‘The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection’ by Robert Farrar Capon (1989).‘Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson’ by Robert Caro (2002).‘The Skeptics Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake’ by Steven Novella (2018).‘The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey’ by Michael Huemer (2012).‘Educated: A Memoir’ by Tara Westover (2018).‘Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America’ by Ibram Kendi (2016).

I hope you use it to find something really good to read! I’ve listed the top 50 according to this scoring system.

Here’s the spreadsheet of all the books sorted by this score, along with other helpful information (i.e., the year each came out and the number of ratings): Basically, this formula gives something like the mean rating but applying a mild penalty on books with fewer ratings (since the mean rating is less certain as an indicator of the “true” mean when there are few ratings). Using data from, I then sorted the book list using this formula: score = average_rating – 1.96/square_root(# of ratings) which calculates to the lower end of the 95th percentile confidence interval on the mean book ratings (under the assumption that the ratings all have a standard deviation of 1 because, unfortunately, I can’t easily get the actual standard deviations). I would not rate any of them below ‘pretty good.’ Incidentally, there was very little overlap between this list and Time Magazine’s “All-Time 100 Best Non-Fiction Books” (found here: ), there appear to be ~5 books in common.Īs a personal frame of reference for the quality of the recommendations I received, I noted that, of the 11 on the list that I had read before, I would rate three of them as ‘great’ (~27%), six as ‘good’ (~54%), and two as ‘pretty good’ (~18%). The request yielded 102 unique recommendations, only 18% of which were familiar to me. Yesterday I asked people to share one of the best non-fiction books they’ve ever read, that may be lesser-known. Are you looking for a good non-fiction book to read?

Behave robert sapolsky goodreads