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Yuval Noah Harari began as a specialist — a historian of medieval and military history at Oxford — and became, in his own phrase, "a student of humankind." The book that turned him was Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which showed him that you could ask the very biggest questions about the human story and try to answer them with evidence rather than anecdote. That template — sweeping, scientific, unafraid of the whole species as its subject — became Sapiens, and it explains the shape of Harari’s reading: he is drawn to books that zoom out far enough to make the familiar look strange.
His recommendations, though few, are pointed. He names Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World his favourite and the most prescient book of the twentieth century; he recommends Daniel Kahneman on the fallible mind and engages Steven Pinker’s optimism precisely because he disagrees with parts of it. And he uses his platform deliberately for the cause he cares about most outside history: as a vegan, he wrote forewords to Melanie Joy’s and Peter Singer’s landmark books on animal ethics. Harari reads and recommends less as a curator of favourites than as a thinker pointing you toward the questions he believes matter most — where we came from, where technology is taking us, and whom our progress leaves out.
Yuval Noah Harari’s short list of recommendations is really a map of the questions his own books ask. It begins with method. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is not just an influence but a licence — the book that convinced Harari big history was possible, that one could explain the shape of civilisation through geography and biology rather than kings and battles. Everything Harari wrote afterwards is an attempt to do for the human mind and the human future what Diamond did for the human past.
From that root the list runs forward in time. Huxley’s Brave New World — which Harari calls the best and most prescient science fiction ever written — is his sharpest lens on where technology leads, a dystopia of engineered contentment that haunts Homo Deus and Nexus. Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow supplies the fallible, hackable mind those futures will exploit, and Harari engages Pinker’s Enlightenment Now as a worthy opponent — recommending it, he says, precisely because "there is much to argue about." This is a reader who prizes the books that sharpen a disagreement over the ones that flatter a view.
The final thread is moral, and it is the one Harari pushes hardest. A vegan who thinks industrial animal farming may be one of history’s gravest crimes, he lent his name and his pen to the animal-ethics canon — Melanie Joy’s Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows and Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation — writing forewords rather than merely blurbs. Set beside Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction and Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, the pattern is clear: Harari reads to understand the largest systems — deep history, technology, ecology, ethics — and recommends the books that make us look honestly at the ones we would rather not see.
From the deep past to the deep future — Huxley’s dystopia of engineered contentment is Harari’s sharpest lens on where technology leads.
The fallible, hackable mind those futures will exploit — Kahneman on how systematically we misjudge.
The optimistic counter-case Harari engages with — recommending it, he says, precisely because there is much to argue about.
And the moral blind spot he cares most about — how we justify the treatment of the animals our progress depends on.
The single formative influence — Diamond’s big history turned Harari from a historian of medieval warfare into a student of humankind, and became the template for Sapiens.
“It made me realise that you can ask the biggest questions about history and try to give them scientific answers.”BlogSource: Yuval Noah Harari — on the book that shaped him
His self-declared favourite — Huxley’s dystopia of engineered contentment, which Harari calls the most prophetic book of the twentieth century and later introduced in an anniversary edition.
“I think Brave New World is the best science fiction book ever, definitely the most prescient.”WebsiteSource: Yuval Noah Harari — interview on his favourite book (2016)
His pick for understanding "the tangled web of the human mind" — the fallible cognition Harari argues technology is learning to hack.
WebsiteSource: Yuval Noah Harari — recommended reading (ynharari.com)A rare recommendation of a book he partly disagrees with — Pinker’s data-driven optimism, which Harari prizes as a worthy argument rather than a settled truth.
“There is of course much to argue about, but that’s what makes this book so interesting.”WebsiteSource: Yuval Noah Harari — recommended reading (ynharari.com)
The book on "carnism" whose anniversary edition Harari introduced — the clearest expression of the animal-ethics cause he cares about most.
“Melanie Joy’s book is an important and groundbreaking contribution to the struggle for the welfare of animals.”BookSource: Yuval Noah Harari — foreword to the 10th-anniversary edition
Singer’s foundational classic of animal ethics, updated — Harari wrote the new introduction, a second, independent animal-welfare endorsement.
BookSource: Yuval Noah Harari — foreword to the revised edition (2023)Kolbert on human-driven mass extinction — the ecological crisis that recurs across Harari’s writing on our species’ power.
WebsiteSource: Yuval Noah Harari — recommended reading (ynharari.com)O’Neil on how opaque algorithms entrench inequality — a concrete instance of the data-power Harari warns about in Homo Deus and Nexus.
WebsiteSource: Yuval Noah Harari — recommended reading (ynharari.com)Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Harari credits it with showing him that the biggest questions about human history could be answered with evidence, and says it turned him from a historian of medieval warfare into "a student of humankind" — the ambition that became Sapiens.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Harari has called it the best science-fiction book ever written and the most prescient book of the twentieth century about the human future, and he later wrote an introduction to an anniversary edition.
Alongside Guns, Germs, and Steel and Brave New World, he recommends Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow on the fallible mind and engages Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now as a book worth arguing with. He also champions animal-ethics books by Melanie Joy and Peter Singer.
Harari is a committed vegan who has described industrial animal farming as possibly one of the worst crimes in history. He wrote forewords to Melanie Joy’s Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows and Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation — using his platform to push the moral question he cares about most outside of history.
This page does not list them. Harari’s own works — Sapiens, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons, Nexus and the Sapiens graphic history — are his output, not his recommendations, so they are excluded in favour of the books that shaped or are endorsed by him.