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.

Gay Hendricks, born 20 January 1945, is an American psychologist, writer and teacher working on personal growth, relationships and body intelligence. Hendricks is known for work on relationship enhancement and conscious breathing exercises. After a Stanford University PhD in psychology in 1974, Hendricks spent 21 years at the University of Colorado, becoming a full professor in Counseling Psychology, and founded The Hendricks Institute. Hendricks and Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks have written more than 35 books together. The catalogue lists 59 books from The Centering Book (1975) to Your Big Leap Year (2024), plus the Tenzing Norbu Mystery and Sir Errol Hyde series.

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.

Various Authors is the catalogue entry for 153 children's and family titles with no single credited writer, published between 2010 and 2025. The earliest is The Very First Easter (2010) and the most recent is A Kids Book About Masculinity (2025). Bible story retellings for young readers make up much of the list, including Jesus Feeds the Hungry, David Battles Goliath and The Beginner's Bible Book of Prayers, alongside books on parenting, education and psychology. Titles average 64 pages.

Richard Bass writes parenting guides, with 18 catalogued books from 2021 to 2025. The first is A Beginner's Guide on Parenting Children with ADHD (2021), and the newest is The Sensory Processing Handbook for Parents (2025). Other titles cover autism, oppositional defiant disorder, anger management and teen anxiety, including Parenting a Child with Autism (2022). Subjects are self-help techniques, parenting, psychology and education. Richard Bass is still publishing.

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.

Jack Canfield, born August 19, 1944, is an American author and motivational speaker. Canfield co-authored the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which has more than 250 titles and 500 million copies in print across over 40 languages. The Success Principles, written with Janet Switzer, followed in 2005. The catalogue lists 182 books from Dare to Win (1988) to Everyday Catholicism (2020), with Mark Victor Hansen co-credited on 148 and Amy Newmark on 46. Chicken Soup for the Soul appeared in 1993.

John Berger

62 books• 8 series

John Berger (5 November 1926 to 2 January 2017) was an English novelist, art critic, painter and poet who lived in France for more than 50 years. G., a novel, won the Booker Prize in 1972. Ways of Seeing, an essay on art criticism, accompanied the BBC series of that name. The catalogue lists 62 books from A Painter Of Our Time (1958) onward, including The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965), A Fortunate Man (1967) and The Moment of Cubism (1969). Into Their Labours is a listed series, and art criticism, painting, visual perception, peasants and country life appear in the subjects.

Wayne W. Dyer

47 books• 1 series

Wayne W. Dyer (May 10, 1940 - August 29, 2015) was an American self-help author and motivational speaker. Dyer completed a bachelor's degree in history and philosophy, a master's in psychology and, in 1970, an Ed.D. in guidance and counseling at Wayne State University. After working as a high school guidance counselor and running a private therapy practice, Dyer taught counselor education at St. John's University, where a literary agent's approach produced Your Erroneous Zones (1976). Success, spiritual life, meditation and self-realization appear among the subjects, and Pulling Your Own Strings (1978) and You'll See It When You Believe It (1989) are among the 47 catalogued books.

Mary McHugh's catalogue spans 23 books over 40 years, from Psychology and the New Woman (1976) to High Kicks, Hot Chocolate, and Homicides (2016). Early titles are career and advice guides such as Veterinary Medicine and Animal Care Careers and Careers in Engineering and Engineering Technology. Humour books followed, including How Not to Become a Little Old Lady and Eat This!: 365 Reasons to Stop Dieting. Happy Hoofers Mystery is the fiction series, with women dancers among the subjects.

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.