We surveyed Good Judgment’s professional Superforecasters during the height of the COVID lockdowns to get their reading recommendations. They offered both pandemic-related suggestions and a list of all-time-favorite reads.
We then shared the entire list of recommendations with the group and asked them to upvote their favorites. Below, we share the results, ranked in order of the number of votes received.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year
Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk and The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
Steven Johnson, Ghost Map
Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking
Scott Page, The Model Thinker
Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos and Cat’s Cradle
Ezra Klein, Why We Are Polarized
Paul Ewald, Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause Cancer, Heart Disease, and Other Deadly Ailments and Evolution of Infection Disease
Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem (trilogy)
Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light
Ron Chernow, Grant
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, and Bach
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Dan Mayland, The Colonel’s Mistake
Toby Ord, The Precipice
Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866
Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War
Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague
Tom Wright, Billion Dollar Whale
Dave Levitan, Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science
Thomas H. Corman, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, & Clifford Stein, Introduction to Algorithms (3rd ed.)
Matt Leacock, Pandemic (not a book, but a cooperative board game)
Agustin Rayo, On the Brink of Paradox
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science
Damir Huromovic (ed.), Psychiatry of Pandemics: A Mental Health Response to Infection Outbreak
Dani Rodrik, Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science
James Ellroy, This Storm
Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public
Robert Sapolsky, Behave
Hari Hunzru, Transmission
Adam Kucharski, Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread
Albert Camus, The Plague
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism
David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel
Patrick R. Murray, Ken S. Rosenthal, & Michael A. Pfaller, Medical Microbiology (9th ed.)
Bruno Maçães, Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order and The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of a New World Order
Jose Saramago, Blindness
Greg Egan, Permutation City
John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids
Laura Spinney, Pale Rider
V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas
Norman Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Alicia Keys, More Myself: A Journey
Robert Shiller, Narrative Economics
Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire
Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
James Joyce, Ulysses
Alan Moore & David Lloyd, V for Vendetta
Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind
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