Ricky's Reading List

Every now and then you come across a book that feels like someone finally handed you the missing piece of a puzzle you didn’t realize you were trying to solve. Below is a list of books that have been essential puzzle pieces in my development of critical thinking and understanding the complexities of human psychology.

I specifically chose not to focus on therapy or self-help books. Instead, I want to focus on more rigorous books that have helped me question assumptions, think more carefully, and see psychology from angles I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. I’ve also intentionally included books that arrive at very different—even opposing—conclusions, because reading across disagreement has been essential to my understanding of complex psychological issues. Happy reading! (Listed in no particular order)

Critical Thinking and Decision-Making

Foundational for therapists who want to understand how people actually think—not how we wish they did.

Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow
Winner of the Nobel Prize. The modern cornerstone of cognitive bias research.
Philip Tetlock – Superforecasting
The art and science of thinking clearly and remaining intellectually humble.
Steven Pinker – How the Mind Works
A dense and rigorous exploration of the mind through an evolutionary and cognitive science lens, unpacking how perception, emotion, reasoning, and human nature emerge from underlying psychological mechanisms.

Hans Rosling – Factfulness
Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.

Annie Duke – Thinking in Bets
Professional poker player turned decision theorist; teaches probabilistic reasoning, embracing uncertainty, and making better decisions under risk.

Julia Galef – The Scout Mindset
A clear, engaging guide to thinking with curiosity and intellectual honesty, emphasizing how to question assumptions, update beliefs based on evidence, and approach the world with a learning-oriented mindset.

Happiness and Well-Being

The suprising science of happiness.

Daniel Gilbert – Stumbling on Happiness
Explores the surprising ways our minds mispredict what will make us happy, blending psychology, neuroscience, and behavioural research.
Sonja Lyubomirsky – The How of Happiness
Evidence-based exploration of interventions and strategies that can reliably increase long-term happiness.

Tom Gilovich – How We Know What Isn’t So & research on happiness
Examines common misconceptions about what makes us happy, including social comparisons, materialism, and adaptation.

William MacAskill – Doing Good Better
A useful guide to maximizing human well-being through effective giving and impactful action, showing how thoughtful decisions about where and how to help can significantly increase happiness for others and, indirectly, ourselves.

Oliver Burkeman – The Antidote
Explores the counterintuitive idea that embracing uncertainty, failure, and limitations can lead to greater happiness and fulfillment, challenging the cultural obsession with constant positivity and control.

Angela Duckworth – Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Explores how sustained effort and resilience—more than talent alone—shape success and achievement, providing insights into motivation, self-discipline, and long-term personal growth.

Jonathan Rauch – The Happiness Curve
Explores the well-documented U-shaped trajectory of life satisfaction across adulthood, combining psychological research, economics, and personal narrative to challenge cultural assumptions about midlife and highlight how meaning and well-being often deepen over time.

Meaning, Suffering, and Existential Psychology

Clinical depth regarding the human experience.

Viktor Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning
Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor; still unmatched in clarity about suffering, agency, and finding purpose.
Irvin Yalom – Love’s Executioner
A philosophical exploration of actual therapy cases. A depth-oriented approach focusing on free will, self-determination, and the search for meaning in life.
Mary Oliver – Devotions (or her collected poetry)
Poetry that confronts suffering, mortality, and the human experience with profound attention and clarity, offering reflection on meaning, presence, and resilience in the face of life’s challenges.

Oliver Burkeman – Four Thousand Weeks
Philosophical realism about time, control, and acceptance—quietly therapeutic.

Critical Thinking About Therapy

Sharpening Clinical Judgment and Questioning Assumptions.

Scott Lilienfeld et al. – Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology
A critical inoculation against trendy but unsupported therapies.

Scott Lilienfeld – 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology
A clear, engaging, and evidence-driven look at widespread misconceptions in psychology, perfect for grounding clinical thinking and avoiding common misunderstandings about human behaviour and mental health.

Paul Meehl – Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction
Required reading for any clinician who believes intuition beats data. (It doesn’t)

Bruce Wampold & Zac Imel – The Great Psychotherapy Debate
Essential for understanding common factors vs. specific techniques.

Scott D. Miller – The Heart and Soul of Change
Outcome research that challenges therapist ego.

Mindfulness, Consciousness, and Attention

Grounded approaches that don’t drift into pseudoscience.

Jon Kabat-Zinn – Full Catastrophe Living
The original, clinically grounded mindfulness text.
Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, & Jon Kabat-Zinn – The Mindful Way Through Depression
A clinically sound, MBCT-informed guide that connects mindfulness practice directly to relapse prevention and cognitive patterns.

Sam Harris – Waking Up
Consciousness and meditation approached with intellectual discipline.
Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
Private reflections that map surprisingly well onto CBT principles.

Tara Brach – Radical Acceptance
Integrates mindfulness, meditation, and clinical insight.

Neuroscience, Biology, and the Limits of Knowledge

Oliver Sacks – The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Neurology as a lesson in identity and human fragility.
Robert Plomin – Blueprint
A clear, evidence-based argument for the powerful role of genetics in shaping psychological traits, challenging environmental and therapeutic assumptions about how and why people change.

Matthew Cobb – The Idea of the Brain
A richly detailed, historically grounded exploration of how we’ve come to understand the brain — from early metaphors and crude assumptions to modern neuroscience.

Paul Bloom – Psych
A sharp, accessible tour through what psychology gets right, what it gets wrong, and how the field has changed over time—useful for keeping a healthy scepticism about both old theories and new trends.

Science, Progress, and Big Ideas

David Deutsch – The Beginning of Infinity
An exploration of what drives human progress and how we improve our knowledge.
Karl Popper – Conjectures and Refutations
A useful mindset for therapy models: provisional, falsifiable, revisable.

Walter Isaacson – Einstein / Leonardo da Vinci
Biographies that illuminate creativity, obsession, and intellectual courage.
Steven Pinker – Enlightenment Now
Evidence-based optimism on human progress and the power of reason, science, and humanism.
Richard Feynman – Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
A reminder of how curiosity, doubt, and play drive real understanding.

Tim Urban – What’s Our Problem?
Surprisingly rigorous exploration of tribalism and epistemology.

Human Nature and Human Development

Clarifying and clinically useful for understanding motives, conflict, and meaning.

David Buss – The Evolution of Desire
Evolutionary psychology applied carefully to relationships, attachment, and conflict.
Alison Gopnik – The Gardener and the Carpenter
A thought-provoking exploration of how children learn and develop, challenging common assumptions about parenting and highlighting the importance of curiosity, play, and environment in shaping minds.
Steven Pinker – The Blank Slate
A clear, ambitious attempt to explain human thought, emotion, and behaviour through cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, pushing back against vague or purely social explanations of the mind.
Robert Wright – The Moral Animal
An accessible but serious evolutionary account of human behaviour.
Judith Rich Harris – The Nurture Assumption
A carefully argued and controversial examination of child development that questions many long-held assumptions in psychology and parenting—and forces a more nuanced view of environmental influence.

Joseph Henrich – The Secret of Our Success
A rigorous and fascinating look at how culture—not just individual intelligence—drives human evolution, learning, and behaviour, with important implications for how we understand development, norms, and change.

Robert Kurzban – Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite
Explores why humans often hold contradictory beliefs and behave inconsistently, arguing that our minds are made up of competing systems rather than a single unified self.

Memoirs & Lived Experiences of Mental Illness

Carefully written personal accounts that offer insight into lived experiences of suffering.

William Styron – Darkness Visible
A short, powerful account of major depression that remains one of the clearest descriptions of psychic pain ever written.
Kay Redfield Jamison – An Unquiet Mind
A rare combination of memoir and clinical insight, written by a leading mood disorders researcher reflecting on her own bipolar disorder.
Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
A profound memoir of overcoming hardship and a traumatic chilhood; exploring themes of resilience, identity, racism and sexism.

Andrew Solomon – The Noonday Demon
Part memoir, part investigative work—deeply researched, expansive, and emotionally honest.
Susanna Kaysen – Girl, Interrupted
A culturally influential memoir that captures institutional psychiatry and diagnostic ambiguity with restraint and intelligence.