Naval's Recommended Reading (from Almanack)

Selected source-stated list. Naval emphasises this is a sample; he skips ~2/3 of his books in public because "they'd sound trivial or silly."

"I always spent money on books. I never viewed that as an expense. That's an investment to me."

Non-fiction — foundational

• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World — David Deutsch ("not the easiest read, but it made me smarter").
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind — Yuval Noah Harari ("best book of the last decade I have read").
• The Rational Optimist — Matt Ridley ("most brilliant and enlightening book I've read in years"). Also recommends everything else by Ridley: Genome, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, The Evolution of Everything.
• Skin in the Game — Nassim Taleb (best 2018 read). Plus The Black Swan, Antifragile, Fooled by Randomness, The Bed of Procrustes.
• Six Easy Pieces / Six Not-So-Easy Pieces — Richard Feynman. Plus Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track; biography Genius by James Gleick.
• Thing Explainer — Randall Munroe (xkcd) — "complicated stuff in simple words."
• Thinking Physics — Lewis Carroll Epstein.
• The Lessons of History — Will & Ariel Durant. Plus The Story of Philosophy (Will Durant).
• The Sovereign Individual — Davidson & Rees-Mogg ("best book I've read since Sapiens").
• Poor Charlie's Almanack — Charlie Munger (ed. Peter Kaufman).
• Reality Is Not What It Seems + Seven Brief Lessons on Physics — Carlo Rovelli.
• For game theory: The Compleat Strategyst (J.D. Williams) + The Evolution of Cooperation (Robert Axelrod).

Philosophy + Spirituality

• Everything by Jed McKenna (Theory of Everything (Enlightened Perspective) — Dreamstate Trilogy, Notebook, Jed Talks #1 & #2).
• Everything by Kapil Gupta, MD (A Master's Secret Whispers, Direct Truth, Atmamun).
• The Book of Life + Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti — Jiddu Krishnamurti.
• Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse ("given out more copies of this than any other").
• The Book of Secrets: 112 Meditations + The Great Challenge — Osho.
• The Way to Love — Anthony de Mello.
• The Untethered Soul — Michael Singer.
• Meditations — Marcus Aurelius ("absolutely life-changing").
• Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It — Kamal Ravikant (Naval's brother).
• The Tao of Seneca (audiobook — "most important audiobook I've ever heard").
• How to Change Your Mind — Michael Pollan (psychedelics).
• Striking Thoughts — Bruce Lee.
• The Prophet — Kahlil Gibran.
• Naval's update: also add Schopenhauer and Vashistha Yoga to favorites.
• "Pretty much always rereading something by either Krishnamurti or Osho. Those are my favorite philosophers."

Science fiction (Naval's pipeline started here)

• Ficciones / Labyrinths — Jorge Luis Borges.
• Stories of Your Life and Others + Exhalation + The Lifecycle of Software Objects — Ted Chiang.
• Snow Crash + The Diamond Age — Neal Stephenson.
• "The Last Question" — Isaac Asimov.

Currently rereading (at time of writing)

• Tools of Titans (Tim Ferriss), Thermoinfocomplexity (Behzad Mohit), Pre-Suasion (Cialdini), The Story of Philosophy (Will Durant), Emerson, Chesterfield, Tolstoy, Alan Watts, Scott Adams (God's Debris), Tao Te Ching, Nietzsche, The Undercover Economist (Tim Harford), Illusions (Richard Bach), Jed McKenna, Dale Carnegie, The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu), Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl), Sex at Dawn (Christopher Ryan).

Blogs

• @KevinSimler — Melting Asphalt (https://meltingasphalt.com/)
• @farnamstreet — Farnam Street (https://fs.blog/)
• @benthompson — Stratechery (https://stratechery.com/)
• @baconmeteor — Idle Words (https://idlewords.com/)
• "The Munger Operating System" by @FarnamStreet.
• "The Day You Became a Better Writer" — Scott Adams.
• "Crony Beliefs" — Kevin Simler.
• "Career Decisions" — @eladgil.
• "Quantum physics is not 'weird.' You are weird." / "Think Like Reality" — Eliezer Yudkowsky.
• "Lazy Leadership" — @awilkinson.
• @EdLatimore.

Other

• "You and Your Research" — Richard Hamming essay.
• Rick and Morty (TV + comic).
• Graphic novels: Transmetropolitan (Warren Ellis), The Boys (Garth Ennis), Planetary (Ellis), The Sandman (Neil Gaiman).
• Twitter: @AmuseChimp, @mmay3r, @nntaleb, Art De Vany (Facebook).

Filter rule

"If they wrote it to make money, don't read it."

Related

• Reading Protocol — how he actually reads these.
• Mental Models (Collected from Almanack) — sources of his mental models (Munger, Taleb, Franklin, Darwin).

Sources: [Almanack pp207-222]