I asked Chatgpt: what to read in 2026? suggest a list of must read books!

Here is a list 39 books.

Here’s a curated, year-long reading list for 2026—a mix of classics, contemporary must-reads, and high-impact nonfiction across business, psychology, culture, and creativity. I’ve organized it so you can plan quarters or themes.

I will follow and start reading some of these books, which I hope can be of useful to you too.

Happy new Year everyone.

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1) Business, Strategy & Entrepreneurship

1. Good to Great – Jim Collins

2. The Hard Thing About Hard Things – Ben Horowitz

3. Zero to One – Peter Thiel

4. The Innovator’s Dilemma – Clayton Christensen

5. Thinking in Bets – Annie Duke

6. Measure What Matters – John Doerr

7. Hooked – Nir Eyal

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2) Leadership & Decision-Making

8. Principles – Ray Dalio

9. Team of Teams – General Stanley McChrystal

10. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – Robert Cialdini

11. Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

12. Antifragile – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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3) Economics & Society

13. Capital in the Twenty-First Century – Thomas Piketty

14. Range – David Epstein

15. The Rise and Fall of Nations – Ruchir Sharma

16. The Second Machine Age – Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee

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4) Creativity, Learning & Mental Models

17. Mastery – Robert Greene

18. The Art of Learning – Josh Waitzkin

19. Super Thinking – Gabriel Weinberg & Lauren McCann

20. Latticework: The New Investing – Robert G. Hagstrom

21. How to Take Smart Notes – Sönke Ahrens

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5) Culture, History & Narrative

22. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari

23. Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond

24. The Silk Roads – Peter Frankopan

25. The Lessons of History – Will & Ariel Durant

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6) Fiction (for Depth & Empathy)

26. 1984 – George Orwell

27. The Stranger – Albert Camus

28. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez

29. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

30. The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt

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7) Science & Big Ideas

31. The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins

32. The Gene: An Intimate History – Siddhartha Mukherjee

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8) Productivity & Focus

33. Deep Work – Cal Newport

34. Atomic Habits – James Clear

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9) Persuasive Writing & Communication

35. On Writing Well – William Zinsser

36. Made to Stick – Chip & Dan Heath

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Seasoned Picks (Optional High-commitment Reads)

37. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

38. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky

39. Gödel, Escher, Bach – Douglas Hofstadter

Some of these books are classics and pobably you have read some of them, others you might have heard of them for the first time and I hope you will add some of them to your reading list. Let me know in the comments if you have any other suggested reads for 2026.