Books like Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It

01

Fluent in 3 Months

Benny Lewis · Language

Fluent in 3 Months is Benny Lewis's argument that the main thing standing between you and a new language is not talent, age or grammar — it's your refusal to open your mouth and be bad at it.

Both dig into language learning.

02

Ultralearning

Scott Young · Self-help

Ultralearning is Scott Young's synthesis of principles drawn from his own extreme learning projects — completing MIT's four-year computer science curriculum in one year, learning four languages in a year, and other aggressive self-directed learning experiments — and from the academic research on skill acquisition and deliberate practice.

A kindred language read.

03

Make It Stick

Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger and Mark A. McDaniel · Science

Make It Stick is a book about how memory actually works, and why the study techniques most people rely on — re-reading, highlighting, massed practice — are among the least effective ways to learn.

Both dig into memory.

04

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool · Science

Peak is Anders Ericsson's definitive account of deliberate practice — the specific type of focused, feedback-driven training that, more than any other factor, determines how expert people become in demanding fields.

A kindred language read.

05

A Mind for Numbers

Barbara Oakley · Self-help

A Mind for Numbers is Barbara Oakley's guide to learning hard subjects effectively, written primarily for students struggling with mathematics and science but drawing on cognitive science principles that apply to any demanding field.

Both dig into memory.

06

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway · Memoir

A Moveable Feast is Hemingway's posthumously published account of his years in Paris during the 1920s, when he and his first wife Hadley lived cheaply in Montparnasse while he apprenticed himself to the work of becoming a writer.

Both dig into memory.

07

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Timothy Snyder · History

Bloodlands is Timothy Snyder's account of the territories between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union — principally Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states — where the two regimes' violence overlapped between 1933 and 1945.

Both dig into memory.

08

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

Susannah Cahalan · Memoir

Brain on Fire is Susannah Cahalan's account of the month she spent in a New York hospital in 2009, during which she experienced psychosis, paranoia, violent behavior, catatonia, and seizures — and was nearly committed to a psychiatric facility before a doctor correctly diagnosed her with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, a newly described autoimmune disease in which the body attacks the brain.

Both dig into memory.

09

Confessions

Saint Augustine · Philosophy

Confessions, written around 397 CE, is the spiritual autobiography of Augustine of Hippo and one of the most influential texts in Western philosophy and Christian theology.

Both dig into memory.

10

Educated: A Memoir

Tara Westover · Memoir

Educated is Tara Westover's memoir about growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and eventually earning a PhD in history from Cambridge University.

Both dig into memory.

11

Gulag: A History

Anne Applebaum · History

Anne Applebaum's Gulag is the first comprehensive English-language history of the Soviet forced labor camp system, drawing on KGB archives opened briefly after 1991, survivor memoirs, and interviews with former prisoners and guards.

Both dig into memory.

12

In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust · Literary fiction

In Search of Lost Time is a seven-volume novel published between 1913 and 1927 in which the unnamed narrator, looking back from late middle age, attempts to recover a life that has slipped away.

Both dig into memory.