Books by category
Pick a topic and see its best books summarized in 15 minutes, with new books every week.
Personal Finance
A good money book rarely promises easy wealth. It changes how you see your paycheck, your debt and your time. This selection runs from old classics like The Richest Man in Babylon and The Intelligent Investor to modern voices such as Morgan Housel, Ramit Sethi and J.L. Collins, plus Brazilian authors like Gustavo Cerbasi and Thiago Nigro, whose ideas travel well.
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Business
The business books that last explain why some companies grow and others disappear. This selection mixes the methods founders use most, such as The Lean Startup, Zero to One and The Hard Thing About Hard Things, with classic strategy work by Michael Porter, Clayton Christensen and Jim Collins.
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Psychology
Understanding how the mind works helps explain why we repeat habits we dislike, undermine ourselves in big decisions and react in ways we barely recognize later. This selection brings together books that took psychology to a wide audience, like Mindset, Emotional Intelligence, Flow and Quiet, alongside classics by Freud, Jung, Fromm, Rogers and Frankl.
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Personal Development
Personal development is the shelf most crowded with promises, which is why it needs the most filtering. This selection favors books that help you do something different tomorrow morning: building drive with Awaken the Giant Within, finding direction with Ikigai and The Defining Decade, or sharpening your thinking with The Art of Thinking Clearly and How to Decide.
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Health
The health books in this selection share one trait: they start from research and explain the why instead of just giving orders. Sleep is covered by Why We Sleep and The Sleep Revolution, food by How Not to Die, In Defense of Food and The Obesity Code, and longevity by Outlive, The Blue Zones, Lifespan and The Longevity Diet.
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Spirituality
This category gathers books from different traditions that ask the same question: how do we live with more meaning and less anguish? You will find Christian classics such as Confessions, The Imitation of Christ and Mere Christianity, the Spiritist works of Allan Kardec and Chico Xavier, Buddhism through the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, and contemporary teachers like Eckhart Tolle and Anthony de Mello.
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History
Well-told history explains the present. This selection goes from the story of our species in Sapiens to the story of money in The Ascent of Money, through the trade routes of The Silk Roads, the road to world war in The Guns of August and The Sleepwalkers, and the Nazi regime in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
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Science
Good science writing makes you look at the sky, your own body or your own decisions differently. Here are the big names of the genre: Carl Sagan in Cosmos, Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time, Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene and Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything.
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Relationships
Good relationships take work, and the books in this selection show where to put the effort. There are couple classics such as The 5 Love Languages and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, the science of attachment in Attached and Hold Me Tight, and John Gottman's The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.
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Leadership
Leading means getting people to want to come along, and the books here show very different routes. There is the servant leadership of The Servant, the purpose-driven approach of Start with Why, the total accountability of Extreme Ownership and the practical laws of John C. Maxwell's The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.
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Fiction
This selection brings together the novels everyone cites, from Don Quixote and Pride and Prejudice to Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina, along with dystopias like 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451, and Brazilian classics such as Dom Casmurro and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis.
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Children's
A selection of children's books summarized to read in 15 minutes, with the key ideas of each one.
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Biographies and Memoirs
Biographies and memoirs let you borrow someone else's life for a few hours. This selection runs from founders such as Phil Knight in Shoe Dog, Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, and Sam Walton: Made in America, to political and moral figures like Nelson Mandela in Long Walk to Freedom, Mahatma Gandhi in The Story of My Experiments with Truth and Malala Yousafzai in I Am Malala.
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Philosophy
Philosophy is less about answers than about better questions. This selection starts with the Stoics, who wrote practical advice for hard days: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, The Enchiridion by Epictetus and On the Shortness of Life by Seneca. Modern writers like Ryan Holiday, in The Obstacle Is the Way and The Daily Stoic, and Donald Robertson, in How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, carry those ideas into everyday life.
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Productivity and Focus
Everyone wants more time and less distraction, and the books in this selection disagree about how to get there. Deep Work and Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport defend protecting your attention. Essentialism and The ONE Thing argue for doing less, better. Getting Things Done by David Allen offers a system for capturing everything on your mind.
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Mental Health
Anxiety, trauma, depression, addiction and a mind that will not switch off are subjects more and more people want to understand. This selection gathers authors who study and treat them: Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score, Gabor Maté in When the Body Says No, Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation and Anna Lembke in Dopamine Nation.
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Family and Parenting
Family is the first place we learn to relate, which is why it raises so many questions and so many books. This selection brings authors who look at it from different angles: psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, educators and writers. Each summary shows what the author argues, without dictating how you should raise your kids.
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Marketing and Sales
Marketing is how a company, or a person, explains what it does to those who may need it. This selection brings together the classics that shaped the field's vocabulary, such as Positioning and The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout, and Seth Godin's Purple Cow, Tribes and This Is Marketing.
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Career and Work
A career stays with you for decades: choosing a field, switching, growing, failing, starting over. The books in this selection look at work from different angles, and none offers a shortcut. They are researchers, executives and writers telling you what they observed.
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Habits and Discipline
Much of what we do each day happens on autopilot. The books in this selection explain how habits form and what each author proposes for changing the ones you do not want. Atomic Habits by James Clear and The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg are the best known. Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg works with very small steps.
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Technology and the Future
Artificial intelligence, algorithms and information networks are in the news every day. The books in this selection explain these subjects calmly, and many disagree about what the future holds. Yuval Noah Harari examines in Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and Nexus what technology might do to society. Nexus tells the history of information networks, from writing to AI.
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Economy and Society
Why do some countries get rich and others do not? Has violence gone up or down? Why do we decide in such irrational ways? This selection gathers books by economists, historians, psychologists and sociologists who try to answer questions like these.
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