The Official Serious Reading List

A lot of the books have overlapping themes, so I just tried to group them according to their central ideology. I'm just going off my own books, so feel free to suggest additions.

Libertarianism:
- 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell
- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
- Liberty Defined by Ron Paul
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- Free to Choose by Milton Friedman
- The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan

Capitalism:
- Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
- The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
- Austrian Economics: A Primer by Dr. Eamonn Butler
- The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
- The Failure of New Economics: An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies by Henry Hazlitt
- End the Fed by Ron Paul
- The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis by Ben S. Bernanke
- Boom and Bust Banking: the Causes and Cures of the Great Recession by David Beckworth

Authoritarianism:
- Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

Conservatism:
- The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell
- Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg
- American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia by Bruce Fohnen

Liberalism:
- FDR by Jean Edward Smith

Socialism:
- Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and the Global Order by Noam Chomsky
- Occupy by Noam Chomsky
- The Conquest of Bread by Pyotr Kropotkin
- The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx

Philosophy:
- Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
- Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
- Anarchism by Ruth Kinna
- Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals by David Hume
- The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
- Republic by Plato
- The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
- The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
- Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
- Common Sense by Thomas Paine

Religion:
- God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

I would have said this is good enough to merit a sticky even without the demand >_>

Also +100 to anyone who can actually finish Mein Kampf. It reads like a brick wall ._.

I'll do some books for Psychology reading tomorrow, but I think it might be a good idea to add in some religious texts for the religion section.

Hell, even a tldr version of the books would be better than none <.<

Communist Manifesto?
The Prince?
Leviathan?
Common Sense?

Common Sense?

By Thomas Paine?

Common Sense?

By Thomas Paine?

Yes

Yes

Under philosophy?

Yes

Under philosophy?

Philosophy and religion, interestingly enough; it utilizes biblical references to attract the people and connects independence with protestant beliefs

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Could you put "The Road" by Jack Kerouac under "Beat-nick?

The movie, though good, doesn't do the book justice (but then again apparently this book is impossible to put on film - somehow).

The Spirit of the Laws, The Persian Letters, The Second Treatise on Civil Government

Oh hey, I've actually read one of the books on the list, maybe one day I'll read some more off this list.

Alrighty well I have two suggestions for Psychology books <.<

Emotions Revealed - Paul Ekman
Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit - Paul Ekman

I've read the first and I'm planning to read the second, ER might help people get a better understanding of interacting with other humans in person. Something that's easy to... misplace... when you spend a lot of time online <.<

The second one is more of a research paper in book form, but it provides some great insights into deceit.

A good review of it <.<

Dr Eckman may disappoint his readers by not giving them what they want: A simple protocol for determining whether or not someone is lying. There is a simple reason: There isn't one.

Other books will defraud the reader by giving them techniques that in reality don't work. Dr Eckman pounds in one central point - that there is no one single way to detect dishonesty. He calls any belief to the contrary "the Brokaw Hazard," named after Tom Brokaw, who believes that circumlocution is the omnipresent sentinel of a lie. He also develops the concept of the "Othello Error," that cautions the reader against actually causing lie signals by accident (named after the literary Othello, who assumed that his wife's sobbing was for her lover, but in reality she was sobbing because of her husband's rage over the incorrectly presumed affair.). He gives many tips, including a checklist in an appendix that might help the reader to detect lies, but most of the material is embedded deep within the text. He helps the reader to develop a dynamic approach to detecting lies; approaches that are developed as detection begins. He exhorts the reader to use NUMEROUS well-defined clues to develop the case for the conclusion that someone is lying.

The biggest flaw in the book is on its cover. The cover suggests that this is a practical book. It is more of a research paper. This is what makes it reliable - the fact that such a complete study is contained within. But the average reader will look for a standard protocol for detecting lies - but the Brokaw Hazard tells us there is none.

I haven't read it just yet, but I'm certainly planning to <.<

Add The Prince to Authoritarianism. And to add on to Mr Psychologist's post, I'd like to suggest The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks as a good psychology/mental disorder book. And I may as well give a personal recommendation list.

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Oresteia, Aeschylus
Dante's Divine Comedy
Canterbury Tales, Chaucer (also many of his "dream vision" poems, like The House of Fame, and his philosophical work "The Consolation of Philosophy")
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Candide, Voltaire
Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown
The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
The Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
Treatises on Government, John Locke
anything Calvin and Hobbes
anything by Shel Silverstein
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, TS Eliot
A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor
Sophie's World, Jostien Gaarder/Paulette Moller
Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain

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Imperium
Conspirita both by Robert Harris

I'll list them as they come to me. I'm a little lacking on the philosophical stuff. I'm decently read on physics stuff and am well aware that most of this won't interest anyone other than me.

GΓΆdel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter (any one interested in AI  or just really interesting shit in general definitely should read this)
The Fabric of Reality - David Deutsch (popular level, a lot of this stuff is really far out but interesting none the less)
Six Easy Pieces - Richard Feynman(good introduction to some of his lectures on physics)
The Mars Trilogy - Kim Stanley Robinson ( a trilogy of books about Terraforming Mars)
The Road to Reality - Roger Penrose (not for the faint of heart, thousand page book, the first 300 and something pages of which is dedicated entirely to the math needed to understand the other 700)
I Am A Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter (expounds on the concept of strange loops developed in EGB)
The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin (explains many of the problems with the string approach to quantum gravity in a way that's easy to digest for laymen)
Solaris - Stanislaw Lem
The Millennial Project - Marshal T. Savage (lays out in detail how humanity can go about large scale colonization of space)
Not Even Wrong - Peter Woit ( first half gives possibly the most accurate account of QFT I've ever seen in a popular level book, second half gives several arguments as to why string theory is a failed research program and is "Not even wrong")

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I'm sure I'm biased, but The God Delusion is widely recognized as highly flawed, biased, and sloppy in its arguments. I never finished it because 50 pages in every argument Dawkins made could have been refuted by a 15 year old Sunday School student.

Augustine's City of God is a good foil to the two you've got listed.

A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss under science

Body for Life by Bill Phillips under fitness

The 50th Law of Power by Robert Green under lifestyle

I would have said this is good enough to merit a sticky even without the demand >_>

Also +100 to anyone who can actually finish Mein Kampf. It reads like a brick wall ._.

Always wanted to read Mein Kamph

I would have said this is good enough to merit a sticky even without the demand >_>

Also +100 to anyone who can actually finish Mein Kampf. It reads like a brick wall ._.

Always wanted to read Mein Kamph

Ehhh it's pretty shit, I wouldn't buy it at all >.>
It should be in a well stocked library though, you can have a gander at the ramblings on a lunatic for a bit >.>

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Some books you guys might like.

You should add Ishmael by Daniel Quinn to the philosophy section. That's an insanely enlightening book.

Do you guys mind if I add some history books to this list?

You could make a personal development section and add these.

Goals by Brian Tracy
 -Explains how to set goals based on studies of successful people and companies goal setting principles.

Willpower by Roy F. Baumeister
 -Talks how willpower is essentially like a mental muscle and you can strengthen it by exercising discipline, and how it's influenced by glycogen levels.

de la democratie en amerique- alexis de tocqueville
olive branch and sword: the compromise of 1833- merril peterson

A small edit, but the Communist Manifesto should be labelled as both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Why not throw up the list of Most Challenged Books? Let's start knocking them out one by one.