Books iI once asked myself the question: if I woke up and all my knowledge was completely wiped from my brain — I literally knew nothing, and I had to start all over again, what books would I read to build the foundations of my knowledge from the ground up? This question gnaws at me, because it forces one to choose books that are fundamental to your understanding of the nature of reality. Interestingly, most of these were written a long time ago. Here are some of the books I've chosen, while some are so dense I haven't made headway (or I simply got bored reading them). There are also some other books here that I just enjoyed and think are cool.

The Symposium

The Symposium

Plato
Letters on Ethics

Letters on Ethics

Seneca
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Things Hidden

René Girard
The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Hero With a Thousand Faces

Joseph Campbell
Enchiridion

Enchiridion

Epictetus
The Republic

The Republic

Plato
Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl
Eichmann in Jerusalem

Eichmann in Jerusalem

Hannah Arendt
Open

Open

Andre Agassi
Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

Walter Isaacson
Zero to One

Zero to One

Peter Thiel

Also Read

  • Superintelligence — Nick Bostrom
  • On Writing Well — William Zinsser
  • Walden — Thoreau
  • Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl
  • The Shining — Stephen King
  • 1984 — George Orwell
  • Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
  • The Surrender Experiment — Michael A. Singer
  • The Rose That Grew from Concrete — Tupac Shakur
  • Meditations — Marcus Aurelius

Want to Read

  • Sociobiology — Edward O. Wilson
  • The Last Whole Earth Catalog — Stewart Brand
  • History of North America, Map by Map
  • The Brothers Karamazov — Dostoevsky
  • How to Eat: A Buffet of Ancient Authors
  • Galaxy Formation and Evolution — Mo, van den Bosch & White
  • Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms — David MacKay
  • Discourses and Selected Writings — Epictetus
  • On the Origin of Species — Charles Darwin
  • It — Stephen King
  • The Screwtape Letters — C.S. Lewis
  • Imminent — Luis Elizondo
  • The Divine Comedy — Dante
  • Ancient Greek Philosophers — Canterbury Classics
  • Elements of Information Theory — Cover & Thomas
  • The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Edward Gibbon
  • Manufacturing Consent — Noam Chomsky
  • Foundation — Isaac Asimov
  • The Road — Cormac McCarthy
  • Understanding Media — Marshall McLuhan
  • A Guide for the Perplexed — Werner Herzog
  • The Theory of the Leisure Class — Thorstein Veblen
  • The Goal — Eliyahu M. Goldratt
  • The Art of War — Sun Tzu
  • The Odyssey — Homer
  • The Genetic Book of the Dead — Richard Dawkins
  • The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins
  • Watchers — Dean Koontz
  • Aesop's Fables — Jack Zipes
  • Selected Dialogues — Lucian
  • Natural Questions — Seneca
  • The Madness of Crowds — Douglas Murray
  • The Pornographic Age — Alain Badiou
  • Lives of the Eminent Philosophers — Diogenes Laertius
  • The Metamorphosis — Franz Kafka
  • The Logic of Scientific Discovery — Karl Popper
  • Benjamin Franklin — Walter Isaacson
  • The Idiot — Dostoevsky
  • Food of the Gods — Terence McKenna
  • A Path with Heart — Jack Kornfield
  • Phaedo — Plato
  • The Stranger — Albert Camus
  • The Book of Five Rings — Miyamoto Musashi
  • On the Sublime — Longinus
  • Woman as Revolutionary — Frederick C. Giffin
  • A True Story — Lucian (Forgotten Books)
  • The Athenian Constitution — Aristotle
  • Propaganda — Edward Bernays
  • On the Margin — Aldous Huxley
  • On the Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith