Books to Improve Your General Knowledge.

When you finally take a break from your intense concentration on the topics you must succeed in to be admitted to the university of your choice, you realise how little you actually know about anything else. Consider taking math, further math, physics, and chemistry at the AS level while planning to major in engineering. More formulas than you can count have been committed to memory. You already know an alphabet's worth of laws that are named after scientists from the 17th century. You've never encountered a graph that you disliked. However, after your exams are over and the summer break arrives, you realise that you haven't read anything other than a textbook in months and are confused about who the Prime Minister is.

This issue doesn't just affect aspiring engineers. All topic areas are susceptible to this excruciating level of focus. When you're in the thick of exam season, it's not a bad state to be in. What happens, though, if you make it through and decide that you'd rather be a well-rounded person who can hold a conversation about subjects unrelated to engineering? This collection of suggested reading materials includes books, magazines, and a variety of other works that will keep you informed on any subject you wish to consider.

The Economist

Weekly news publication The Economist is published in London but available all over the world. It is renowned for providing a truly global perspective of politics and economics; its specialties include articles examining issues like the political and economic repercussions of, instance, difficulties in gathering Burundi's sweet potato harvest.As a result, many people purchase the Economist without actually reading it as a declaration of their own intelligence and cosmopolitanism.

With advertisements like "I never read The Economist... management trainee aged 42" and "Stop having to remind people who you are," the magazine cultivates the perception of being read solely by the bright and accomplished. Purchasing it and really reading it is likely to prove to be a significant boost to your knowledge of underreported events of the kind we looked at in this article, in addition to the current affairs that the majority of regular newspaper readers will be aware of.

A Brief History of Time

The best-selling popular science book of all time is Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which is the first of our specific book recommendations. It examines the universe's creation and nature, and there are updated editions available for the topics where knowledge has advanced since it was initially published in 1988.

Hawking was infamously forewarned that if he inserted more equations, his readership would decrease by half, thus he only did it once. Despite Hawking's best efforts, this does not imply that the book is simple to read. Here is a sample:The grand unification energy's value is not well understood, but it must be at least a billion billion billion GeV... In order to accelerate particles to the grand unification energy, a machine would need to be as large as the Solar System, which is unlikely to be funded in the current economic environment.

Even if you have only a basic understanding of math and physics, the first three or four chapters are not too difficult to follow. After that, things get more difficult, but it's still worthwhile trying to obtain at least a basic understanding of the solutions to some of the largest challenges humanity has ever faced.

Very Short Introductions

Over 500 Very Short Introductions—books of approximately 150 pages or 35,000 words—have already been released by Oxford University Press. These books are intended to provide readers with a balanced and thorough introduction to a particular academic topic. From accounting, advertising, and African American religion to Wittgenstein, world music, and World War II, they discuss a wide range of subjects.

Since all of them were written by subject-matter experts, they were all written with the fervour and commitment of someone who genuinely loved the subject they were writing about. Additionally, reading several of them provides a pleasingly varied experience because they are written in a range of distinct styles that reflect the normal styles of the academic subjects they represent.We don't necessarily advise doing that because reading them all would cost more than £4,000 (at £8 apiece) and take a typical reader more than a thousand hours to complete. But it's worth picking up one or two on a topic you're interested in learning more about because each one contains suggestions for additional reading if you get interested and want to learn more.

Little Black Classics

'Little Black Classics' are 80 of the world's finest authors, both historical and modern, who have each written a pocket-sized, 80p book as part of Penguin Books' celebration of its 80th anniversary. Each volume is only 64 pages long and contains short tales, essays, poetry, and occasionally even portions of novels by authors like Thomas Hardy, Dante, Anton Chekhov, and Christina Rossetti.

There is even a box set if you want to own them all.The great thing about the Little Black Classics is that they give readers a taste of some of the world's best authors without being as intimidatingly long as most of their more well-known works. This is especially pertinent given that some of their authors, like Charles Dickens and Herman Melville, are included. You don't have to read a large book to acquire a feel for their subject matter and writing style. The other benefit is that you regularly come upon lesser-known literature. For instance, while Oscar Wilde's work The Picture of Dorian Gray is widely read, his short tale "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" in the Little Black Classics is lovely and virtually unread.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, disputed the idea that our economic behaviour is based on logical decision-making, which puts him in the uncommon position of having earned the Nobel Prize for Economics. His book Thinking, Fast and Slow is a fairly readable and approachable explanation of a lot of his studies.The central thesis of the book is that people think in two different ways: we make snap judgments based on instinct and emotion, and we make deliberate judgments based on reason and logic.

When Kahneman lists all the various cognitive biases that result not only from hasty, emotional thinking but also from the modes of thought that we erroneously perceive to be when we are thinking more rationally, he provides an important insight. It's worthwhile to read if you want to develop your cognitive abilities as well as your general knowledge, and the junction of psychology and economics that it symbolises is also quite fascinating.