Economic History
This accessible primer gives a whistle-stop tour of the great thinkers and works, from Plato in ancient Greece, through to Adam Smith, Karl Marx, the Great Depression of the 1930s, all the way up to the 2008 Global Financial Crash. A highly recommended read, you can start with the LSE Blog Book review of it here.
Niall Kishtainy’s A Little History of Economics
His website is here.
In A Very Short Introduction to Global Economic History, Robert Allen gives a very nice tour of global economic history, which will give you a great overview of the world.
You can read it here.
The following book, The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today, by Linda Yueh is a good accessible book on some key macro- and micro-economic themes, through the lens and life of the major economists from the past who studied them. From Joseph Schumpeter (innovation), to Keynes (depressions), there is something in here for everyone - and its a great starting place to learn about the field so you can start to get a sense of what topics you enjoy. Perhaps most telling from the book is that the themes and challenges the world faced in the past, are not so dis-similar to what we face today.
Ha Joon Chang’s Economics: The User’s Guide is a very useful book for budding macroeconomists who wish to study Economics beyond A-level. The most interesting aspect I found was the analysis of different schools of economic thought - something that is almost non-existent in A-level syllabuses. If you read HJC’s book, you will get a much more interesting sense of the wider schools of thought that exist out there.