What would be a good topic for a 30-something person to delve into, I wondered, one and a half years ago. I har just finished my 106 Books of Pretention project after 10 years of reading. More classics? Books on naturalism? Meditation? Biographies? Or just some freaking great modern novels? 

I decided to go for books that weigh heavy on wisdom, but are still readable and captivating even on work days, when my head is busy with so many things. I googled. And I found three excellent lists, shared here. Out of those 48 books I have now read 39. The wisdom in a book really only unfolds when the reader resonates with the writer’s language and style – there are shared elements of thinking, visualizing, and speaking. A writer may surprise with uncommon ways of expression, but only if they play a string within us do we truly feel the message.

And so, some of the books from my compiled Books of Wisdom list ended up on my own list. These lovely things have shaken my world for the better. Some have forced me to add a building block. Others, to tear down what I thought I was going to make, and rebuild it as something else. But most of them have been subversive: a quiet, but relentless and constant whisper that has stayed with me long since I put the book down. As I go on discovering new works of wisdom, I will share them here.

Philosophy & meditation

1. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
2. Epictetus – Manual for living
3. Shunryu Suzuki – Zen mind Beginners mind
4. Ryan Holiday – Ego Is the enemy
5. Jon Kabat-Zinn – Where ever you go, there you are

Mastering the body and mind

1. Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner – Think like a freak
2. Jordan B. Peterson – 12 rules for life
3. Ryan Holiday – The obstacle is the way
4. Malcolm Gladwell – Blink
5. Pema Chödrön – When things fall apart
6. Matthew Walker – Why we sleep
7. Patterson et al. – Crucial confrontations: Tools for resolving broken promises, violated expectations, and bad behavior 

Business and personal finance

1. Harvard Business Review – 10 must reads on managing yourself
2. Ray Dalio – Principles
3. Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Fooled by randomness
4. Wallace D. Wattles – The science of getting rich
5. Yvonne Chouinard – Let my people go surfing
6. Ramit Sethi – I will teach you to be rich
7. Michael Watkins – The first 90 days

Happiness psychology & creativity

1. Sonja Lyubomirsky – The how of happiness
2. Brene Brown – The gifts of imperfection
3. Marie Kondo – The life-changing magic of tidying
4. Elizabeth Gilbert – Big magic

History, science, society

1. Yuval Noah Harari – Sapiens: A brief history of humankind
2. Jared Diamond – Guns, germs, and steel
3. Jared Diamond – Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
4. Sunstein & Thaler – Nudge
5. Peter Wohlleben – The hidden life of trees

Novels

1. Richard Bach – Jonathan Livingston Seagull
2. Paulo Coelho – The Alchemist
3. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – The little prince

(Copenhagen, Denmark; September 2020)