argumentative Indian
by Amartya Sen
In sixteen linked essays, Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen discusses India’s intellectual and political heritage and how its argumentative tradition is vital for the success of its democracy and secular politics.
“Depending how you count, almost any nation could be portrayed as argumentative. But he uses this central theme to range over an amazing breadth of scholarship” Read more...
The best books on The Indian Economy
Kaushik Basu, Economist
“He shows that in fact there were roots of a democratic culture in India long before the British ever got there, and that is what he means by the ‘argumentative Indian’.” Read more...
The best books on The End of The West
David Marquand, Political Scientist
The Bible
The New Oxford Annotated Bible
“It leaves you to think and read for yourself.” Religious studies professor Timothy Beal recommends the New Oxford Annotated Bible as a good version to read if you’re studying the Bible.
“Chapters 7 to 12 of the Book of Daniel constitute, in my opinion, the first genuinely global history ever written.” Read more...
“I teach biblical studies at a secular university and I use this version a lot. It’s the standard critical edition for academic study, but many people use it for personal reasons. It uses the New Revised Standard Version translation, which I think is among the best.” Read more...
Timothy Beal, Theologians & Historians of Religion
“It’s a masterpiece of sociological and political analysis. Tocqueville’s work still helps us understand America, 170 years after he wrote it.” Read more...
Stephen Breyer on his Intellectual Influences
Stephen Breyer, Lawyer
“Tocqueville was seized by the sharp contrast between Paris and America, where people did not wait for the central government, but went ahead on their own, and I think that’s vital part of what it is to be both an American and a vital part of what is America.” Read more...
The best books on Compassionate Conservatism
Karl Rove, Political Commentator
Dracula
by Bram Stoker
Dracula by Bram Stoker is the classic 1897 Gothic horror story. The most famous vampire story, Dracula has underlying themes of race, religion, superstition, science, and sexuality. Find out why Dracula is one of Five Books’ most recommended books. Also worth looking at are Bram Stokers Notes for Dracula which contains Stoker’s research notes.
“Dracula is very explicit. That’s what’s so surprising about it.” Read more...
“Personally, I like to read Dracula as one of the great novels of London. Stoker himself was an Irish immigrant to London. The Count is a central European immigrant to London” Read more...
Darryl Jones, Literary Scholar
“It has been said that he did extensive research for The Plague. The ‘plague’ is generally taken to be a metaphor or meta-commentary on Nazism during World War II. I’m not necessarily sold on that as the exclusive interpretation of the novel. Other people have argued that he was reading about plagues during the time that he was writing this. But one thing that’s really interesting in the background is that, for at least a period of time while writing the novel, Camus was trying to recover from a bout of tuberculosis and he was staying in a village in southern France in the Free Zone (Vichy)” Read more...
“Albert Camus’s The Plague has justifiably become a bestseller this year. Camus is startlingly perceptive about the psychology of those in lockdown, and the ways in which different people cope with the fear of contagion. Previously most of us were told to read this novel as an oblique commentary on the Nazi Occupation. Now we can appreciate it at a literal level too.” Read more...
Summer Reading 2020: Philosophy Books
Nigel Warburton, Philosopher
“Lear is about all sorts of things but one of the things it’s about is people getting old and not ceding what their kids think they should to them and the kids trying to bully them.” Read more...
Kathleen Taylor, Science Writer
“I think it’s the most profound of the plays. It’s not one you go to for a jolly night out, Shakespeare was deeply serious in writing this play. It does have its comic aspects, but it’s easily the most profound examination of what it means to be human of anything that I know.” Read more...
Stanley Wells recommends the best of Shakespeare’s Plays
Stanley Wells, Literary Scholar
“She looked at what biology, history and literature had to say about what it meant to be a woman and she came to the conclusion that these things really only gave people a definition of what it meant to be a woman from the standpoint of famous men. Nobody had ever asked, to her satisfaction, the question of what it means to be a woman to women themselves.” Read more...
“Beauvoir argued that we need to be free from oppression in order to be free to live and love authentically.” Read more...
The best books on Philosophy of Love
Skye C Cleary, Philosopher
Winner-Take-All Politics
by Jacob S Hacker and Paul Pierson
Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned its Back on the Middle Class, by Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker identifies the real culprit behind one of the great economic crimes of our time—the growing inequality of incomes and how the US political system has allowed this to happen.
“This book is about rising inequality and it traces back to fundamental causes. I like books that get back to ultimate causes and that think like social scientists about these causes. The question is, ‘Why is inequality getting worse in so many different countries?’ This book particularly focuses on the US. There are a number of traditional answers, but the most prominent among them is this idea that in a modern economy there is a skill bias in technical change. Our computers and communications have led to a winner-take-all society, where only the really smart can make money.” Read more...
The best books on Capitalism and Human Nature
Robert J Shiller, Economist
“Winner-Take-All Politics puts complex economic ideas into language that we understand. It takes a fresh look at the increase in inequality over the last thirty to forty years.” Read more...
The best books on Progressivism
Keith Ellison, Lawyer
Ordinary Men
by Christopher Browning
How was it that a group of middle-aged men from Hamburg, most not even members of the Nazi party, led by a 53-year-old career policeman, carried out some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust? Ordinary Men by American historian Christopher Browning, first published in 1992, sifts through their testimony to try and find some answers. In doing so, it reveals some unsettling truths for any human being reading its pages.
“The takeaway from reading this horror-filled book is that depredations on the scale of those that Browning describes can be perpetrated anywhere and by anyone.” Read more...
The best books on US Intervention
Lawrence Kaplan, Journalist
“The reason this is such an important book is that when you study the Holocaust you ask almost immediately: How could people do this? How could men who had their own children, go out and murder other children? Or husbands take women and rip open their wombs and kill their infants and shoot them behind the ear? This book raised that question in a very, very strong and powerful way, based on firsthand testimony.” Read more...
The best books on The Holocaust
Steven Katz, Historian
The Aeneid
by Virgil
“Arms and the man I sing, who,
forced by fate,
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore”
—Aeneid, opening lines (Robert Fitzgerald translation)
The Aeneid was written by the Roman poet Virgil, in the age of Augustus, as a founding myth for the emerging Roman empire. See below why experts picked it as an important book on a variety of subjects. Author Selina O’Grady, author of And Man Created God, specified the translation by the American poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald (1983), though in this New York Times review, you can see the arguments for also reading the translation by Robert Fagles (2006), the late American academic and poet.
If you want to read the Latin alongside the English, you can turn to the Loeb Classical Library, though it inconveniently stretches over two books and the English is a little dated.
In classical times poems were meant to be listened to and rather excitingly the British actor, Simon Callow, has narrated an audiobook of the Aeneid, based on Robert Fagles’s translation.
“Virgil’s Aeneid gives an account of the Trojan Horse and the sacking of Troy.” Read more...
“It combines the Iliadic epic of war with the homecoming epic of the Odyssey, but in a weird way. In the Odyssey, the home that Odysseus returns to is the same home that he left twenty years before, whereas in the Aeneid, the home that Aeneas is coming back to is a home that he’s never been to before. It’s a home that has to be invented. Moreover, it’s a home that lies in the future, rather than the sense you get from the Odyssey that going home means coming back to the past.” Read more...
Emily Wilson, Classicist
“This is such a depressing book. This is The Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update. A lot of people, what they remember about The Limits to Growth is it was published in 1971 and was completely lambasted by economists, technologists, lots and lots of people. What it has sitting underneath it is a model of the world, a model of the world economy, which links population, food, industrial production, pollution, a few other things, it’s quite a complicated systems-dynamics model. Obviously it’s only a model, it’s a picture of the world, it isn’t the world itself. But what it said was that if our behaviour as a society didn’t change, we would end up with industrial collapse in the mid-2020s and a population collapse in the mid-2030s.” Read more...
Andrew Curry, Technologist
“The book was written 30 years ago. I read it in the 1980s and it made a big impact on me. The predictions were pretty accurate. They foresaw the strains of growth, and the wear on our planet is certainly starting to show. So it’s a good book, an easy read and it gives you some idea of what we’re up against. We must clean up our environment and find cleaner sources of energy.” Read more...
The best books on Clean Energy
Jerry McNerney, Politician
The Nicomachean Ethics
by Aristotle
It is a sophisticated and subtle analysis of the various virtues: courage, temperance, and wisdom among many others. It’s incredibly subtle and precise, especially when you compare it with the way a lot of moral words are used today.
“According to Aristotle, it is hard to become virtuous, and hard to become vicious too. The character of most people is somewhere in the middle.” Read more...
The best books on Moral Character
Christian B Miller, Philosopher
“It is a sophisticated and subtle analysis of the various virtues: courage, temperance, and wisdom among many others.” Read more...
Edward Skidelsky, Philosopher
In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
In Search of Lost Time is Marcel Proust’s masterpiece which is an excruciatingly detailed chronicle of a part of his life in which every single element and thought is captured and retold. His story is in line with a whole genre of stories, James Joyce’s Ulysses being one and Robert Musil’s A Man without Qualities another one.
“Proust’s reflection on the nature of time is deep and spread over his writing.” Read more...
Carlo Rovelli, Physicist
“A famous masterpiece which is an excruciatingly detailed chronicle of Proust’s life in which every single element and thought is captured and retold.” Read more...
The best books on Memory and the Digital Age
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Technologist
