University Prep
Best Books for Super-Curricular Reading, by Subject
Not every recommended book is worth reading. This list focuses on texts that generate genuine intellectual engagement — and how to get the most out of each one.
How to Read for Super-Curricular Purposes
Reading for super-curricular purposes is not the same as reading for pleasure or reading to pass an exam. The goal is to develop genuine intellectual engagement with your field — to encounter arguments, evaluate them, disagree with them, be changed by them, and have questions left over. This means reading actively: with a pen, questioning the author's claims, following up on ideas that interest or puzzle you, and connecting what you read to other things you have read.
The test is always: could I hold a fifteen-minute conversation about this book with someone who knows the field? If the answer is no, you have not read it in the way that makes it super-curricular. Admissions tutors and interviewers will probe any book you mention. Saying "I read it and found it interesting" without being able to say what you found interesting, and why, and what question it left open, is worse than not mentioning it.
The books below are selected because they reward this kind of engagement — they make arguments that can be agreed with or challenged, they connect to live academic debates, and they naturally raise questions that a curious reader will want to investigate further.
The Emperor of All Maladies
Siddhartha Mukherjee
A biography of cancer that doubles as an account of how medical science works — ideal for understanding clinical trials, oncology, and the history of medicine.
Being Mortal
Atul Gawande
On end-of-life care, patient autonomy, and the limits of medicine. Raises questions about medical ethics that are directly relevant to interviews for medicine.
The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
Essential for understanding evolutionary biology from first principles. Read alongside critiques (Stephen Jay Gould) to understand the debate.
Bad Science
Ben Goldacre
A rigorous introduction to research methodology, clinical trials, and the ways evidence can be misrepresented. Invaluable for understanding how medicine evaluates claims.
The Wealth of Nations (selected chapters)
Adam Smith
Not the whole book — read Book I on the division of labour and the theory of value. Understanding Smith's actual argument is more impressive than citing him.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
A comprehensive account of behavioural economics and cognitive biases. Raises important questions about the assumptions of rational agent models.
The Globalization Paradox
Dani Rodrik
A sophisticated argument about the political economy of global integration — accessible and directly relevant to macroeconomics, trade, and policy questions.
Misbehaving
Richard Thaler
The story of behavioural economics from one of its founders. Read alongside standard microeconomic theory to understand what's at stake.
The Concept of Law
H.L.A. Hart
The foundational text in analytical jurisprudence. Essential for understanding what law is and how it relates to morality — core material for any law interview.
The Rule of Law
Tom Bingham
An accessible account of what the rule of law means and why it matters. Written by a former Lord Chief Justice and highly readable.
Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
Michael Sandel
A survey of competing theories of justice — useful for developing the normative reasoning that law interviews test.
Letters to a Law Student
Nicholas McBride
Practical and intellectual preparation for studying law at university, with substantial content on legal reasoning.
What Is History?
E.H. Carr
The essential text on historical methodology and the historian's relationship to evidence. Required reading for understanding historiography.
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt
A demanding but rewarding analysis of the political conditions that produce totalitarian regimes. Demonstrates what serious historical and political analysis looks like.
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond
A large-scale argument about why some civilisations developed faster than others. Read critically — the argument is contested and engaging with its weaknesses is useful.
The Sleepwalkers
Christopher Clark
A revisionist account of the origins of the First World War that demonstrates how historians engage with contested questions and primary sources.
Sophie's World
Jostein Gaarder
An accessible entry to the history of philosophy. Use it as a map to identify which philosophers and problems interest you, then read them directly.
The Republic (selected books)
Plato
Books I and IV–IX are the most relevant. The arguments about justice and the form of the ideal state are still worth engaging with critically.
A Theory of Justice
John Rawls
Start with the Preface and Chapter 1. The veil of ignorance thought experiment is one of the most discussed ideas in political philosophy and PPE.
Reasons and Persons
Derek Parfit
Demanding but important — the sections on personal identity and the non-identity problem raise questions that are genuinely puzzling and directly useful for ethics discussions.
The Dream Machine
M. Mitchell Waldrop
A biography of J.C.R. Licklider and the history of computing — essential context for understanding what the internet and modern computing were designed to be.
Human Compatible
Stuart Russell
The clearest account of why AI alignment is a genuine problem and how to think about it. Directly relevant to AI ethics, policy, and technical development.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter
A deep exploration of self-reference, recursion, and the foundations of mathematics and computer science. Demanding but intellectually transformative.
The Alignment Problem
Brian Christian
An accessible account of the technical and ethical challenges in building AI systems that do what we actually want. Well-sourced and current.
Beyond Books: Engaging with the Primary Literature
The books above are entry points. The most impressive applicants — those who genuinely distinguish themselves at Oxbridge interviews and in competitive personal statements — have moved beyond popular and accessible texts and engaged with the primary academic literature: peer-reviewed papers, scholarly monographs, and original academic arguments.
This is more accessible than it sounds. Google Scholar allows free access to many papers directly. ArXiv hosts preprints in physics, mathematics, and computer science. PubMed Central provides free access to biomedical research. SSRN makes economics and law papers freely available. A student who has read three or four academic papers in their field carefully — not skimmed, but actually read and thought about — is operating at a level that most applicants have not reached.
Reading academic papers requires different skills from reading books. Learning to read an abstract, identify the research question, understand the methodology, evaluate the evidence, and assess the conclusions is itself an academic skill. It is also, not coincidentally, exactly what a first-year university student needs to be able to do. Students who develop this ability before university arrive already equipped for the work that will be expected of them.
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