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The Best Books

Every book I've read as an adult that I still remember, ranked from S-tier to F-tier.

By Zachary Roth86 books rankedUpdated April 2026
SMasterpiece
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Overstory by Richard Powers
AExcellent
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
Flash Boys by Michael Lewis
Breath by James Nestor
Acid for the Children by Flea
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Island by Aldous Huxley
Disunited Nations by Peter Zeihan
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Silence by John Cage
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
Chip War by Chris Miller
A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage
The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss & Neil Howe
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith
The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross
More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite by Sebastian Mallaby
The Accidental Superpower by Peter Zeihan
Hammer of the Gods by Stephen Davis
Julius Caesar by Philip Freeman
BGreat
The Iliad by Homer
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
Deep by James Nestor
Life Ascending by Nick Lane
When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson
The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets by Benoit B. Mandelbrot & Richard L. Hudson
Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
The Infinite Machine by Camila Russo
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music by Ian Carr
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Medici by Paul Strathern
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
On Having No Head by Douglas Harding
CGood
Havana Nocturne by T.J. English
The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros
Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe by Niall Ferguson
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Life After Google by George Gilder
Blockchain Chicken Farm by Xiaowei Wang
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
Wanting by Luke Burgis
The Absent Superpower by Peter Zeihan
The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami
I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
Perdurabo by Richard Kaczynski
Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician by Christoph Wolff
Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World by John Dickie
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow
Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
DOkay
Tribes by Seth Godin
Deep Work by Cal Newport
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter by 50 Cent
Read Write Own by Chris Dixon
The Art of Community by Jono Bacon
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
FPoor
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

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