Psychology book series in reading order

by John E. Douglas

Joyce Carol Oates

180 books• 8 series

Joyce Carol Oates, born June 16, 1938, is an American writer of novels, short stories, poetry, plays and nonfiction. The catalogue holds 180 books, beginning with By the North Gate (1963) and reaching The Frenzy: Stories (2026). Oates took the National Book Award for the novel Them (1969), and later honours include two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal and the Jerusalem Prize in 2019. Black Water, What I Lived For, Blonde and the collection Lovely, Dark, Deep were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014.

John E. Douglas

20 books• 2 series

John E. Douglas is a retired FBI special agent, born in 1945, who served as a unit chief in the Bureau's Behavioral Science Unit and helped build criminal profiling in the United States. Mindhunter (1995) is the best known of 20 catalogued books, which open with the Crime Classification Manual (1992) and end with When a Killer Calls (2022). Sexual Homicide (1993), Unabomber (1996), Journey Into Darkness (1997) and The Anatomy of Motive (1999) work through serial murder investigation as case studies.

Noam Chomsky

134 books• 4 series

Noam Chomsky (Avram Noam Chomsky, born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist and social critic, sometimes called the father of modern linguistics. Chomsky helped found cognitive science, is a major figure in analytic philosophy, and holds posts as laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and institute professor emeritus at MIT. The catalogue lists 134 books, starting with Syntactic Structures (1957) and reaching The Myth of American Idealism (2024). Subjects range from generative grammar to world politics and terrorism.

Nicci French writes psychological suspense about missing persons, murder and the psychology of the people caught up in both. The Memory Game (1997) opens a catalogue of 28 titles. Frieda Klein, a psychotherapist, carries the longest series; Maud O'Connor heads a later one; and standalone novels including The Safe House, Beneath the Skin and Secret Smile fill the early years. Books median 376 pages.

Daniel Goleman

63 books• 2 series

Daniel Goleman is an American psychologist and science journalist, born 7 March 1946, who reported on the brain and behavioural sciences for The New York Times for twelve years. Goleman's 1995 book Emotional Intelligence spent a year and a half on The New York Times Best Seller list and is in print in 40 languages. Other subjects in Goleman's writing include self-deception, creativity, meditation, social and emotional learning, ecoliteracy and the Dalai Lama's vision for the future. The catalogue lists 63 books from The Meditative Mind (1977) to Optimal (2024), plus the series Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence.

Across 194 catalogued books, Danielle Steel writes contemporary romance and family drama: love stories, marriages, widowhood and the turns that reshape a life. The run starts with Going Home (1973) and continues through Celebration, with 24 Hours scheduled for 2027. Steel's catalogue also holds children's picture books, short stories and non-fiction beside the standalone novels that make up most of it.

Debbie Macomber

245 books• 35 series

Debbie Macomber, born October 22, 1948, is an American author of romance novels and contemporary women's fiction. Six Macomber novels became made-for-TV movies, and the Cedar Cove novels became a television series of the same name, with Macomber serving as executive producer on the adaptations. Macomber won the first fan-voted Quill Award for romance in 2005 and holds a RITA Award and a lifetime achievement award from the Romance Writers of America. The catalogue counts 245 books between Starlight (1983) and A Date with Santa (2026). Series include Heart of Texas, Midnight Sons, Navy, Those Manning Men, Orchard Valley and Angels Everywhere.

Margaret Atwood

89 books• 8 series

Margaret Atwood, born November 18, 1939, is a Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic and inventor. The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel from 1985, is the best-known Atwood work. Atwood's output includes 18 poetry books, 18 novels, 11 non-fiction books, nine short fiction collections, eight children's books and two graphic novels. The catalogue opens with The Circle Game (1964) and runs to Book of Lives (2025), with The Edible Woman (1969) and Surfacing (1972) along the way. Series include MaddAddam, Handmaid's Tale and Angel Catbird. Awards include two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Franz Kafka Prize and the Order of Canada.

Brene Brown

18 books• 1 series

Shame, vulnerability, courage and resilience are Brene Brown's subjects, treated as psychology and self-improvement rather than fiction. Women & Shame (2004) is the earliest catalogued title, followed by I Thought It Was Just Me (2007), Daring Greatly (2012) and Rising Strong (2015). Dare to Lead names a series within the catalogue, which runs to 18 books through Strong Ground in 2025.

Malcolm Gladwell

13 books• 1 series

Malcolm Gladwell is a British-Canadian journalist, author and public speaker, born 3 September 1963, and a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. The catalogue lists 13 books, opening with The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000) and followed by Blink (2005), Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), David and Goliath (2013), Talking to Strangers (2019) and The Bomber Mafia (2021). The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic (2026) is the newest. Gladwell's writing draws on social science research in sociology and psychology. Gladwell hosts the podcast Revisionist History, co-founded Pushkin Industries, and joined the Order of Canada in 2011.

James Baldwin

40 books• 4 series

James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 - December 1, 1987), born James Arthur Jones, was an American writer and civil rights activist whose essays, novels, plays and poems drew wide acclaim. Time magazine ranked Go Tell It on the Mountain among the top 100 English-language novels. The essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955) established Baldwin as a voice for human equality, and a 1965 debate with William Buckley became a landmark on race in the United States. Catalogued works include Giovanni's Room (1956), Another Country (1962) and The Fire Next Time (1963), with race relations and African American life as recurring subjects.

Provence made Peter Mayle's name, in travel writing about French village life, food and neighbours. The earlier work is very different: illustrated guides for children and parents, starting with 'What's Happening to Me?' (1975) and 'Where Did I Come From?' (1977), plus the Wicked Willie cartoons. Sam Levitt heads a later crime series. Fifty-four titles make up the catalogue, which closes with My Twenty-Five Years in Provence in 2018.

Mo Willems

89 books• 9 series

Mo Willems makes picture books and early readers, funny and animal-led: the Pigeon books, Elephant & Piggie, Knuffle Bunny, Cat the Cat, Unlimited Squirrels and Leonardo. Friendship and emotions are the recurring subjects, and the books are short, a median of 57 pages. Ninety catalogued titles run from 1994 through Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! (2003) and Knuffle Bunny (2004) to The Pigeon WON'T Pick a Color!, with another title scheduled for 2027.

Ayn Rand

15 books• 4 series

Ayn Rand was the pen name of Alice O'Connor, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum (1905-1982), a Russian-American novelist and philosopher who developed the philosophical system Objectivism. Rand grew up and studied in Russia before emigrating to the United States in 1926. Two early novels and two Broadway plays preceded the 1943 novel The Fountainhead, which made Rand famous, and Atlas Shrugged followed in 1957. The catalogue holds 15 books from The Night of January 16th (1936) to Ideal (2015), including Anthem (1938) and The Virtue of Selfishness (1964).

Foster care accounts for the whole of Casey Watson's catalogue: 31 books published between 2011 and 2023, drawn from therapeutic fostering in Great Britain. The run opens with The Boy No One Loved (2011) and ends with I Want My Daddy (2023). Subject headings cover foster children, abused children, foster mothers and biography. Short stories and novellas sit alongside the full-length titles. Nothing new has appeared since 2023, and the catalogue is dormant.

Kazuo Ishiguro

14 books• 2 series

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-British novelist, screenwriter, musician and short story writer, born in Nagasaki on 8 November 1954. Ishiguro moved to Britain with family in 1960, at the age of five. Ishiguro won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature; the Swedish Academy praised novels of great emotional force that expose the gulf under a false sense of connection with the world. The catalogue lists 15 titles, starting with A Pale View of Hills (1982). An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989), The Unconsoled (1995), When We Were Orphans (2000) and Never Let Me Go (2005) follow. Nocturnes appeared in 2009, and Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger is due in 2027.

John Updike

83 books• 8 series

John Updike, born March 18, 1932, was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet and critic of art and literature who died on January 27, 2009. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, one of only four writers to do so, and the output spans over twenty novels and more than twelve short-story collections, plus poetry, children's books and criticism of art and literature. The New Yorker printed hundreds of Updike stories, reviews and poems from 1954 on, and Updike wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. The catalogue lists 83 books from The Poorhouse Fair (1958) to Hoping for a Hoopoe (2020), including Rabbit, Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963). Series include Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, Henry Bech, Maples Stories and Eastwick.

Wilkie Collins

88 books

Wilkie Collins, born William Wilkie Collins on 8 January 1824 and died on 23 September 1889, was an English novelist and playwright. The Woman in White (1860) is an early sensation novel; The Moonstone (1868) set out much of what the modern detective novel came to do, and stands as an early example of the police procedural. Collins was the son of the London painter William Collins and Harriet Geddes, spent two years in Italy and France from the age of twelve, learned Italian and French there, and worked at first as a tea merchant. The catalogue holds 88 titles, from Iolani; Or, Tahiti as It Was (1840) onward, with the 1850s the heaviest decade.

Rachel Cusk

18 books• 1 series

Rachel Cusk is an English novelist, born in 1967. Motherhood, marriage, families and the inner lives of women are the standing subjects, handled in a psychological register. Cusk's 18 catalogued books run from Saving Agnes (1993) to Life of M (2026), taking in The Country Life (1997), A Life's Work (2001), The Lucky Ones (2003), Arlington Park (2006), The Bradshaw Variations (2009) and Aftermath (2012). Outline is the one named sequence in the catalogue, and the 2000s were Cusk's heaviest decade.

Mark Manson

6 books• 2 series

Mark Manson, born 9 March 1984, is an American self-help author and blogger. Three Manson books reached the New York Times bestseller list: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Everything Is F*cked (2019) and Will (2021). The catalogue lists 6 titles beginning with Models: Attract Women Through Honesty (2011), and the subjects on file include conduct of life, psychology, dating and self-realization.

Scott Cawthon

44 books• 7 series

Scott Cawthon, born June 4, 1978, is an American video game developer, writer and producer who created Five Nights at Freddy's, a horror game series that grew into a media franchise. Cawthon started out making family-friendly Christian video games and moved to horror in 2014. The catalogue lists 46 books credited to Cawthon from 2015 to 2026, starting with The Silver Eyes (2015), with a Five Nights at Freddy's Character Encyclopedia due in 2027. Listings include Fazbear Frights, Tales from the Pizzaplex, graphic novels, an interactive novel and guidebooks.

Thom Hartmann

42 books• 1 series

Thom Hartmann, born in 1951, is an American author, broadcaster and progressive political commentator. Two bodies of work sit in the catalogue: books on attention deficit disorder, from Attention Deficit Disorder (1993) through Beyond ADD (1996), Healing ADD (1998) and a complete guide to ADHD (2000); and political and historical writing, including the Hidden History series and The Last American President (2025). Hartmann has hosted The Thom Hartmann Program on syndicated radio since 2003 and presented the television show The Big Picture from 2010 to 2017. Forty-two titles are catalogued in all.

Walker Percy

14 books• 3 series

Walker Percy (May 28, 1916 to May 10, 1990) was an American novelist and a Southern Catholic literary figure. Alienation, existentialism, faith and the limits of science run through the Percy novels, several of them set in New Orleans. The Moviegoer (1961), the first, won the National Book Award for Fiction. Will Barrett and Dr. Tom More are the two series, and The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot and The Second Coming are among the novels. Percy earned an M.D. from Columbia University in 1941 after studying chemistry at Chapel Hill.

Danica McKellar is an American actress and mathematics writer. Her maths books for school students begin with Math Doesn't Suck (2007) and continue through Kiss My Math (2008), Hot X: Algebra Exposed (2009) and Girls Get Curves (2012). McKellar then moved to picture books, among them Goodnight, Numbers (2017), Bathtime Mathtime (2018), Ten Magic Butterflies (2018) and The Times Machine! (2020). The catalogue holds 11 titles and ends at Double Puppy Trouble (2022).