Heres the problem with reading the books that everyone else has read.
It makes you more like everyone else.
Reading is about insight into the human experience, about understanding.
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What does following in the footsteps of everyone else get you?
It gets you to exactly the same conclusions as everyone else.
Not to say that the books in our canon arent valuable, because they certainly are.
The Western world has been publishing books for some 3,000 years.
Memoirs, histories, aphorisms, essays, treatises, tutorials, exposes, stories, epicsits all there.
Which is why I put together the list of books below in their rough historical order.
They are all great pieces of literature or learning and at the same time, mostly unknown.
Put down your David Foster Wallace and pick up one of these.
For whatever reason, his work is not nearly as famous, even though it is far more applicable.
Unlike Plato, Xenophon studied people.
There are so many great lessons in here and I wish more people would read it.
Machiavelli learned them, as this book inspiredThe Prince.
Some favorites: The mightiest rivers are easy to cross at their source.
Avarice is the source of its owns sorrows.
And of course, extra-applicable to this list, Many receive advice, few profit by it.
But for far too many people it is.
It simply tells you how to live a little better.
And this text survives and you have access to it today.
There are so many great lessons about craft and psychology within this book.
But this essay/book makes you think a little.
If there is one book you read about slavery in America, read this one.
Its fucking harrowing and written lucidly and articulately by the person who experienced it.
He was cut off from his family and his freedom, and even among the slaves he was different.
Too many books about the Civil War are inaccessible, with their flanking movements and war vocabulary.
This book is all people.
Its a true and vibrant snapshot of a period of American life that you cant get anywhere else.
Gun fights, brawls, consits all here.
Fascinating, peculiar and very easy to read.
Hunger is about a writer who is starving himself.
Its a vicious cycle and the book is a first-person descent into it.
The letters date back to the 1890s but feel like they could have been written in any era.
Packed with good advice.
Its not very long but it is full of really interesting strategies and anecdotes.
But despite all that, he was always smiling.
Well, the story of the fight is the story of a smile.
If ever a man won by nothing more fatiguing than a smile, Johnson won today.
12.Company Kby William March
Far and away the best book ever written about WWI.
Better thanAll Quiet on the Western FrontorGoodbye to All Thator any of the other classics.
But thats the problemWWI was awful, perhaps the most awful thing of the 21st century.
And this book is forgotten precisely because it portrays the war and its pointlessness too realistically.
We want to know, but we dont really want to know.
By all accounts, it was destined to be a classic critical novel of the American Dream.
Yet, here we are 80-90 years later: youve probably never heard of the term or the book.
Perhaps its because the biting satire of American suburban middle class life cuts deeper now than it did then.
He was also an alcoholic.
But there was no treatment for his disease.
So he checked himself into an insane asylum.
Yet all his books are out of print and hard to find.
Two of my copies are first editions from 1931 and 1942.
15.Ask the Dustby John Fante
This is the west coasts Great Gatsby.
Better than Gatsby, it is a series.
(DO NOT watch the movie version ofAsk to Dust, it is embarrassingly bad.)
In my view, Hart is unquestionably the best writer on military strategy and history.
I cant say much more than read these books.
It is such an honest and self-aware compilation of someone hell-bent on their own destruction.
Its a sad and moving but necessary read.
Most people know who he wasmostly because he died in a hail of bullets.
In fact, he lived up until the 1980s.
Just enough time to do a couple decades at Alcatraz with guys like Al Capone.
Midway through the book, Johnny writes what he calls the Unbelievers Prayer.
Its good enough to be from Epictetus or Montaigneand he was fucking 16 when he wrote it.
Its reading the book for that alone.
His next book,The Harder They Fallis about boxing and loosely based on thePrimo Carnera scandal.
I tried to do that.
And thats affected me my whole life.
Sandlin is a master and the essay is free,read it.
What an insane period of history.
The rest of the essays, which talk about Haleys unusual approach to psychotherapy are also quite good.
The (true) story is simple: man in Siberia wounds tiger while hunting to feed his family.
This is probably the single best piece of nonfiction journalism Ive ever read.
Yes, it is heavy on American history.
But guess where most of the people reading this live?
No one is saying you should skip your high school reading list.
The problem is thinking that thats enough.
Because the latter books are real.
The others keep us comfortable, even when they make us think.
I hope some of these books do that for you.
They certainly did for me.
