Machiavelli learned them, as this book inspired The Prince. There are so many great lessons in here and I wish more people would read it.
His greatest book is about the latter, it’s the best biography written of Cyrus the Great (aka the father of human rights). For whatever reason, his work is not nearly as famous, even though it is far more applicable. Xenophon, like Plato, was a student of Socrates. Cyropaedia (a more accessible translation can be found in Xenophon’s Cyrus The Great: The Arts of Leadership and War ) Put down your David Foster Wallace and pick up one of these. Sure, you might have heard of a few of them (in which case, consider yourself part of the minority) but far too many people haven’t. They are all great pieces of literature or learning and at the same time, mostly unknown. Which is why I put together the list of books below in their rough historical order.
Humble yourself to think that our grasp of the lists of the “best” of these books will always miss more than it captures. Memoirs, histories, aphorisms, essays, treatises, tutorials, exposes, stories, epics–it’s all there. The Western world has been publishing books for some 3,000 years. It’s just that you have to remember for every Great Gatsby out there, there were 10 others written at the same time about the same thing that for whatever twist of cultural fate and cumulative advantage are mostly lost to us (one of the books on this list fits that definition to a T). Not to say that the books in our “canon” aren’t valuable, because they certainly are. What does following in the footsteps of everyone else get you? It gets you to exactly the same conclusions as everyone else. Reading is about insight into the human experience, about understanding. Checking off the various books from your high school curriculum, and then, perhaps the “100 Greatest Books Ever Written” is the educational equivalent of skating to where the puck is and not where it’s going. Here’s the problem with reading the books that everyone else has read.
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