The 14 books
1. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
A world kept content by pleasure, drugs and engineered birth, and what it costs. Brave New World summary
2. 1984, George Orwell
A state that controls people by controlling what they are allowed to know and say.
3. The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
Orwell's report on poverty in the north of England, and his attack on the socialists of his own day.
4. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
A student kills to prove he is above morality and is undone by what he did.
5. Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky
A small revolutionary cell in a Russian town, and how ideas turn people to murder.
6. Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche's attack on the morality and philosophy he inherited.
7. Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning
How a unit of middle-aged German policemen became mass killers in Poland.
8. The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski
A boy alone in the villages of Eastern Europe during the Second World War.
9. The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang
The massacre of Chinese civilians by the Japanese army in 1937.
10. The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Soviet prison camps, from a man who survived them, in three volumes.
11. Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
A psychiatrist's years in the Nazi camps, and his finding that the people who survived had something to live for. Man's Search for Meaning summary
12. Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Carl Jung
Jung's essays on dreams, the psyche and the spiritual problem of modern life.
13. A History of Religious Ideas, Mircea Eliade
Religion from the Stone Age onward, in three volumes.
14. Affective Neuroscience, Jaak Panksepp
The brain systems behind emotion, shared by humans and other mammals.
His own Maps of Meaning, he says, was written under the influence of the books above.
Common questions
Which book should I start with?
Man's Search for Meaning. It is short, and its question, what makes suffering bearable, runs through the rest of the list. Then Brave New World and 1984 as a pair.
Why does Peterson call these books terrifying?
In the lecture he posted with the list, he splits suffering into tragedy, the price of human limitation, and evil, "the conscious and malevolent attempt to worsen Being." People can bear tragedy, even triumph over it, if they are guided by truth; evil, he says, is "a far more insidious, subtle and damaging force." Ordinary Men, The Rape of Nanking and The Gulag Archipelago are accounts of the second.
Can I listen to these books?
Ask the composer above for a 15-minute episode on any one of them, or for the list as a course. SUN also has summaries of Brave New World and Man's Search for Meaning.
More reading lists: books recommended by Elon Musk, Bill Gates' reading list, Steve Jobs' favorite books, Andrew Huberman's book recommendations, Joe Rogan's book recommendations, Charlie Kirk's book recommendations.