The Selfish Gene & The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins
Evolution is the reason we exist! Understanding how it happens and why it can lead to counterintuitive outcomes is very important. He also narrates his own audiobooks and is excellent at it.
The Blank Slate & The Better Angels of our Nature by Pinker
Both books counter much accepted wisdom. The second book, in particular, will make you think of humanity in a fundamentally different light.
The Black Swan & Fooled by Randomness by Taleb
The role of chance in everyday life! It plays a big role!
Dawkins: A lot of really interesting things in life are really weird and puzzling, such as sex. Literature and religion try to elucidate it, but fail to get to the bottom of it. The insights popularised by Dawkins really make a lot of sense of it.
Pinker: Absolutely. There is this notion that things were much better in the past. These books shred it to pieces. It's also worth looking at Pinker's Enlightenement Now, and Julian Simon's The State of the World, though that has a lot of libertarian propaganda in it. However, the statistics are sound.
Taleb: Not a huge fan of Taleb. The point about the role of chance is much better made, in my view, by Robert H. Frank in his Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.
Evolution is the reason we exist! Understanding how it happens and why it can lead to counterintuitive outcomes is very important. He also narrates his own audiobooks and is excellent at it.
The Blank Slate & The Better Angels of our Nature by Pinker
Both books counter much accepted wisdom. The second book, in particular, will make you think of humanity in a fundamentally different light.
The Black Swan & Fooled by Randomness by Taleb
The role of chance in everyday life! It plays a big role!