Your life canon
We've had a wonderful response to our Life Canon project, which aimed to draw up a list of the 10 essential books we need to help us flourish in the modern world.
Suggestions came flooding in via Twitter, Facebook and through our online survey. The aim of this document is to provide a list of many of the titles recommended by people.
We've split the list below into some basic categories, but the books within them are in no particular order. We hope you will enjoy exploring other people's recommendations, and we're sure you'll find something in the list to inspire and inform you.
The most popular recommendation from people was A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. We're delighted about this, as it shows how everyone understood exactly where the Life Canon project was coming from - finding books that are accessible and interesting and that give you an overview of a topic to help you put things into perspective - and this is just what Bill Bryson's book does so well.
Other popular titles were The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and Prosperity Without Growth by Tim Jackson.
Our list of your suggestions is below.
Your life canon
Science
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
The New Science of Strong Materials: Or Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor - JE Gordon
Darwin's Dangerous idea - Daniel Dennett
Unweaving the rainbow - Richard Dawkins
The meme machine - Susan Blackmore
The golden bough - Sir James Frazer
The Emperor’s New Mind - Roger Penrose
The Fractal Geometry of Nature - Benoît Mandelbrot
Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness - Bruce Rosenblum, Fred Kutter
Three Steps to the Universe: From the Sun to Black Holes to the Mystery of Dark Matter - David Garfinkle, Richard Garfinkle
A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow
Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan
Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
The Origin of Our Species - Chris Stringer
Bad Science - Ben Goldacre
The Fabric Of The Cosmos - Brian Greene
Philosophy & Religion
The Discourses - Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations - Plato The Last Days of Socrates - Pierre Hadot
Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis
Why I Am Not A Christian - Bertrand Russell
The Heart of Things - A C Grayling
How Philosophy can save your life - 10 Ideas that matter most - Marietta McCarty
Everyday Zen - Charlotte Joko Beck
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion - David Hume
Varieties of Religious Experience - William James
Dhammapada - The Buddha
The Bhagavad Gita
The fabric of reality - David Deutsch
The Bible
The Tao De Ching
The Little Book of Philosophy - Andre Compte-Sponville
Justice - What's the right Thing to do? - Michael J Sandell
Letters to Lucilius - Seneca
Politics & Economics
The Spirit Level - Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
The Storm - Vince Cable
The Great Unravelling - Paul Krugman
History
World History of Art - Honour & Fleming
Literature & Poetry
The Complete Works - William Blake
The Horse's Mouth - Joyce Cary
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe - Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa
New and Collected Poems (1931-2001) - Czeslaw Milosz
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
Songs of Innocence and Experience - William Blake
The Deptford Trilogy - Robertson Davies
Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts
View with a Grain of Sand - poems by Wislawa Szymborska
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
The Aleph - Jorge Luis Borges
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Education of Little Tree - Forrest Carter
Flashman and The Redskins - George Macdonald Fraser
The Poetry of Pablo Neruda - Pablo Neruda. Ilan Stavans, Ed.
Molesworth - Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle
Personal development
The art of happiness - The Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler
The Happiness Project - Gretchen Rubin
Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception - Daniel Goleman
7 Habits of highly Effective People - Stephen Covey
The 4-Hour Work Week - Timothy Ferris
The Success Principles - Jack Canfield
Living the 80/20 Way - Richard Koch
The Road less Travelled - Scott Peck
Authentic Success - Robert Holden
Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality - Dan Ariely
Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now - Gordon Livingstone
The Arbinger Institute - Leadership and Self-Deception - Marshall Rosenberg
Non-violent Communication - David Bohm
Dialogue and The Art of Thinking Together - William Isaacs
The Wisdom of a Broken Heart - Susan Piver
Full Catastrophe Living - Jon Kabat Zinn
Swimming with Piranha makes you Hungry - Colin Turner
Miscellaneous
The Politics of Experience - R.D.Laing
The Empathic Civilization - The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis - Jeremy Rifkin
If This Is A Man - Primo Levi
The Art of Loving - Erich Fromm
Fear of Freedom - Erich Fromm
Small is Beautiful - EF Schumacher
Critical mass - Philip Ball
Collapse - Jared Diamond
Godel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid - Douglas Hofstadter
Cultural Amnesia - Clive James
McMafia - Misha Glenny
Working - Studs Terkel
The Male Brain - Louann Brizendine
The Open society and Its Enemies - Karl Popper
True and False - David Mamet
Culture of Make Believe - Derrick Jensen
Farewell Promised Land - Richard Dawson and Gray Brechin
A new earth - Eckhart Tolle
Shattered Lives - Camila Batmanghelidjh
500 Ways to Change the World from the Global Ideas Bank
Crazy Busy - Dr. Edward M. Hallowell
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
