A short reading list for curious people

Reading lists are usually too long. The compiler wants to seem well-read, the reader wants to seem ambitious, and the result is a list of forty books, of which the reader will finish three. A more useful reading list is short. Six or seven items, picked because each one rewards the time it takes, and ordered so the early reads make the later ones richer.

The first thing on a curiosity-shaped list is something that recalibrates how you think about thinking itself. Books that do this well change the way you process every other book you read for the next year. They don't have to be philosophy; some of the best examples are history of science or biography. The signal that a book is doing this is that you find yourself rereading paragraphs not because they're hard, but because you want to live in the argument a little longer.

The second is a long, well-reported piece of nonfiction about a topic you would not have picked yourself. The point is not the topic; the point is the reporting. Reading a careful, multi-year investigation into something obscure teaches you what good investigation feels like, and inoculates you against the casual confidence of unsourced commentary on every other topic.

The third is a primary text in a tradition you've previously only read about. If you've read three secondary books about Stoicism, read Marcus Aurelius. If you've read takes on early Christianity, read the Gospels. If you've read essays about Darwin, read Darwin. Primary sources are usually shorter and stranger than the secondary literature implies, and they reset your sense of how much subsequent commentary is interpretation versus repetition.

The fourth is a craft book in a discipline you don't practice. A book on how playwrights structure scenes, even if you'll never write a play. A book on how surgeons make decisions, even if you'll never hold a scalpel. The thing being explained matters less than the texture of how a working practitioner thinks about it. Each such book is a borrowed mind, and borrowed minds are how you escape the limits of your own.

The fifth is a novel you've been avoiding because it has a reputation that intimidates you. Most reputations are wrong in the specifics. The book is rarely as difficult as the reputation suggests; the difficulty is concentrated in two or three sections that are worth pushing through. Reading one such book a year, deliberately, tends to be the highest-leverage reading of the year.

The sixth, and the one most people skip, is a small, deliberately easy book. A short essay collection. A book of poems. A graphic novel. The reading muscle gets fatigued by all the heavy lifting; the easy book is recovery. Without it, the harder books at the top of the list start to compete with each other and your reading slows.

The article we'd point you to is exactly this kind of short list, well-curated by a working editor with a particular point of view. The reasoning behind each choice is more useful than the choices themselves, because it teaches the principle of building your own list — which is the only kind of list that ever actually gets read.