Jordan Peterson has recommended many books over the years to his students and online followers. Immediately below is a reading list of his most-often recommended books with short synopses, followed by a more fulsome list of books he has recommended from time-to-time (to-be-updated).
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Jordan Peterson Reading List
1. The Gulag Archipelago 
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3, Abridged)
First, you defend your homeland against the Nazis, serving as a twice-decorated soldier on the Eastern front in the criminally ill-prepared Soviet Red Army. Then, you’re arrested, humiliated, stripped of your military rank, charged under the auspices of the all-purpose Article 58 with the dissemination of “anti-Soviet propaganda,” and dragged off to Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison. There, through the bars of your cell, you watch your beloved country celebrating its victory in the Great Patriotic War. Then you’re sentenced, in absentia, to eight years of hard labor (but you got away easy; it wasn’t so long afterward that people in your position were awarded a “tenner”—and then a quarter of a century!). And fate isn’t finished with you, yet—not by any means. You develop a deadly cancer in the camp, endure the exile imposed on you after your imprisonment ends, and pass very close to death. Despite all this, you hold your head high.
– Jordan Peterson
2. Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning
It’s the best book of its type – maybe it’s the only book of its type… It’s a story about these german policemen in the early stages of WWII, and they were guys who were old enough to be raised in Germany really before the Hitlerian propaganda came out in full force… They started out by rounding up all the Jewish men between 18 and 65 and gathering them in stadiums and then shipping them off on the trains. But that isn’t where they ended. They ended in in very, very dark place. I mean these guys were going out in the field with naked pregnant women and shooting them in the back of the head by the end of their training – and what’s really interesting about that is their commander told them that they could go home at any time, so this is not one of those examples of people following orders.
– Jordan Peterson
3. Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
Do the Marxists have sympathy for the working class? George Orwell was interested in this question and so he wrote this book called Road the Wiggin pair which I would highly recommend it… Orwell concluded that the tweed-wearing, armchair-philosophizing, victim-identifying, pity-and-contempt-dispensing social-reformer types frequently did not like the poor, as they claimed. Instead, they just hated the rich. They disguised their resentment and jealousy with piety, sanctimony and self-righteousness.
– Jordan Peterson
4. 1984 by George Orwell
I started reading George Orwell when I was a kid – about 13 or 14 – and I read “1984” and “Animal Farm,” of course, because that’s the books that everyone starts with. And then later in my life, I became aware of how prescient George Orwell was with regards to the dangers of totalitarianism… He was one of the first intellectuals in the West to sound the alarm about what was going on especially in the Soviet Union. Orwell is definitely one of my intellectual heroes from the 20th century. He’s been a hero of mine consistently.
– Jordan Peterson
5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
I think that Aldous Huxley, when he came to write Brave New World, he had these philosophical issues he wanted to discuss. And maybe I’m inventing, maybe it wasn’t like this at all, but my impression is that he thought, “Well, it will actually be easier and more interesting and engaging instead of having these formal, logical arguments.” And instead of having these thought experiments, which philosophers love so much, why not have an entire book, which is one long thought experiment, and see where it takes me?
– Yuval Noah Harari
6. Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzche
When Nietzsche was writing beyond good and evil, he wasn’t very well and because of that he had to spend a lot of time thinking and not very much time writing. Because he was also brilliant beyond comprehension his ability to distill what he was thinking into incredibly rich phrases – and I think in some sense it’s beyond parallel. I mean often if I’m reading a book if it has any utility at I’ll mark it. Usually, I fold over the top of the page or sometimes put a yellow sticky note on it if I find a place where there’s an idea that’s worth returning to that’s particularly worth understanding – and you can’t do that with a book like Beyond Good and Evil because what ends up happening is you have to mark every sentence. And obviously marking every sentence isn’t any better than not marking any sentences at all so I guess I also might as well tell you why it is worth bothering with a book like this at all. Because it’s a very difficult book, and it’s also the sort of book that will rattle you up.
– Jordan Peterson
7. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment is the best investigation I know of, of what happens if you take the notion that there’s nothing divine about the individual seriously. Now you know most of the people I know who are deeply atheistic, and I mean I understand why they’re deeply atheistic, they haven’t contended with people like Dostoyevsky – not as far as I can tell, because I don’t see logical flaws in crime and punishment. I think he got the psychology exactly right.
– Jordan Peterson
8. Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky
One of his books, Demons, for example, describes a political scene scenario that’s not much different than the one we find herself in now, and there are these people who are possessed by rationalistic utopian atheistic ideas and they’re very powerful. They give rise to the communist revolution. Right. I mean they’re powerful ideas and his character, Stavrogin, also acts out the presupposition that human beings have no intrinsic nature and no intrinsic value. It’s another brilliant investigation and Dostoevsky prophesized, that’s what I would say, what will happen to a society if it goes down that road – and he was dead exactly accurate. It’s uncanny to read Dostoyevsky and then and then to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipeligo because one is fiction and prophecy and the second is “Hey, look, it turned out exactly the way the Dostoyevsky said it would for exactly the same reasons.” So it’s quite remarkable.
– Jordan Peterson
9. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
It’s good. It’s not very long. It’s pretty accessible. It’s deep. It’s fundamentally accurate. I would say it’s a profound book and everyone can read it. The person who wrote it, Viktor Frankl, was a psychiatrist who spent time in Auschwitz and so it’s a discussion about totalitarianism and meaning, and personal responsibility. And it’s brilliant – a very profound, meaningful, serious, uplifting book – even though it’s very very dark. It’s a great book. It’s been a best-selling book for decades because of that.
– Jordan Peterson
10. Modern Man in Search of a Soul by Carl Jung
Jung was a tremendously insightful clinician and he was a strange person. Introverted visionary, high in introversion – very very very very very high in openness, like off-the-charts. And also God only knows what his IQ was. I mean every time I read Jung, like reading Nietzsche, it’s terrifying because you know he’s so damn smart that he can think up answers to questions that you don’t even [think needed answered]. It’s not like you don’t understand the answers – it’s that you never conceptualized the damn questions. It’s really something to read someone like that right, who says, “Well, here’s a mystery.” And you think, “Wow, I never thought of that as a mystery.” And [Jung is like] “Here’s the solution.” It’s like okay that’s, that’s, that’s something.
– Jordan Peterson
11. The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
Hands down. I’m no fan of trigger warnings. Ever. But this book is shocking enough to produce seizures. I’m not joking. You’ve been warned. It’s a semi-autobiographical account of Kosinski’s post-war experiences in Eastern Europe as he wandered through the wreckage as a child.
– Jordan Peterson
12. The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang
It is certainly possible, and appears more than likely to be the case, that totalitarian states are not so much oppressive political structures forced upon innocent and otherwise benevolent subordinate individuals, as they are indubitable expressions of the general self-deceptive philosophy of the majority of the individuals comprising those states. The “totalitarian ego” is certainly capable of oppression and aggression. The self-deceptive individual is, likewise, perfectly willing to sacrifice the best in him or herself to the conveniences of the moment and, if the situation arises and the horrible act can be appropriately rationalized, to sacrifice the dangerous and irritating other to the rigid god of static belief. This is a depressing and frightening notion, but seems to be the lesson put forth in the strongest terms.
– Jordan Peterson
13. A History of Religious Ideas by Mircea Eliade (Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3)
Mircea Eliade wrote a book called A History of Religious Ideas, which I would strongly recommend. It’s a three-volume set. It’s quite readable, and it’s brilliant. It’s brilliant. I really like it.
– Jordan Peterson
