A university education costs tens of thousands. The greatest books ever written cost a library card. This is an attempt to build that education anyway — deliberately, in order, one book at a time. Not a reading sprint or a Goodreads challenge: an attempt to build the education I wish I'd had — why civilizations rise and fall, how governments and economies work, how science explains reality, what philosophers have argued for 2,500 years, and the greatest stories ever written, all connected rather than studied in isolation.
375 non-fiction books across 15 categories, plus 125 novels, sequenced into a single staircase — each book preparing the reader for the next.
Harari's account of how an unremarkable ape on the African savanna became the species reshaping the planet -- tracing the cognitive, agricultural, and scientific revolutions, and the shared myths (money, nations, religions) that let millions of strangers cooperate at scale. Opens the curriculum with the big-picture frame the rest of World History fills in.
Browse the 15 categories + novels · See the full 500-book reading order · Read the blog
