Psychology and Science Summer Reading List (a couple of weeks late)
I had a few questions that asked me for recommendations in psychology books for summer reading. While I could have just rattled off a few books that I have read, I wanted to see what some of the other tumblrs had to say on the matter. Here is what everyone had to say:
Below is a list of book recommendations submitted by fellow tumblrs, along with my recommendations below. Thank you again to anyone that submitted, I really appreciated the level of involvement that I received when I asked for contributions.
Now, go get reading!
- How God Changes your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist by Andrew Newberg, M.D. and Mark Robert Waldman
- A New Earth and The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (I’m not so sure about these!)
- The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miracles by Bruce H. Lipton
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (one of my all-time favorite books)
- Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks by Ben Goldacre
- Why Does e=mc^2 (And Why Should We Care?) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
- The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks (really anything by Oliver Sacks!)
- Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio Damasio (one of the premier minds behind consciousness, check out anything written by him)
- Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher
- Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran (Another one that you should read anything he has written, really fantastic neuroscience author)
- My Lobotomy by Howard Dully (This is on my personal reading list)
- The Snake Charmer: A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge by Jamie James
- Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane
- Calculus: Vol. 1 and 2 by Tom M. Apostol’s (Because who doesn’t love calculus)
- Principles of Mathematical Analysis by Walter Rudin
- Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
My recommendations:
Some classic Psychology/Sociology literature
- Walden Two by B.F. Skinner
- The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
- On Being Human by Erich Fromm
- On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy by Carl Rogers
- ANYTHING written by Emile Durkheim
- About Behaviorism by B.F. Skinner
- Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm
More Current recommendations
- The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human by V.S. Ramachandran
- Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman (Loved this work)
- Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are by Joseph LeDoux
- Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach (fascinating, and very well-researched)
- Also check out Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach. Seriously, I love her stuff.
- Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class by Ronald Dworkin (Nice read, but I had some issues with some of the conclusions)
- Awakenings by Oliver Sacks (my FAVORITE from Sacks)
- The Origin of Mind: Evolution of Brain, Cognition, and General Intelligence by David C. Geary
- Killing Freud: Twentieth Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis by Todd Dufresne
- The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives by Shankar Vedantam
- The Sublime Engine: A Biography of the Human Heart by Stephen Amidon (LOVED THIS)
- Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in your Twenties by Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner (Read this if you are in your twenties)
- The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson
- Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among Us by Robert Hare
- The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout
- Homicide: A Year in the Killing Streets by David Simon
Some Fiction that features psychological principles:
- Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (heart)
- The Shinning by Stephen King
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- The Raw Shark Texts: A Novel by Steven Hall (heart)
- American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
- Requiem for a Dream: A Novel by Hubert Selby Jr.
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