What to
Read Next
Fifteen reading lists — curated by hand for readers who are curious about themselves, other people, and the world they live in. Browse them all, or filter by what fits right now.
If You Loved The Choice
Books for readers who couldn’t stop thinking about Edith EgerEger survived Auschwitz as a teenage ballet dancer and wrote a book not about what happened — but about what we choose to do with it. Every book here shares that quality: people broken by something real who decided to heal anyway. From Man’s Search for Meaning to Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.
Browse this listIf You Loved The Power of Now
Books for readers who felt something shift while reading TolleTolle’s argument is simple and quietly unsettling: almost everything that causes suffering is a thought about the past or future — not what is happening now. These five books approach the same territory from different directions: Buddhism, philosophy, poetry, psychology.
Browse this listIf You Loved Poor Things
Books for readers who couldn’t get Bella Baxter out of their headPoor Things asks what a woman would actually be like if nobody had spent her whole life telling her who to be. Dark, funny, and formally strange. Every book here asks the same question from a different angle — Carter, Rhys, Ishiguro, Winterson, Clarke.
Browse this listIf You Loved The Great Gatsby
Books for readers seduced by Fitzgerald’s beautiful, doomed worldGatsby is a novel about wanting something so badly you destroy yourself chasing it — and about a world that looks like paradise from the outside and feels hollow from within. These books share that same intoxicating pull: gorgeous prose, flawed people, and a dream that was always going to break.
Browse this listIf You Loved Lord of the Flies
Books for readers who haven’t recovered from what Golding suggested about peopleGolding’s argument is brutal and simple: remove the rules and watch what humans do. These books take the same premise — civilization as a thin, fragile layer over something darker — and push it further. Some are quieter. Some are worse. None of them let you off the hook.
Browse this listIf You Loved Lolita
Books for readers who were disturbed by it and couldn’t look awayLolita is one of the most beautifully written novels in the English language and one of the most morally uncomfortable. Nabokov makes you complicit — that’s the point. These books share that quality: a narrator you cannot trust, prose that seduces you into something deeply unsettling.
Browse this listBooks About Mental Health
The honest ones — without the five-step plansNot books that promise to fix you. Books that take the subject seriously — that understand being a person is genuinely difficult, and the mind is one of the most complex things we will ever try to understand. For readers who want books that don’t talk down to them.
Browse this listBooks About Finding Meaning
For when the big questions won’t leave you aloneWhat am I doing this for? Does any of it matter? From Frankl’s logotherapy to Rilke’s letters — these books offer no easy answers. They offer something more useful: a way of living with the question itself.
Browse this listMy Favourite Spiritual Books
The books that shaped how I move through the worldNot necessarily religious — books about the parts of life that don’t fit into a spreadsheet: meaning, loss, presence, the strange feeling of being alive. From Buddhism, psychology, poetry, and philosophy — and they have more in common than you’d expect.
Browse this listBest Memoirs & Biographies
True stories that read better than fictionThe best memoirs put you inside someone else’s mind at the moment things were happening — you don’t just learn what they did, you understand why, and what it cost. Includes Educated, Tell Me Who I Am, and others that are impossible to stop thinking about.
Browse this listBooks on Lying & Secrets
Understanding how and when people tell the truthTelling a lie fills the gap between who we wish we were and who we actually are. As we deceive others, we also deceive ourselves. These books explore why we lie, what it costs, and what it reveals about who we are when no one is watching.
Browse this listBooks About Cults & Extreme Beliefs
How ordinary people end up in extraordinary situationsOne of the most revealing ways to understand people is to study what happens when ordinary individuals end up inside extraordinary systems of belief. About cults, extremism, and the psychology of belonging — some of the most useful reading I’ve done.
Browse this listBest Nonfiction Books
The books I would press into the hands of anyone who askedCurated over years of reading — not by what was popular, but by what stuck. Each book was selected because it changed something in how I think. History, science, the systems we live inside without noticing them.
Browse this listBest Investigative Journalism Books
For when you want to understand how things actually workThere is a particular pleasure in watching a journalist pursue a truth that someone powerful wants buried. Scientology, Silicon Valley fraud, political corruption, and the hidden mechanics of industries we use every day. Exhaustively researched and impossible to put down.
Browse this listBest True Crime Books
Crime as a lens on the systems that shape usGood true crime is not really about crime. It is about systems — the ones that fail, the ones that protect the wrong people. These books start with a crime and end with something much larger. Read them when you want something impossible to put down.
Browse this listBest Essays to Read
Personal writing that gets closer to the truth than most journalismEssays begin with a question the writer doesn’t yet know how to answer and end somewhere unexpected. The best ones — Baldwin, Didion, Sontag — leave something shifted in how you see. Short enough to finish in one sitting. Impossible to forget.
Browse this listNo lists match this filter.
One book, every two weeks
One recommendation I genuinely believe in — and exactly why it matters right now. No algorithms. No filler. 500+ readers · unsubscribe anytimeNot sure which list?
A few pointers based on what you might be looking for right now.Start with Books like The Choice. Every book on it earns its place.
Try books like Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, or Lolita. Each list finds what made the original unforgettable and chases it.
Books on lying or books about cults. Both permanently change how you listen.
Investigative journalism or true crime. Both are built for exactly that.
Books about mental health — the honest ones. Or books about finding meaning.
Books like The Power of Now, then the spiritual books list.
Frequently asked questions
What makes these lists different from a bestseller list? +−
A bestseller list tells you what a lot of people bought. These lists tell you what a specific kind of reader — curious, reflective, interested in people and ideas — tends to find genuinely transformative. I have read everything here. The selection is based on what stuck, not what was popular.
Are the lists regularly updated? +−
Yes. I add to each list when I find a book that genuinely belongs there — not on a schedule, but when the right one turns up. I only add books I have read myself and would recommend to someone I care about.
Can I get a personalised recommendation? +−
Yes — via the newsletter. One recommendation every two weeks with a full explanation of who it’s for and why it matters right now. You can also browse the reader Q&A archive, where I answer questions about what to read in specific situations.
Are these suitable for people going through something difficult? +−
Many are — especially Books like The Choice and the mental health list. These were chosen because they take difficulty seriously — not to minimise it, but because they understand it from the inside.
More on my personal bookshelf
Individual recommendations — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
