Deep Reading

BigCat's Close-Reading Shelf

One book a day · the distilled essence · read this page instead of the whole book

Read 1Thinking, Fast and Slow — two systems in your head, and how they fool youDaniel Kahneman Read 2The Selfish Gene — you're not the gene's purpose, you're its survival machineRichard Dawkins Read 3Sapiens — shared fictions let strangers cooperate at scaleYuval Noah Harari Read 4Guns, Germs, and Steel — the inequality of nations is rooted in geography, not raceJared Diamond Read 5The Wealth of Nations — prosperity woven from specialization and free exchange by an "invisible hand"Adam Smith Read 6Tao Te Ching — the Dao never forces, yet everything gets doneLaozi Read 7Zhuangzi — what binds you isn't the world but the grid in your headZhuang Zhou Read 8Homo Deus — a sated humanity sets out to upgrade itself into a godYuval Noah Harari Read 9Meditations — the world is not yours to run, but your view of it isMarcus Aurelius Read 10The Republic — justice is the healthy order of a soul ruled by reasonPlato Read 11The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism — earning hard yet never enjoying it, an accidental by-product of religious anxietyMax Weber Read 12Discipline and Punish — the most efficient control makes you watch yourselfMichel Foucault Read 13The Second Sex — one is not born, but becomes, a womanSimone de Beauvoir Read 14Escape from Freedom — why people hand back the freedom they just wonErich Fromm Read 15Flow — the best moments come from total absorption in a hard, worthy taskMihaly Csikszentmihalyi