About Most Recommended Books
We're Richard and Anurag, two friends who have spent 7 years collecting the books successful people actually recommend, and putting every book series in the right order.
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Who we are
Most Recommended Books is run by the two people who started it. There's no content farm behind it: we both still review what goes on the site, and every page you read carries our names as its editors.
Richard Reis
Co-founder and editor
Software engineer who likes building products and going deep on finance and artificial intelligence. Richard kept the text file of podcast book recommendations that became MRB. Today he builds the site and the tools behind it, and reviews new recommendations, series orders and the corrections readers send in. He writes about what he learns on his site.
Anurag Ramdasan
Co-founder and editor
Anurag leads investments at 3one4 Capital and still writes code and builds apps on the side. At MRB he co-edits the site: he reviews our best-of lists and people pages, and his systematic thinking shapes what we cover next and how we keep the database accurate as it grows.
How it started
Richard loved Tim Ferriss' podcast. Near the end of most episodes, Tim asks his guests which books they have given as gifts most often, and Richard wrote every answer down in one long text file on his computer. Over time that file became the most useful reading list he owned: books that people who had built companies, won championships or written bestsellers kept coming back to.
In 2019, over one of our many conversations about books, we asked the obvious question: why keep this to ourselves? We put the list online as Most Recommended Books. There was no grand plan, just two friends who thought other readers might find it useful too.
They did. During the 2020 lockdown, with more time at home and far more readers than we expected, we turned that single list into the database it is today: people pages first, then best-of lists, complete series reading orders and book summaries. Today Most Recommended Books is read by hundreds of thousands of people a month, from more than 150 countries.
What you'll find here
The books founders, scientists, athletes and writers say shaped them, each with the quote and a link to where they said it.
Best-of lists built from expert consensus: a book needs at least two independent sources to make the cut.
Every book in a series or by an author, novellas included, in publication order, with the date we last checked it.
Chapter-by-chapter summaries that stick to what the book says, not what we think of it.
How we compile and check the data
A book recommendation is only useful if you can trust it, so accuracy comes before size. Software helps us find candidates and flag new releases; we decide what goes on the page.
- Recommendations are traced to the source. A recommendation only counts when we can point to the interview, podcast, post or article where the person said it. We show the quote and link the source next to the book.
- Lists are consensus, not opinion. We study the top expert sources for a topic, keep books that at least two independent sources recommend, and rank them by how often they appear.
- Series are checked against the author's own record. We list every book, including novellas and prequels, in verified publication order, add new releases as they are announced, and show the date each page was last updated.
- Summaries stick to the book. They condense each chapter without adding our opinion, so you can judge the ideas yourself.
The full details are on our methodology page.
How the site is funded
Most Recommended Books is free to read. When you buy a book through one of our Amazon links, we may earn a small commission as an Amazon Associate, at no extra cost to you. That is what pays for the site. It never decides what we include: a book is on a page because someone recommended it or because it belongs to the series, not because anyone paid for the spot.
We're humbled to be featured in: Forbes, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, Tim Ferriss, Hollywood Reporter, Inc, Morning Brew, Slashdot, The Next Web, Vanity Fair, Yahoo Finance
Corrections and suggestions
Readers are our best fact-checkers. Every month people write in with a missing book, a new recommendation, a wrong year or a typo, and we fix what checks out. If you spot something, tell us on our contact page or email [email protected].
Link to us
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