thinking books

Kodak's Colorama Archive

gestalten

Colour is far more powerful than you think.

Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka · 1915

You'll never look at Gregor Samsa's family the same way again.

The Masque of the Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe · 1922

Prince Prospero's fatal flaw was believing he could outwit death by locking himself away.

Odour of Chrysanthemums

D. H. Lawrence · 2025

Life is often a quiet, unspoken war fought around the kitchen table.

The Time Machine

H. G. Wells · 2016

The future is a lot more squalid than you might imagine.

The Open Society and Its Enemies

Karl Popper · 1945

Plato, Hegel, and Marx were all enemies of freedom, and we're still dealing with the fallout.

Humanism and Terror

Maurice Merleau-Ponty · 1969

The only way to understand terror is to live through it.

The Accumulation of Capital

Rosa Luxemburg · 1913

Imperialism is simply capitalism’s desperate, necessary need for new markets and resources.

Freedom and Organization

Bertrand Russell · 1934

The real trouble with organisations is that they always end up stifling the very freedom they were created to protect.

Steal Like an Artist

Austin Kleon · 2012

You don't need to be original, just remix what you already love.

Show Your Work!

Austin Kleon · 2014

Your work is more interesting than you think, so share it.

Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

Dan Wang

China's tech ambitions are far more coordinated and aggressive than we realise.

Atlas of Unusual Borders

Zoran Nikolic · 2019

The most interesting borders are the ones that don't make any sense on a map.

Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands

Judith Schalansky · 2009

The most interesting places are often the ones you'll never visit.

Scattered Minds

Gabor Maté · 1999

The Age Rebellion: Supercharge the Second Half of Your Life

Lyndsey Simpson · 1975

Stop thinking of retirement as an ending; it's the start of your most productive years if you prepare now.

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk

Trauma is stored in the body, and healing requires reconnecting with it.

Superintelligence

Nick Bostrom · 2014

Superintelligence is coming, and we're absolutely not ready for it.

The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence

Sebastian Mallaby

The Singularity Is Nearer

Ray Kurzweil · 2022

AI will soon surpass human intelligence, and that's a good thing for everyone.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

Melanie Mitchell · 2019

AI is a lot less intelligent than we think, and a lot more interesting.

Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI

Ethan Mollick

AI is less a tool and more a new kind of colleague you'll have to manage.

The Coming Wave

Mustafa Suleyman · 2023

AI is about to get dangerously powerful, and we're already behind.

The Captain Class

Sam Walker · 2017

The most successful captains were often the most difficult personalities.

A History of the Novel in Britain

Philip Hensher · 2026

British novelists have always been better at writing about themselves than anything else.

A Short History of Japan

Christopher Harding · 2025

The Conquest of Happiness

Bertrand Russell · 1930

Unhappiness is mostly self-absorption. Russell's cure is unfashionably simple: get interested in things outside yourself.

Hooked

Nir Eyal · 2014

The products you cannot put down were designed that way. Read it to build them, or to notice them being built on you.

The Book of Trespass

Nick Hayes · 2021

Ninety-two per cent of England is closed to you. Hayes walks into it anyway, and asks who wrote that rule.

Humankind

Rutger Bregman · 2019

Assume people are decent and you get different institutions, different schools, different prisons. The assumption is the intervention.

The Daily Stoic

Ryan Holiday · 2016

You do not control what happens, only what you do next. Most anxiety is a category error about which is which.

Deep Work

Cal Newport · 2016

Concentration is a skill that has become rare exactly as it became valuable, which is the whole opportunity.