I. History & History of Science
- Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution by R. R. Palmer
- Rome: A History in Seven Sackings by Matthew Kneale
- Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium by Lucy Inglis
- The Big Oyster: A Molluscular History of New York by Mark Kurlansky
- The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte
- Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown
- Five Centuries of Keyboard Music by John Gillespie
- Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans
- A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman
- Monarchs of the Sea: The Extraordinary 500-Million-Year History of Cephalopods by Danna Staaf
- Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland
II. Travel, Survival & Anthropology
- Magic and Mystery in Tibet by Alexandra David-Neel
- The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut by Nigel Barley
- Miracle in the Andes by Nando Parrado
- A Visit to Don Otavio: A Mexican Odyssey by Sybille Bedford
- The World That Made New Orleans by Ned Sublette
- Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade
- A Year in Marrakesh by Peter Mayne
- Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson
- Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City by Gary Kamiya & Paul Madonna
III. Science, Space & Universe
- If Universe is Teeming with Aliens…Where is Everybody?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb
- Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli
- Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness by Bruce Rosenblum & Fred Kuttner
- A History of the Universe in 21 Stars (and 3 Imposters) by Giles Sparrow
IV. Medicine & Human Mind
- The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams
- The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks
- The Woman with a Worm in Her Head by Pamela Nagami
- Bitten: True Medical Stories of Bites and Stings by Pamela Nagami
- Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Hospital by Alex Beam
- DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman
- Mad in America by Robert Whitaker
- The Minds of Billy Milligan by Daniel Keyes (to read)
V. Philosophy & Religion
- The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton (ed. by Stanton J. Linden)
- The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
- The Way of Zen by Alan W. Watts
- Characters by Jean de La Bruyère
- Ethics by Benedict Spinoza (to read)
- Letters from a Stoic by Seneca (to read)
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (to read)
VI. International Crime, True Crime & Drugs
- Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright
- Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge
- The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina
- A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie by Kathryn Harkup
- Minamata: The Story of the Poisoning of a City by Eugene W. Smith & Aileen M. Smith
- Murder in the Stacks: Penn State, Betsy Aardsma, and the Killer Who Got Away by David DeKok (to read)
- Sympathy Vote: A Reinvestigation of the Valerie Percy Murder by Glenn W. Wall (to read)
VII. Memoir/Biography
- Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance
- The Railway Man by Eric Lomax
- Mozart: The Man Revealed by John Suchet
- The Good Neighbour: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King
- Hiroshima Diary by Michihiko Hachiya
- Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
- An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mohandas K. Gandhi
- Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky (to read)
