What is the Most Underrated Book You’ve Read?

Compiling Taylor Pearson's tweet replies

I’m trying to be helpful and listing some of people’s most underrated books, sort them into categories and link to them. 

Comments and book suggestions come from replies to Taylor Pearson’s tweet, What is the book that the fewest people have read to which you would give 5 stars? I.e. What is the most underrated book you’ve read?

Taylor Pearson @TaylorPearsonMe

What is the book that the fewest people have read to which you would give 5 stars? I.e. What is the most underrated book you've read?

Biographies and Autobiographies

• Alone at Sea by Hannes Lindemann

• Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan

• Boyd by Robert Coram

• Fate Is the Hunter: A Pilot’s Memoir by Ernest K. Gann

• God Runs My Business: The Story of R.G. LeTourneau by Albert W Lorimer

• One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

• Popper by Bryan Magee

• Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon

• Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps by Emmett Grogan

• Shut Out: How a Housing Shortage Caused the Great Recession and Crippled Our Economy by Kevin Erdmann

• Striking Thoughts by Bruce Lee

• The Bad One: A Memoir About Growing Up a Goat by Erin Tyler

• The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg

Business, Investing & Strategy

• The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros

• Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy by William Janeway

• Gateless by Sebastian Marshall and Kai Zau

• Marketing: A Love Story: How to Matter to Your Customers by Bernadette Jiwa

• The Art of Contrary Thinking” by Humphrey B. Neill

• The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy: Classic Concepts and New Perspectives Edited by Carl W. Stern and Michael S. Deimler

• The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World by Mark Spitznagel and Ron Paul

• The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society Kindle Edition by Eric D. Beinhocker

• The Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction by Thomas McKraw

• The Secret of Selling Anything by Harry Browne

• The Unnatural Act of management by Everett Suters

Classic Literature & Fiction

• Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

• All about H. Hatterr: A novel, by G. V Desani

• El Peregrino by Jesus Torbado Carro

• Growth of the soil by Knut Hamsun

• More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

• Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

• Stalking the Wild Pendulum by Itzhak Bentov

• That Which Is Seen And That Which Is Not Seen by Frédéric Bastiat

• The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski

• The Walk by Robert Walser

• With Fire and Sword by Henryk Sienkiewicz

• Yukikaze by Chōhei Kambayashi

History & Recollections

• Memories of Silk and Straw by Junichi Saga

• North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail by Scott Jurek

• The Forgotten Highlander: An Incredible WWII Story of Survival in the Pacific by Alistair Urquhart

• The Land I Lost by Huynh Quang Nhuong

• The Warrior Generals: Combat Leadership in the Civil War by Thomas Buell

Government, Politics & Nations

• Pax Indica: India And The World Of The 21st Century by Shashi Tharoor

• The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization by Ron Davison

Science & Tech

• Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge by Jeremy Narby

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship by Andrey Miroshnichenko

• Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds by Bernd Heinrich

• The Complementary Nature by J. A. Scott Kelso and David A. Engstrom

• The Dream Machine by Mitchell Waldrop

• The Physics of Life by Adrian Bejan

• Quantum Physics for Hippies by Dr. Lukas Neumeier

• Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo

Psychology, Behavioural, Philosophy

• Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Reason why: Most people read it only once and barely scratched the surface. Instead, it’s like a system of pumps. You read it once, you build one pump. The second time you read it, you have a pump helping you extracting knowledge. And build a second, higher pump. And so on.)

• The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Similar reason as above)

• Freedom from the Known by Jiddu Krishnamurti

• How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne

• Human Action by Ludwig von Mises

• Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon by Dr Rahul Jandial

• Lila: An Inquiry into Morals by Robert Pirsig

• Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions by Robert H. Frank

• Piloting through Chaos – the Explorer’s Mind by Julian Gresser

• Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering: What Philosophy Can Tell Us about the Hardest Mystery of All by Scott Samuelson

• Sex, Ecology and Spirituality by Ken Wilber

• Staring at the Sun by Irvin Yalom

• The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom

• The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon

• The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler

• The Evolving Self by Robert Kegan

• The Farther Reaches of Human Nature by Abraham Maslow

• The Mind’s I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul by Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

• The ordeal of change by Eric Hoffer

• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

• Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World by Rene Girard

Self Improvement

• At Home with the Inner Self by Jim Burns

• Awareness by Anthony de Mello

• If Better is Possible by John Buchanan (My recommendation)

• How to Want What You Have by Timothy Miller

• Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy by Will Meyerhofer

• Life on Top: Lessons from High Mountains by Satyabrata Dam

• Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin

• Sum by David Engleman

• The Fall of the Human Intellect by A. Parthasarathy

• The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment by Thaddeus Golas

• This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can’t by Augusten Burroughs

• This Life by Martin Hagglund

Misc

• Atmamun: The path to achieving the bliss of the Himalayan Swamis. And the freedom of a living God. by Kapil Gupta MD

• Clear and Simple as the Truth by Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner

• Dancing With the Gods by Kent Nerburn

• Don’t Shoot the Dog: The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor

• How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff

• Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre 1st Edition by Keith Johnstone

• Playing with Movement by Todd Hargrove

• Reflections on Silver River by Ken Mcleod

• Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik

• The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard

• The Game by Neil Strauss

• The Power Law of Information: Life in A Connected World by Srinath Srinivasa

• The Three Marriages by David Whyte

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Disclaimer: I’ve used Amazon Affiliate Links here. Feel free to help out by using them, much appreciated! 

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You can find my previous posts here. I also interview legends at Compounding Curiosity, lurk on Twitter @scarrottkalani, and have a Discord server for everything Allocators Asia (I’d love for you to join our cool little community we got going).

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