5 books recommended by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Taleb is an extraordinary person: he is convinced that the world is ruled by uncertainty, so most of his life he studied the phenomena of luck, luck, chance. According to his theory, the significance of forecasts is exaggerated, and all the great events in history - the development of the Internet, the First World War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and so on - were impossible to predict.

Taleb has been named one of the greatest writers of the 20th century by The Guardian.

"Demons", Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

I keep reading this novel and I don't know why. Probably because the characters became my friends.

Opposing Shore by Julien Grac

When I wrote Black Swan, my favorite book was Tatar Desert by Dino Buzzati. This is a special novel, the only one that I am ready to reread all my life.

Shore Opposing is a remarkably similar story about the urge to wait (instead of the "urge to hope" as I characterize Buzzati's book), but written in a more elegant language and a real writer: Buzzati was a journalist, so his prose is more pragmatic. The Opposing Shore's narrative style is laconic and precise, it has texture, rich details, and a mesmerizing atmosphere.

Once you start reading, you will fall in love with this novel. Reading it, I never tired of repeating: "This is a book."

Experiments, Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne is more of an interlocutor than a teacher. Until recently, he had a bad reputation in academia, as he did not have a scientific degree: he was an ordinary person with limited knowledge, but a great intellectual hunger. Therefore, his book is an ideal portal to the classics. She's like a guide. I never travel without a volume of Experiences if I have a presentiment that I will be stuck at the airport.

Fictional Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

This is very difficult to find by definition: a literary author who thinks in abstract categories (another such author whom I read is Stanislav Lem). These are philosophical thought experiments in their purest form, which were somehow magically given a playful literary form.

Borges is a philosopher-mathematician, the first and the last. Ignore his attitude towards Latin American literature and the nonsense about his background and personal life. We must resist attempts to build it into the socio-cultural environment: Borges is as unique as possible. In his short stories, literature and philosophy are combined in a parable.

"History of Private Life", Volumes 1-5

The Annals school's approach to understanding history was based on prosaic everyday life, far from sensational historical events: who ruled, what kind of coup took place, what was the war or the geopolitical situation. Representatives of this historical direction were not interested in events that seem to be scientific topics, but in fact are the object of journalism.

The Annals methodology is more statistical, as this school examines a number of reliable facts, and not biographies of historical figures or information about wars (as if, studying our time, scientists focused on diabetes and traffic jams, and not on sensational shark attacks and plane crashes).

Instead of studying Roman history from Caesar's biography or events in Pompeii, you can learn about everyday life, laws and customs. For the past 25 years, I have been reading and rereading these five volumes.