“What book did you read that you felt genuinely made you smarter?,” one Reddit reader asked. Readers responded with a huge list of books.
Below, we’ve linked to free samples of the most popular books on that list (with some free eBooks as well).
Add your favorites in the comments section, we’d love to expand the list some more…
Free Samples of Books To Make You Smarter
Flatland: a romance of many dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott (Free eBook edition!)
Mythologies by Roland Barthes (Author), Annette Lavers (Translator)
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (Free eBook edition!)
Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes by Jacques Ellul
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
The Story of America by Jill Lepore
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (Free eBook Copy!)
You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself by David McRaney
The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow
Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine by Candace B. Pert
Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn
Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World by Lisa Randall
Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense by John Ralston Saul
Big Bang by Simon Singh
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn