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10 Fascinating Books That Will Expand Your Mind
Matt Karamazov
January 20, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 38 minutes
📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
I’m not going to undersell these books. Every single one of them is absolutely incredible, and every single one of them has the potential to change how you think about everything.
About your life, yourself, the universe, other people, the human mind…absolutely everything. They are nothing short of spectacular, and so I don’t want to waste any time introducing them to you tonight.
Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly.
Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”
“The Germans have a superb word for the (secret) pleasure humans obtain from the misfortunes of others. It is schadenfreude - from schaden meaning ‘harm’ (from which we get the word ‘shadow’), and freude meaning ‘joy.’
Those of you who are definitely going to be rich will recognize it often enough in the faces and body language of idiots around you.
It is the price you must learn to pay for any attempt to raise yourself in the world. And I suspect that was as true ten thousand years ago as it is today.”
Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.
This month’s book is How to Get Rich, by Felix Dennis, a fantastic book about getting rich, obviously, but also with a touch of tragic beauty, written as it was when Dennis found himself at the top of the financial mountain, with terminal cancer…and alone.
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After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,460 books, including 6 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
How can I summarize one of my absolute favorite books of all time? After all, this is the book that got me hooked on learning everything I could about space, and Carl Sagan has been my go-to every time I want a triple-shot of wonder, beauty, and awe.
Cosmos was originally a 13-part TV documentary series, written by Carl Sagan along with Ann Druyan and Steven Soter, and with Sagan as the on-screen presenter The remake was done by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who was actually one of Carl Sagan's mentees!
There’s also a great story about the Sagans hosting Tyson at their home for dinner, going out of their way to make him feel at home, and answering every single question Tyson asked about science, space, and about a potential career spent studying it.
Anyway, Cosmos is an absolutely thrilling book about space exploration, the composition of other planets, our efforts to find out more about the universe we live in, and the possibilities for future space-missions to unlock even more wonder and beauty and awe.
It’s relentless in its awesomeness (both space and the book), and ever since reading it I’ve wanted to just get up, leave the planet, and go out exploring the dark, silent, and vast ocean of space.
But at the very same time, Sagan also extols the beauty, majesty, and significance of this planet, and he makes you feel extremely glad to be home.
Difficulty Rating: Medium
Why It’ll Expand Your Mind: This is the first book to make me realize that other planets are literally places we can go to! As in, even a planet that’s hundreds of millions of light-years away. As long as it’s solid, you can literally step on it, and walk around on it, just like you do on Earth!
“But the question most often - too often - asked about extraterrestrial life is whether or not. The fact is, that’s a very boring question. Its answer would be revolutionary, and plenty of scientists are pursuing it, but sitting here posing it to a vast and empty sky doesn’t tell us anything. We should really be asking what if?”
Back in the 1960s, Rachel Carson wrote movingly and persuasively about the beauty of the world’s oceans, the dangers of pesticides, and our responsibility to safeguard the only home we’ve ever known.
Today, I’ve come to think of Jaime Green almost like the Rachel Carson of space.
The Possibility of Life is astoundingly good, and it’s not only about whether we’re alone in the universe, it’s about what extraterrestrial life might look like if we found it.
But it’s even more than that, as she goes on to share what science has to say about how alien life might communicate with us (and whether we’d even be able to understand them), the astrobiology of alien life, and specifically how we might discover it.
Jaime is a science journalist herself, and this book has won more “book of the year” awards than there are habitable planets out there awaiting discovery (okay, maybe not, but the list of awards is pretty damn long, and it deserves every single one of them).
It’s precisely and carefully researched, containing insights from interviews with some of the brightest minds to ever look through a telescope, but it’s also poetic and hauntingly beautiful - a true masterpiece of nonfiction reporting.
Now, obviously, it’s a science book, and one dealing with several intersecting, emerging, and complicated fields, so unless you’re Neil DeGrasse Tyson, it’s probably not a beach read! But it’s spectacular.
And the science itself is fascinating: the formation of planets, the conditions necessary for life, the methods scientists use to detect it, and the evolution of technology as we move closer, inexorably perhaps, to the singularity.
Difficulty Rating: Medium
Why It’ll Expand Your Mind: Because aliens, obviously! But yeah, just like it says in the quote above, this one goes into how our world might change if the answer was, “No, actually, we’re not alone.”
“The people with the least respect for our so-called reality are the ones changing it.”
Years ago, if you had told me that a cartoonist/hypnotist would have such a profound impact on my life, I wouldn’t have believed you.
Well, maybe I would have. I mean, that’s oddly specific - if you came to me with that kind of prophecy, I’d assume you had some sort of insider information that I wasn’t aware of and I might have listened.
Anyway, the point being…Scott Adams changed my life.
I first read his other book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, where he laid out the difference between goals and systems, and how everyone fails to reach their goals for virtually 99% of the time they’re chasing them.
Every day you haven’t achieved your goal yet, you’re currently “unsuccessful.” Whereas with systems, you’re successful every day that you work your system. You may not have lost 10lbs yet, but if you worked out and ate healthy that day, your system is working, and you’re successful. Achieving the goal is just a matter of time.
He also gave me the career advice that started it all, when he pointed out in the book that it’s extremely difficult to break into the top one percent of any particular field.
However, it’s so much easier to break into the top ten percent of two fields and combine them in an interesting way.
Not only is it easier, but it’s more profitable, because there’s automatically less competition, and very, very few people who can do what you do.
There are plenty of people who are smarter than I am, and plenty of people who are more jacked than I am, but when I combined books and bodybuilding, that became a scroll-stopping combination that helped me gain 100,000+ followers in just a few short years, and go full-time talking about books on the internet.
All of that is to say, whenever Scott Adams comes out with a new book, I damn well read it, and Reframe Your Brain is easily one of my favorite books of his. Essentially, it’s about reprogramming your mind for success and happiness by reframing reality and rewiring your brain to help you get what you want in life.
The collection of reframes covers everything from business and career success, to mental health, relationships, fitness, and more. The full range of human experience. There’s literally a reframe for everything. That’s because reality is more malleable than most people believe, and you can literally author your own experience.
The “real world” might be real for most people, but you don’t have to live there.
You don’t have to think like everybody else. You don’t have to live like everybody else, either! Instead, you can adopt some of these transformational reframes and achieve better outcomes than anyone who willingly and unthinkingly submits to “the way things are.”
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Expand Your Mind: You’ll learn in this book that reality is malleable - to a much greater extend than most people realize. Instead of being a victim of your reality, or a passive participant, you can be the author of it.
“If the whole world were to appear to mortals now, for the first time; if it was suddenly and unexpectedly exposed to their view; what could one think of more marvelous than these things, and which mankind would less have dared to believe?"
If you took a few required philosophy courses in university, hated it, and subsequently wrote off philosophy forever as “not really my thing,” then it probably wasn’t philosophy.
You might have heard some version of this joke where a doctor is asked what he specializes in, and the doctor replies, “I specialize in the treatment of the left earlobe.” The joke is that medicine has become so ultra-specialized and exact - finely technical - that you could have a specialization like that and no one would know if you’re even joking or not!
Well, it’s kind of the same thing in philosophy nowadays. It’s become so unbelievably stuffy and academic that you could present a thesis on “Semiotic De-Temporalization in Abstract Existentialist and Metaphysical Meta-Realities” and you’d probably get your doctorate! Did I make that up? Or is it a real thing? Who knows!
Anyway, it’s so far away from the actual philosophy that real people used to practice to, you know, improve their lives! Hadot’s book is about real, honest to goodness philosophy (a word that means love of wisdom), and it’s about real people (everyone from slaves to Roman Emperors) who used it to become mentally stronger, more joyful, less afraid, and more fully alive.
I won’t say that this is an easy read because it’s not. It’s more of a philosophy textbook than something you’d bring with you to the beach, but the whole purpose is to show you that philosophy’s a real, live activity, that can actually improve your one and only life.
Reading it, you’ll see why people like Socrates felt that real communication with other human beings was infinitely superior to knowledge gained from books, how Marcus Aurelius used philosophy to help him run the Roman Empire without losing his mind, and how you can go from where you are now, to where you want to be.
Difficulty Rating: Medium
Why It’ll Expand Your Mind: This book draws attention to the wonder and magic available to witness all around us - literally at any moment, no matter where we are, who we’re with, or what we’re doing.
"The people around you generally appear sane and in control of their lives. But put any of them in stressful circumstances, with the pressure rising, and you will see a different reality."
If I had been given The Laws of Human Nature as a textbook in high school, I probably would have learned something while I was there!
Seriously though, there is just so much here, and I believe that most people who have made a serious effort to absorb its lessons have been fundamentally transformed by what Robert Greene has to teach.
Human nature is one of the most expansive topics one could ever hope to cover in a single volume, so of course you're not just going to suddenly "understand people'' by reading it once through.
But I would argue that there's not much else that could be a better use of your time than making that serious effort to understand the hidden psychological motivations and triggers of others.
We deal with other people all day long, and yet we're constantly confused and deceived by their words and actions. They do things we don't understand, for reasons we don't have access to, and not all of them have our best interests at heart.
So this book is just as much about self-defense as it is about understanding your own nature and improving the quality of your close relationships.
But I wouldn't be doing justice to human beings if I made you think that The Laws of Human Nature is only about protection from the negative aspects of human nature. It's not that at all.
Human beings are astonishing, spectacular, and extraordinary. We are amazing in our ability to connect with one another, solve problems together, console each other when faced with the inherent tragedies of human existence, and in our ability simply to rise above our circumstances.
Human beings are powerful, impressive, and awesome - but we're complicated. No one has figured us out yet, and with billions of different people all running into each other, speaking all these different languages, and carrying all these different struggles inside of themselves, we're bound to enter into conflict with one another sometimes.
The Laws of Human Nature, therefore, is also about turning inward, and understanding ourselves in new ways, so that we can take that newfound understanding back into the world with us, and co-exist without tearing ourselves and each other apart.
Difficulty Rating: Medium
Why It’ll Expand Your Mind: This book will give you insight into an entirely new world, hidden just beneath the surface of our everyday social reality.
"The incredible thing many people don't get? Technology is just getting started. We're only at the base of the exponential."
The feel of this book in my hands is like holding a revelation. It's like holding a vision of humanity's marvelously bright future, and after you're finished reading it, I suspect that the bright, techno-utopian future Balaji predicts and describes is going to seem a lot more believable - and more imminent.
Balaji Srinivasan is a serial entrepreneur, investor, futurist, and yes, like Eric Jorgenson says, sort of an eccentric genius and comic book villain. He's a big, optimistic thinker with his feet firmly on the ground, while his head can be found way up in the clouds. When he looks at humanity and at the world, he sees value and infinite potential; where other people see walls, Balaji sees windows.
All of which makes it kind of difficult to summarize such a wide-ranging book about the potentially million-plus-year future of humanity and all the progress that could occur over that timespan. Make sure you're sitting down while reading this one, is I guess what I'm trying to say.
Eric Jorgenson (who's also the author of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant) said that researching and writing this book made him live differently, and influenced the kinds of companies and fields he invests in. It gave him an appreciation for our place in the history unfolding today and impatience for the many ways we're punching ourselves in the face.
The Anthology of Balaji is built entirely out of transcripts, tweets, and talks Balaji has shared and that are scattered all over the internet, much like The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.
In the first part (and the rest of this paragraph is from Amazon), “Technology,” you’ll see how technology shapes our world today and the ways it could shape our future. In “Truth,” you learn how to think for yourself through the constant clamor of information and media. Finally, in “Building the Future,” you’ll learn how to wield Technology and Truth to change your life, change your community, and - maybe - change the future of our species.
Even just the notes that were most relevant to me personally deal with everything from life extension and the quest to live forever, to free speech and cryptographic proof of miracles, to the potentially millions of years of technological progress and techno-utopia we have to look forward to, on this planet and out there among the stars. For such a tightly-condensed book, this one is massive.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Expand Your Mind: This book will have you rethinking the staggering possibilities for humanity’s future, and your place within it. It’ll ask you to consider a human future more far-reaching and incredible than anything you’ve considered before, and it’ll have you wondering what part in bringing about that bright future that you might want to play.
“In this respect, the psyche behaves like the body with its physiological and anatomical structure, of which the average person knows very little too.
Although he lives in it and with it, most of it is totally unknown to the layman, and special scientific knowledge is needed to acquaint consciousness with what is known of the body, not to speak of all that is not known, which also exists.
What is commonly called ‘self-knowledge’ is therefore a very limited knowledge, most of it dependent on social factors, of what goes on in the human psyche.”
Discovering who you are, in a world that relentlessly pushes you to become someone else, is one of the most difficult challenges a person will face in life. There’s this powerful, relentless cultural gravity that’s constantly trying to get you to conform, to be like everyone else, and this book is an antidote to that pressure.
Carl Jung once said that the world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that line since, and my life looks a lot different than it could have if I never stopped to consider its implications.
Not only are there consequences for your individual life, but the “madness of crowds” threatens to engulf the world in darkness, violence, and misery, and our last defence is a population of educated, free-thinking individuals who refuse to be told what to do, what to think, and what to worship.
Again, this book is an antidote. It won’t save you from the difficulty of thinking, but it’ll reveal to you the urgency of doing so, and the critical importance of gaining self-knowledge.
Carl Jung was one of the world’s greatest psychiatrists, who possessed a keener insight into the inner world of mankind than most people, and he was deeply disturbed by what he saw. Not that we were destined to destroy ourselves, but that it was an ever-present possibility, and that it wasn’t inevitable that we wouldn’t.
Difficulty Rating: Medium
Why It’ll Expand Your Mind: Carl Jung will help you realize that, just as the universe expands infinitely outward, there is a similarly deep and vast universe that extends inward - and that is, at yet, virtually entirely unexplored.
“The new circuits and pathways that the brain fashions in order to read become the foundation for being able to think in different, innovative ways."
There is a "before" and "after" point of learning to read that is often the defining moment in a person's life - and especially a child's life. Every book is a door to an alternate future, and tragically, for anyone who never learns to read, those doors remain forever closed.
Magically (unbelievably), books are also windows into the hearts and minds of others, not to mention that the best books also represent paths back to ourselves.
Books are so many different things to so many different people, but how does the miracle of reading actually occur? What happens inside the brain of people just learning to read?
This exact process is the focus of Proust and the Squid, world-renowned cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading Maryanne Wolf's investigation into the development and functioning of the reading brain.
Stunningly, human beings were never meant to read. There are no genes that code for the development of reading skills, and so each human brain has to rearrange itself in the process of learning how to read, moving beyond its original state to learn how to make sense of these strange, squiggly markings on the page.
Sometimes I think that the most amazing thing about the whole process of reading is that we can learn to do it at all. Many people all over the world - even adults - still can't, and this is always and everywhere a tragedy; a failure of education, support, and love.
Another source of endless astonishment to me is that even though it took humans around 2,000 years to develop the kind of written language we have now, we expect children to learn it in about 2,000 days.
Considering the length of time the human species has existed, it's only in the most recent portion of our history that reading and writing actually came to be, and yet so much of our civilization depends on its continued flourishing.
Proust and the Squid does a wonderful job of taking you through a tour of that history, analyzing what we're doing right - and wrong - right now, and even daring to express optimism for the (hopefully long) future of reading.
Difficulty Rating: Medium
Why It’ll Expand Your Mind: This book will literally and figurately expand your mind, by helping you appreciate the unbelievable powers of the mind and the brain (your mind, your brain!) to learn, grow, and discover.
“If we take this journey together, and simply observe as we go along the extraordinary width and depth and beauty of life, then out of this observation may come a love...which is a state of being free of all demand...and we may perhaps be awakened to something far more significant than the boredom and frustration, the emptiness and despair of our daily lives.”
This book was my first introduction to Krishnamurti, and he took me completely by surprise with his total rejection of authority, and his insistence on seeking the truth for oneself, not relying on any external sources of knowledge or truth.
The Revolution from Within is a collection of public talks he gave throughout the world in the 1950s, where he asks, again and again, whether or not the mind can be free of its own projections, and whether the limited human mind can ever perceive the unlimited nature of ultimate truth.
In fact, Krishnamurti speaks mostly in questions. He proceeds very slowly, and uncovers more and more questions in slowly escalating stages, the whole point of which is to provoke independent thought and objectless awareness in the minds of his listeners.
If Jiddu Krishnamurti had a dominant message, it would be that there must be a revolution in our thinking. Not an outward revolution, which is just the continuation of conditioned thought, slightly adapted according to some other philosophy (whatever it may be), but a complete and total rejection of external authority, ideology, and belief.
The whole book is just incredible, covering ideas as diverse as war and global conflict, parenting and relationships, education, spiritual belief, critical thinking, self-awareness, and personal freedom.
After I finished reading the transcript of each lecture - and even while I was reading them - I could feel myself being transformed. I knew that I’d never live the same way again, see the world the same way again, and sure enough, I never did.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Expand Your Mind: Jiddu Krishnamurti will challenge everything you think you know - about the world, yourself, and your very existence. He leaves you literally nowhere to hide, and with no other option except to discover yourself.
“If the entire history of the universe were compressed into one day, modern humans wouldn’t appear until after the last single second. A blink. And each of our individual lives takes place within this second, lasting around four ten-thousandths of that fraction of a fraction of a fraction. And the universe has only just begun.”
I almost didn’t keep reading this one, because it started to feel more like an Intro to Philosophy class (at least at first), but I’m very glad I pulled through to the end, because I was introduced to some ideas and quotes that made the entire book worth it.
Learning that the average person spends about six years of their life dreaming was one of the things that will stick with me, along with the fact that because the Earth is constantly rotating through space, it will never be in exactly the same position ever again! Cool!
But more than that, what kept me turning pages was the sense of strangeness and unreality that Pantano was able to conjure up as he described things that most people, on any given day, usually just take for granted. Things like having a self, being able to manipulate objects and process language, and basically existing at all.
Reading the book felt like an exercise in becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable, except in a cosmic sense.
It was like clearing away the known, the familiar, and the ordinary, and experiencing human existence as though you just got here. Very weird, but also strangely…comforting.
The Art of Living an Absurd Existence covers an extraordinary amount of ground, attempting to answer Philosophy 101 questions like, “How can we know anything for sure?”, and more theological/existential questions like, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
But there’s also a wonder and a lightness there - mixed with an acute sense of the absurd - that makes you feel astoundingly grateful to be here to experience all this strangeness at all.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Expand Your Mind: Same deal as before. Tim Grover knows what it takes to win. He lays it all out in this book. Read it if you’re serious.
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OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.
And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 180,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and scaling my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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