262 books Nassim Taleb mentioned, ranked!

The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas

1) The taste of (cold) revenge is by far the most underrated human experience. Not for cowards. Not be good for society except when revenge does not lead to more revenge. 2) Written ~170 y ago. I've never read more limpid more recent page turner.#Lindy = #ergodic seller! https://t.co/ODPZoPB6pb

— Nassim Taleb

Safe Haven
by Mark Spitznagel

Spencer gets it. (All explicitly in the book"Safe Haven".)https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-news-today-04-04-2023/card/wait-your-hedge-fund-made-how-much--WRy8YA3lZ9404Qx3unVT

— Nassim Taleb

Dominion
by Tom Holland

OK, OK, restarting w/some corrections. For comments. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1544296263822213120 pic.twitter.com/US4P4JhU3T Tom Holland holds an edge over other current authors and intellectuals: the rare coupling of wide erudition and remarkable clarity of mind, two attributes that appear to be negatively correlated, as if the presence of one caused the other one to flee. This confers the ability to spot things other professionals don't catch immediately, in spite of sharing the same ensemble of information - what in my trading days we used to call "connecting the dots". And these discoveries, in spite of being hard to detect, appear obvious, even trivial after the fact. Holland is effortlessly ahead of his time: ten years ago, he was savagely attacked by the high priest of late Antiquity, the extremely decorated Glenn Bowersock, for his book on the conditions surrounding the birth of Islam. Then, only half a decade later, Bowersock quietly published a book making similar claims. So this entire book revolves around one simple, but far-reaching idea. By a mechanism dubbed the retrospective distortion, we look at history using the rear view mirror and flow values retroactively. So one would be naturally inclined to believe that the ancients, particularly the Greco-Romans, would seem like us, share the same wisdom, preferences, values, concerns, fears, hopes, and outlook, except, of course, without the iPhone, Twitter, and the Japanese automated toilet seat. But, no, no, not at all, Holland is saying. These ancients did not have the same values. In fact, Christianity did stand the entire ancient value system on its head. The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order. While ancient gods could have their share of travails and difficulties, they remained in that special class of gods. But Jesus was the first ancient deity who suffered the punishment of the slave, the lowest ranking member of the human race. And the sect that succeeded him generalized such glorification of suffering: dying as an inferior is more magnificent than living as the mighty. The Romans were befuddled to see members of that sect use the cross - the punishment for slaves -as a symbol; it had to be some type of joke in their eyes. There is also the presence of skin in the game. Christianity, by insisting on the Trinity, managed to allow God to suffer like a human, and suffer the worst fate any human can suffer. Thanks to the complicated consubstantial relation between father and son, suffering was not a video game to the Lord but the real thing. The argument "I am superior to you because I suffer the consequences of my actions and you don't" applies within humans and in the relationship between humans and God. This extends, in Orthodox theology, to the idea that God by suffering as a human allowed humans to be equal to Him. Christianity had the last vindication when Julian The Apostate, falling for the retrospective distortion, decided to replace of the Church of Christianity by the Church of Paganism along similar organizational lines, with bishops and all the rest (what Chateaubriand called the "'Levites ). For Julian did not realize that paganism was a soup of decentralized individual or collective club-like affiliations to gods. What has been less obvious is that while we are inclined to believe that Christianity descends from Judaism, some of the reverse might be true. The mother-daughter relationship between Judaism and Christianity has been, as of late, convincingly challenged. "Without Paul, there would be no Akiva" claims the theologian Israel Yuval as we can see in Rabbinical Judaism the unmistakable footprints of Christianity. Further East, Shite Islam shares many features with Christianity, e.g. the same dodecadic approach, with twelve apostles, the last of whom will accompany Jesus Christ, plus self-flagellation rituals around the memory of martyrdom; these can be possibly attributed to a shared Levantine origin. But it is clear that the latest position of supreme leader has been guided by the Catholic hierarchy. Christianity has been slow to spread its values from text to execution, and that may be the point of this book. Yes, Christianity glorifies the poor: but it took seventeen centuries from "the eye of the needle" in Matthew 19:24 to the conception of communism. Likewise it took more than a millennia for the "neither slave nor free" in Galatians 3:28 from epistle to execution. As to the "neither Greek nor Jew", alas, we are still waiting for full implementation as we have witnessed with the birth of nationalism in the late 18th C., a moral degradation and a step away from universalism with the modern contraption of the nation state -the murderous nation state. I recall vividly the TV ads in the early 2000s, promoted by Democrats to attack George W. Bush's policies in Iraq; they kept showing the tragedy that 3,800 people died in the invasion. They omitted to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis -lest the Republicans question their patriotism. These foreign casualties do not seem to count because nationalism establishes clean balance sheets: countries are only responsible for their own citizens.

— Nassim Taleb

Essais
by Michel de Montaigne

ILIAD MONTAIGNE NO NEWSPAPERS That's sufficient

— Nassim Taleb

Letters from a Stoic
by Seneca

Any bio of Seneca will be written by a library rat who writes biographies hence can’t get people of action. Just read Seneca. https://t.co/Q6Nc5ytshs

— Nassim Taleb

Ficciones
by Jorge Luis Borges

[...] Borges is a mathematical philosopher, first and last. Ignore the "Latin American" categorization and the nonsense about his background and personal life: one should resist embedding him in a socio-cultural framework; he is as universal as they come. It is good to read a short story once in a while to see how literature and philosophy can be saved by the parable. [...]

— Nassim Taleb

The discovery of France
by Graham Robb

Until I discovered, reading Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France, a major fact that led me to see the place with completely new eyes and search the literature for a revision of the story of the country.

— Nassim Taleb

The Dawn of Everything
by David Graeber

You muuuuuuuuuust read the next Graeber and @davidwengrow !

— Nassim Taleb

Elements of information theory
by T. M. Cover

OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6

— Nassim Taleb

The Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith

3- Current bibles: The Bible, Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, Works by Aquinas, Montaigne, etc. They fail editorial criteria. Editors don't understand books, Academics don't get scholarship. Why?@rorysutherland : employees' objective is minimizing blame in case of failure.

— Nassim Taleb

The Tartar Steppe
by Dino Buzzati

Until I read ["The Opposing Shore"], Buzzati's "Il deserto dei tartari" was my favorite novel, perhaps my only novel, the only one I cared to keep re-reading through life.

— Nassim Taleb

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Probability, random variables, and stochastic processes
by Athanasios Papoulis

I always always recommend the book by Anastassios Papoulis. 1) Never start with stats, start with probability. 2) Never read a stat textbook not written by a probabilist. Beware, there are plenty, plenty, plenty of stats books written by psychologists! https://t.co/tVYO73HLFB

— Nassim Taleb

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Conspiracy
by Ryan Holiday

Wonderful discussion w/@RyanHoliday. 1) Gawker was destroying lives (weak college girls) & others w/impunity exploiting 1st amndmnt & because law suits too embarassing for plaintifs. 2) An Op-Ed or tawk woudn't fix the problem. 3) @peterthiel destroyed Gawker by bullying bully https://t.co/jzCkOTZYWY

— Nassim Taleb

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Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

Chaos Kings
by Scott Patterson

Scott Patterson @pattersonscott and I are doing Part 2 Wednesday. Please post in the🧵any question you may have so far related to Part 1. -- A Discussion With Scott Patterson's About His Book Chaos Kings, Part 1 https://youtu.be/VuoCxJ9y8-0?si=1p0RyMNfphiC1JTf

— Nassim Taleb

Bible
by

Reread --or read-- the Bible.

— Nassim Taleb

Scale
by Geoffrey West

Have you seen Scale by West? Log scale, but humans are outliers. Exercise has a net effect of lowering the total beats, see @drjohnm's book.

— Nassim Taleb

Intelligence
by Stuart Ritchie

My review of that book on "intelligence"https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R6SACJFYYTD40?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp https://twitter.com/QuietLion/status/1594378465503244288

— Nassim Taleb

Napoleon The Great
by Andrew Roberts

Great book pic.twitter.com/2Q8np2J7n3

— Nassim Taleb

A New Kind of Science
by Stephen Wolfram

Witness here how salaried physicists are dismissing @stephen_wolfram Wolfram's automata BEFORE even hearing him Just as Freeman Dyson publicly dismissed *A New Kind of Science* c. 2002; it turned out that he did not read the book. & pple who refused to read it referred to Dyson! https://t.co/8PfnQVG1k7

— Nassim Taleb

Alchemy
by Rory Sutherland

4 hours dinner conversation with @rorysutherland and Rohan @Silva in a Pakistani restaurant in London (2 bottles of wine, but no Negroni). You must buy two copies of Rory's book, in case one is stolen, lost, damaged (by the rain), or self-destructs. pic.twitter.com/Xa5WFOGCNt

— Nassim Taleb

Das Kapital
by Karl Marx

3- Current bibles: The Bible, Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, Works by Aquinas, Montaigne, etc. They fail editorial criteria. Editors don't understand books, Academics don't get scholarship. Why?@rorysutherland : employees' objective is minimizing blame in case of failure.

— Nassim Taleb

Summa Theologica
by Thomas Aquinas

3- Current bibles: The Bible, Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, Works by Aquinas, Montaigne, etc. They fail editorial criteria. Editors don't understand books, Academics don't get scholarship. Why?@rorysutherland : employees' objective is minimizing blame in case of failure.

— Nassim Taleb

Seta
by Alessandro Baricco

Upload the cover of a book you love without saying why and mention the person who invited you (@mcapellanus) and invite 8 others for #WorldBookDay. @csandis @VergilDen @holland_tom @peterfrankopan @petelx60 @BrankoMilan @BellesLettresEd pic.twitter.com/kQKcFvlqJj

— Nassim Taleb

Probability theory and applications
by S. R. S. Varadhan

Sub-imbecile, Denbo, Varadhan dealt with thin-tails. Read Silent Risk, imbecile. And Russell didn't even deal with probabilistic payoffs. As to Mandelbrot, I gave him his dues. Sub-imbecile.

— Nassim Taleb

Invariances
by Robert Nozick

No, Nozick was out. I read 5 of his books, though. But I had to bite the bullet: time away from Cicero is time burned.

— Nassim Taleb

The forge of christendom
by Holland, Tom Dr.

Also @holland_tom took real risks for his book, followed something to its logical conclusion.

— Nassim Taleb

Modelling Extremal Events
by Paul Embrechts

Best exposition is the first 3 chapters of Embrecht's book.

— Nassim Taleb

The Opposing Shore
by Julien Gracq

5 additional books I recommended pic.twitter.com/hhRW6Kabtg

— Nassim Taleb

Un amore
by Dino Buzzati

Yes and I have also read Buzzati on how to find love in a bordello.

— Nassim Taleb

Idea Makers
by Stephen Wolfram

The Real Thing, a Jewel. [...]

— Nassim Taleb

The Science of Conjecture
by James Franklin

Stands above, way above other books on the history and philosophy of probability.

— Nassim Taleb

Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman

Also, I have been hyping Daniel Kahneman’s recent book, because it is largely an exposition of his research of thirty-five and forty years ago, with filtering and modernization.

— Nassim Taleb

The invisible gorilla
by Christopher F. Chabris

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, in their book The Invisible Gorilla, show how people watching a video of a basketball game, when diverted with attention-absorbing details such as counting passes, can completely miss a gorilla stepping into the middle of the court.

— Nassim Taleb

Happy Accidents
by Morton A. Meyers

Morton Meyers, a practicing doctor and researcher, writes in his wonderful Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs: “Over a twenty-year period of screening more than 144,000 plant extracts, representing about 15,000 species, not a single plant-based anticancer drug reached approved status. This failure stands in stark contrast to the discovery in the late 1950s of a major group of plant-derived cancer drugs, the Vinca Alcaloids—a discovery that came about by chance, not through directed research.

— Nassim Taleb

Kant and the Platypus
by Umberto Eco

I read Plato and the Platypus by Umberto Eco, which I found brilliant [...]

— Nassim Taleb

The Blank Slate
by Steven Pinker

Note: I do not disrespect psychologists because I don't know their works. It is precisely BECAUSE I read their crap. Between 2002 and 2005½ I read >200 psychology books and took notes. (Here 3 books by Pinker @sapinker who claims I didn't read his junk) pic.twitter.com/EH1VNTZgU4

— Nassim Taleb

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

The Better Angels of Our Nature
by Steven Pinker

Junk Science: severely flawed thesis/handling of data.

— Nassim Taleb

The Millionaire Next Door
by Thomas J. Stanley

More Experts I recently read a bestseller called The Millionaire Next Door, an extremely misleading (but almost enjoyable) book by two “experts,” in which the authors try to infer some attributes that are common to rich people.

— Nassim Taleb

Le Labyrinthe des égarés
by Amin Maalouf

An excellent book on modern historical dynamics, covering the stories of the rise of Japan, the Soviet Union, China, & the U.S. I learned tons lot of stuff. It reads like a novel. COI Disclosure: Maalouf did not ask me to comment. pic.twitter.com/JqOmJ1HubD t's the kind of book I didn't know I had to read.

— Nassim Taleb

Quand la Chine s'éveillera… le monde tremblera
by Alain Peyrefitte

A prophetic book I just found in my parent's library, titled (tr.) When China Wakes Up... the World Will Shiver. 53 years ago, a French diplomat thought dynamically in a world lacking in clarity of mind. I read it as a child. Today, play the same exercise. pic.twitter.com/X8eQD2WqfP

— Nassim Taleb

The Second Law
by Stephen Wolfram

It's w/some excitement that found of (personalized) copy of this book in my mailbox. If I hadn't known @stephen_wolfram v. well personally for 21 years, I would have thought that he was a committee of >12 researchers. Furthermore: 1) His output is accelerating w/time; 2) The… pic.twitter.com/ul5L18FoV4

— Nassim Taleb

What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work?
by Stephen Wolfram

OK, OK, we found for #RWRI 18 the best possible person for the Q&A, the one who literally wrote the book on ChatGPT. pic.twitter.com/QpFuC6sJOr

— Nassim Taleb

Toxic Exposure: The True Story behind the Monsanto Trials and the Search for Justice by Chadi Nabhan

Toxic Exposure
by Chadi Nabhan

Monsanto, Roundup, and Nabhan's book "TOXIC EXPOSURE" with Nassim Nicholas... https://youtu.be/bAFxC5h6cEI via @YouTube

— Nassim Taleb

The Haywire Heart: How too much exercise can kill you, and what you can do to protect your heart by Christopher Case, John Mandrola, and Lennard Zinn

The Haywire Heart
by Christopher Case, John Mandrola, and Lennard Zinn

Have you seen Scale by West? Log scale, but humans are outliers. Exercise has a net effect of lowering the total beats, see @drjohnm's book.

— Nassim Taleb

Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis

Wanting
by Luke Burgis

Ordered the book.

— Nassim Taleb

The Seventh Letter: A Philosophical Mystery at Plato's Academy by Mihai Spariosu

The Seventh Letter
by Mihai Spariosu

The posthumous novel by my late friend Mihai Spariosu, RIP. Saw the book's progression over the past 20 y. “Entertaining & gripping ...Plato, Socrates & the Academy/ Plato’s philosophy without abstraction, as the ideas are imbedded in the narrative.”https://www.amazon.com/dp/1737922819?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details

— Nassim Taleb

Corto Maltese
by Hugo Pratt

OK, OK, my reply to the recommended list of summer reads: 1) A practical (short) manual of Latin grammar. 2) Corto Maltese (complete collection, preferably the Ballad of the Salty Sea in text form) 3) Safe Haven by Spitznagel [it can also be read in the winter & other seasons] https://t.co/eDMryP4n03

— Nassim Taleb

Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy

Thanks, but I prefer to read Anna Karenina.

— Nassim Taleb