5 Books to Make you Smarter in 2026 (No Self Help!)

So today we're going to look at five pieces of writing that will make you a smarter person. They'll reach into your brain, develop it, and build those neural networks that are crucial for intelligent and advanced thinking. And they all have something in common. And if you don't spot what it is, I'll tell you at the end. This is a jumping off, a starting point, a guide. And just like any guide, it contains only a tiny fraction of what you can discover. A guide to Madrid will offer some of the obvious places to visit, but when you're there, you will find your own favorite places, cafes, and museums. Your experiences make your trip special. And it's the same with reading. Now, to the first book. Michelle de Montaine was a French nobleman who, when almost 40, withdrew from his aristocratic responsibilities, >> I have had enough of this. >> Sat at the desk in his library and wrote. He wrote about life, ideas about death and politics and books and sadness. He explored every facet of his life through writing. He started with an idea, a thought and then through writing he took a thought journey. One idea leading to another and then another creating an intricate chain of thinking and at each link exploring what those thoughts might mean. It was introspection. Introspection on his life viewed from different perspectives. But through that it was insight and wisdom on what it means to be human. Because he wasn't sifting through the achievements or events of his life, writing allowed him to pick over the experiences of his life, place them under a microscope and examine them from different perspectives and magnifications of idleness, of liars, of quick and slow speech, of prognostications, of constancy, of sadness or sorrow. These are some of the subjects covered. Montaigne regarded his writings as attempts to understand what it is to be human. He was trying to work it out and he gave his attempts a name, a word that means to try in French, essay. And if you're thinking, "But that sounds a lot like essay," you'd be right. Montaigne invented the essay. And the first book I'm recommending is his complete essay collection. Montaigne lived in a castle. He had space and room where he could work, and that is famously the subject of the next book. Virginia Wolf was one of the most significant writers of the 20th century, primarily due to her influence on the novel with a stream of consciousness narration, but she's also well known for an essay published in 1929. It was adapted from two talks she gave at Cambridge University and starts with declaring the subject of the talk, women and fiction. From there, it develops into an exploration of why fewer women have produced fewer works of great art than men. The conclusion is presented on page one of a 100page essay. Wolf says that the reason is because throughout history, women have not had access to what Montaigne needed to create his art, a room of one's own and money. After the conclusion comes the thought processes that led to it. And it is those thoughts, the stream of consciousness captured on the page where the beauty of this work lies. It starts with her imagining an afternoon in an Oxbridge college where she has a lunch. And we notice how sexism and misogyny is part of the infrastructure of life. small inequalities, not being able to walk on the grass or into the library, and she ponders how they came about. The story moves between Oxbridge and the British Museum, and the thoughts go deeper. Where are the missing works of art by women? Why don't they exist? Why isn't there a female Shakespeare? She then asks, "What if Shakespeare had had a sister just as talented with the same upbringing as her brother? What would have happened to her? Could she have created the fine collection of work produced by her brother?" And no is the conclusion because intellectual freedom depends on material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom and women have always been poor. Not for 200 years merely. But from the beginning of time, women had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women then have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. This is a masterclass in thinking and seeing thoughts transcribed onto the page, which is a skill the next writer mastered early in her career. You've probably heard of Zadeie Smith. She burst into the literary world in the year 2000 with her debut novel, White Teeth, and is one of the most famous writers of the 21st century. And what do good writers do? Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences, and pay attention to the world. And that's what I like about this next book. where previous ones send us wisdom from era's past. In Feelf free, Smith writes about the everyday, her experiences of gentrification in London, film reviews, the similarities between dancing and writing, Justin Bieber and fame, where she reflects that all living is meeting. But for Bieber, all meetings with others have in one sense already happened. She holds a camera up to the world and shows us the images after they've been filtered through her mind, seizing the baton from Montaigne and taking us on her own thought journey. Whether or not you agree, engaging with her ideas makes your brain work harder, forcing you to select the nuance from the generality. Examine it and see her perspective. She'll show you a view of life that you probably haven't considered. As your eye moves over the sentences and you see the beauty of thoughts crafted into words, it might create in you a desire to be able to do the same. And the next book could help with that. The story is a true one and it happened to me or rather I witnessed it about a year ago. And that sentence itself illustrates part of the fascinating difficulty of talking about story. The story of course didn't happen. The events happened. The story happened later when I picked out certain of the events and told them. And I've told them several times since because I think they're fascinating. But tonight I'm going to think about the implications of them in a more coherent way. Philip Pullman is famous for the children's trilogy His Dark Materials, but that's not one of today's recommendations, although it's definitely worth reading. In 2017, he released Demon Voices, a collection of essays, many, but not all of them on the craft of writing. Others on the arts, more generally, science, music, and literature. That quote is from a talk which became an essay called Let's Write It in Red. Pullman starts by telling the story of a train trip he took where he overheard two bored young children writing a story together. This is the inciting incident for him to examine storytelling, the craft, what stories must have, the rules of the story and story world, how the form affects the content, and which is more important, and why. From here, Pullman grasps our hands and leads us around the world of good storytelling. With each step, he points out something new, something we probably hadn't spotted. The similarities between writing and film via Tarantino and Trollup, what an essay on puppets and puppetry can teach us about writing, and why some sentence should be written in red. It's not just the wisdom or the writing that I enjoy when reading this book. It's the references to other works. Pullman is well read and has built up his knowledge over a lifetime of writing. He's keen to share books and essays that are useful to him. Many of the books on my shelves are there because I discovered them in one of his essays and I'm grateful for that. My school education was poor. Teachers concentrated only on the curriculum and the sparks of curiosity didn't burn in my mind. So I never learned much about philosophy and thinkers. Historic figures whose ideas might have changed society, politics and the world. I knew nothing about Russo or Benam or Schmidt or nature. And that's why I love this last book by David Runseman, A History of Ideas. Here, Runesman, who's a professor of politics at Cambridge, has written a collection of essays about thinkers and philosophers. He tells the story of how their lives shaped their ideas, what those ideas were, and their significance. It's not a dry academic text. The essays have a narrative to them, inspiring you to discover more about each person. I hadn't heard of Frederick Douglas, the enslaved man who managed to escape his literal shackles. He taught himself to read and became a brilliant writer and speaker. His writing was admired and then feared by Charles Dickens. Douglas played a huge and influential role in the emancipation movement and runs tells the story of his life and legacy. What did all those books have in common? I'm sure you noticed. They're all essay collections. This video is sponsored by Data Impulse, a residential proxy provider that helps you stay private online. Did you know that every time you go online, you're giving away your IP address? That's kind of your home's digital ID. It reveals your location and gets logged by websites, advertisers, and pretty much anyone tracking your activity. And you may not want to give all that information away just by clicking on a link. That's where residential proxies come into play. Instead of visiting a site with your own IP, your traffic gets rooted through a real household internet connection somewhere else in the world. From the point of view of the website, you just look like a regular user in that location, not a VPN server that's easy to detect and block. 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For only $1, you can claim a 1GB Residential proxy from DataImpulse! https://bit.ly/41w5IPD I spent 2025 trying to read more. These books were some of the best I read. You'll enjoy them and they'll make you think. Here I reveal them and talk about why you'll like them. I have a Substack where I post (occasionally!) about insights and thoughts on learning. It's free http://gilesknowledge.substack.com/ Learn How to Learn - My new course on learning will teach you the most effective evidence based learning techniques and practices. Sign up here: https://courses.giles.how/offers/kUVqktk5 And if you'd like to support my on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/gilesmcmullen Chapters 00:00 Introduction 00:33 Book 1 01:58 Book 2 03:55 Book 3 05:03 Book 4 06:50 Book 5 07:54 Data Impulse Ad Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC68KSmHePPePCjW4v57VPQg/join 📱 Social Media https://www.instagram.com/gilesmcmullen/ https://twitter.com/GilesMcMullen 👌 SUBSCRIBE to ME!👌 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC68KSmHePPePCjW4v57VPQg?sub_confirmation=1