Books recommended by Gwern Branwen from gwern.net

Ted Chiang

“Chiang is the closest thing to a modern Jorge Luis Borges in melding high concepts with literature”

Jorge Luis Borges

“Borges the essayist is underrated.”

Wildbow (John C. McCrae)

“addictive superhero SF posing as fantasy; it is long, of consistently high quality”

Olaf Stapledon

“Star Maker is one of the very few SF books that I'd place up there with Blindsight”

Steven Pinker

“This was really really good, as in, maybe the best book I've read that year.”

Kazuo Ishiguro

“this is the most elegant, most restrained, and most English”

Joseph A. Tainter

“Very good: much better than Jared Diamond's Collapse”

Adam Tooze

“Nazi Germany's militarization based on debt induced competing arms races / instability”

Liaquat Ahamed

“I enjoyed this tremendously for revealing a new world to me where I thought I already knew the lay of the land.”

Francis Fukuyama

“It is, overall, an excellent book and one of the better ones on grand history I've read”

Graham Robb

“one forgets the underlying demonstration and just basks in the knowledge of how the past is a very foreign country”

Herodotus

“Overall, far more interesting than I had expected.”

James Gleick

“A solid biography...an excellent subject which I have nothing to say against”

Arthur R. Jensen

“One of the classics in the field...hardly anything substantive I can object to”