Thread by @the_culturist_

I asked X: "Which book changed your perspective on life more than any other?"

After THOUSANDS of replies, these were the top 50.

The ultimate 2025 reading list… (bookmark this) 🧵

Note: Titles within each section are ordered roughly by how frequently they were suggested.

By FAR the most popular suggestion of all was the Holy Bible — so here are the top theological works...

Theology:

1. Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
2. Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
3. The City of God, Augustine of Hippo
4. Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas
5. Confessions, Augustine of Hippo

Philosophy / Political Theory (Part 1):

6. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
7. Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
8. Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
9. The Republic, Plato
10. Tao Te Ching, Laozi

Philosophy / Political Theory (Part 2):

11. Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
12. The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis
13. The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli
14. The Federalist Papers, Hamilton / Madison / Jay
15. The Symposium, Plato

Psychology / Self Improvement:

16. Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
17. The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene
18. The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck
19. How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
20. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey

Economics / Personal Finance:

21. Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell
22. The Richest Man in Babylon, George S. Clason
23. The Creature from Jekyll Island, G. Edward Griffin
24. Rich Dad Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki
25. Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill

Fiction (Part 1):

Dostoevsky, Orwell and Rand dominated suggestions. The most common as follows...

26. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
27. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
28. 1984, George Orwell
29. Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Fiction (Part 2):

31. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
32. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
33. Animal Farm, George Orwell
34. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
35. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
36. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

Fiction (Part 3):

37. The Stranger, Albert Camus
38. The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
39. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
40. Dune, Frank Herbert
41. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
42. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Classical / Medieval Poetry:

43. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
44. The Iliad, Homer
45. The Odyssey, Homer
46. Metamorphoses, Ovid

History & Other Non-Fiction:

47. The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
48. The Art of War, Sun Tzu
49. Histories, Herodotus
50. The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler

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And here’s the original post.

Any I missed?