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Lindy Book - Find the best books of all time

You don't want to waste your time reading the wrong books? Books which are lindy will be also relevant in twenty years. Time to read and reread them.

Here you will find a book database with minimal noise. The books featured on this site belong to the lindy category and are selected according to these heuristics. They are written by authors with a high degree of erudition or by practitioners with skin in the game.


1313 books

literary form | topic | target audience | skills

Browse the full list

Click below to get to the full book list sorted by different categories. It includes essays, aphorisms, history books and scientific literature.

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inspire | entertain | learn | question

Why do you want to read?

People are reading books for different reasons. Some want to learn something, others are looking for inspiration or entertainment. The following overview shows books belonging to one of these categories.

find your lindy book


region | city | country

Lindy Book Places

Some books are attached to a certain geographical area. Find out about the places that interest you the most.

find your lindy book


book title

Lindy Book Sources

What where the books your favorite author got their inspriration from? The following overview shows the paths books went through: which books influenced authors and which other authors did they influence with their ideas.

find your lindy book


age | skin in the game | erudition | path emergence

What is a lindy book?

Nassim Taleb coined the idea of the lindy filter as an absorbing barrier. The two main absorbing barriers for books are the author and the topic about which the book is written. There are timeless topics and topics that attract attention in the short term but become irrelevant in the long term. Additionally, the author's findings may become obsolete because he or she does not have Skin in the Game or lacks erudition.

Read more about the lindy effect.


Some attributes to avoid

In order to decide if a book is lindy or not, you can look at different attributes of its content. Here is a list with some characteristics, which may point to an absorbing barrier.

  • Buzzwords
  • References to poor sources (especially from the fields of psychology, sociology, or economics)
  • Very predictable table of contents
  • Non-lindy topic (current trends)

Lindy Book Club

Join the Lindy Book Club and discuss your favorite lindy books.

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LindyBook Lifetime Book Listings

You are a writer and want your book displayed among classic books on lindybook.com? Learn here about lifetime book listings

Selected Book Lists


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