The greatest books I know of
Dear S,
Readers like to tell you that reading is for smart people. What they don’t tell you is that 99.9% of all books are garbage. The overwhelming majority of writers today will be forgotten in ten years or never heard of, and most of them deserve it. Those who do eventually “make it” will distract us from better writers, probably for too much money, and probably with an ugly dustcover. So email me at letterssubscription.com and get a free ebook from me instead.
I would argue that even the writers who make it today, especially in non-fiction, aren’t writers anyway. They’re talkers. They have an interesting point or two, maybe, but they lack the real style and genius that comes to you in bed at 2 in the morning after you had an argument and it didn’t go the way you wanted and now you need a time machine.
Writing is the time machine. It puts you outside the immediacy and anxiety of the moment so you that you can be a better “you” than you generally are in real time. Since watching and listening are cheaper and easier than reading, prose needs to be writing at least every couple of paragraphs or it’ll waste people’s time and they’ll give up on reading, as most Americans already have. It’s not the average man’s fault he can’t write this way. It’s his fault that he doesn’t seek out and share people who can.
As such I compiled a list of my favorite books and writers of all time. These are the greatest thinkers I’ve ever read and they made me think hard and laugh and fume; and they all combined beauty with strength: not just prose that sparkled, but that felt muscular, and made you struggle with it, and fed your soul — like you were claiming your birthright as a human being. You can feel noble while reading them because they are noble, even when they’re wrong. In a few instances you feel noble because they’re wrong; and the judge inside you stands tall and defiant, ready to knock them down.
By the end of a good book you should be in love with multiple good ideas and at least one more person. I don’t trust any book that’s about a single subject — say, Moby Dick, which reviewers say is “about obsession.” A great book leaves you with so many beautiful ideas and sentences that you have to read it again because you forgot about most of them. It’s something you want to come back to, and you want to bring others along too, but when they ask you what it’s about you can’t quite explain it. Just please try it. And in today’s literary world, an already-bought world where the gates are manned by half-wits and feminists and race-traitors and perverts, the main way you hear about a great book is off the main track, by back-alley wisemen and street-corner evangelists. Especially in non-fiction.
So I’m an evangelist and I’m handing you my list. Most of these authors are dead because most generations can’t rise to their level. But if we can’t make them we can at least always go back to them and steal from them. To be really dynamic you have to be a conservative. The present is a flood of the sub-standard. The future is full of genius, but it’s only sprinkled here and there over time. The past is an ocean of big ideas and all kinds of writers; and if you don’t know where to look, you’ll get lost and bored and probably drown. So I’m not throwing you a life-preserver. I’m here to pick you up on a steamship. It's up to you to take the ladder.
Non-fiction. (The most important stuff)
C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, God in the Dock, The Abolition of Man, etc. Solid prose, deep thoughts.
G.K. Chesterton. Heretics, The Everlasting Man, What’s Wrong With the World, The Defendant, and Varied Types. This man is so full of beautiful sentences and profound ideas that you won’t be able to explain him to anybody; and, in fact, anybody who tries fails. Whole collection on Kindle for cheap.
Edmund Burke. Get his hardcover selection from Everyman, but pick anything, really: the guy is a genius. He’s a bit long-winded on his most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, so if you get bored, move on to something else. But this is the best arguing in the best language I’ve ever seen. Big heart. Great mind. Kindle version for cheap.
Samuel Johnson. The Rambler. The densest and wisest essays ever written. Difficult reading, but unassailable. Make sure to skip the essays that begin with To the Rambler. Also available on Kindle for cheap.
Montaigne. Essays. This Renaissance-era Frenchman will tell you how to get a friend and whether to kill yourself in the best way possible. Very personal. Get the Donald Frame translation, as the others are extremely difficult.
Macaulay. The History of England, Critical and Historical Essays. The best historian of all time. Great storytelling with piercing social and political analysis. Complete works for a couple bucks.
H.L. Mencken. First Chrestomathy, Second Chrestomathy, Prejudices volumes one, two and three. Fun writing — a rotten cynic with a biting sense of humor. Pokes fun at all our pretensions. Don’t be like him, but at least laugh with him.
Ayn Rand. The only woman listed here, and manlier than most of the men. Almost all her non-fiction is good, and her analysis of modern society will make you angry: The Virtue of Selfishness, For the New Intellectual, Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, Philosophy: Who Needs It, The Return of the Primitive.
The Federalist. Nobody ever wrote better political philosophy in better language.
Edward Gibbon. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Perfect cross between literature and history and philosophy. Cheap on Kindle.
Plato. The Republic, The Trial and Death of Socrates, Gorgias. Plato isn’t a theory. He shows brilliant men battling out many theories we fight over today. Not a book, but a school. Complete works dirt cheap on Kindle.
Orwell. The Essays. Most of us know him for Animal Farm and 1984, but the essays flesh out a lot of his ideas in solid prose. And he had a lot of ideas.
Plutarch. Any of the Penguin translations: The Age of Alexander, The Fall of the Roman Republic, The Makers of Rome, The Rise and Fall of Athens, On Sparta. A wisdom philosopher writes biographies of famous Greeks and Romans. Nobody ever did those eras better.
Schopenhauer. The Wisdom of Life, Studies in Pessimism, Counsels and Maxims, Essays, The Art of Controversy, etc. The greatest pessimist. Complete works cheap on Kindle.
Francis Bacon. Essays, The New Organon. The essays are short and colorful and dense. Complete works for cheap on Kindle.
Eric Hoffer. The True Believer. A profound, witty treatise on what makes people join crazy causes. So many great sentences.
Tocqueville. Democracy in America, The Old Regime and Revolution. Penetrating social analysis in brilliant language. Lots of food for thought.
Thomas Paine. Common Sense. Possibly the most epigrammatic prose in English History.
Seneca. The most readable stoic. Fun, profound letters in beautiful prose. Still relevant, like St Paul. The Gummere translation is cheaper, but the Long translation will make him come alive. Fork out the money for this one.
Ta-Nehisi Coates. Between the World and Me, We Were Eight Years in Power. These aren’t some woke books. These are the woke books. I disagree with a lot of his conclusions, but he gets you there in powerful prose and a lot of interesting ideas. Trust me, it’s a read.
Theodore Dalrymple. Our Culture (What’s Left of It), Life at the Bottom. Probably the only great conservative writer of the 2000’s. A clinical psychologist dealing with the refuse of humanity. Great prose, many deep thoughts on many subjects.
The Bible. If you only read one book on this list, make it the Bible. I put it here last but you need to pick it up first. Buy two or three translations (I prefer the NKJV and NIV) and read it cover to cover, over and over. This isn’t just a common culture or a philosophy class — these are words of life and to avoid them is worse than suicide.
Bite-sized sagery.
Every man needs wisdom as a snack — to pick up a book of sayings and aphorisms that blow his mind and lift his soul when he only has five minutes to spare. These are the best I’ve found.
Rochefoucauld. The epigrams and sayings. A profound psychologist before we invented psychology.
Benjamin Franklin. Poor Richard’s Almanack. Dense wisdom in fun style. I'd also pick up his autobiography just for fun — it’s a great read.
Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Beware of this one: if you don’t get the Kochon translation it's a lousy read.
Pascal. Pensees. Some of the best bite-sized ideas you’ll ever read about man and society and government. Skip the apologetics. Ebook is free on Amazon.
Thich Nhat Hanh. Pocketbook. Reinvent your entire vibe and reclaim your life from the garbage pail. Not a Buddhist? Who cares! Profuse with life-hacks to enjoy the existence God blessed you with.
To learn how to write.
The books above are to teach you how to think. The books below are to teach you how to be fun — because nobody cares what you know if you put them to sleep or you brush them the wrong way. Below you'll find sparkling prose, top-notch delivery and even some jokes: not just the soul-building stuff, but the snake-charming stuff. These are books I’ve read that I gave me a really good time.
Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath. Ignore the complaints about left-wing propaganda. It’s a meaty, deep, and muscular book.
Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere’s Fan. Probably the wittiest things you’ll ever read. Pure fun from start to finish. The BBC put out a really great radio collection on audible.
Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. The most profound and beautiful novel I’ll probably ever read. Maude translation is the easiest, and if you’re doing audiobooks, make sure to get narration by David Horovitch. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories features the greatest short story I've ever read — The Kreutzer Sonata.
James S.A. Corey. Leviathan Wakes. Like Tolstoy, Corey has a knack for painting real people in relevant situations; and this first book in The Expanse Series is so good and deep and true that only a grown man can appreciate it. A top-notch sci-fi adventure that’s too fun to read and hard to put down.
Dickens. I started out begrudgingly with Oliver Twist, but it was so good only a few chapters in that I repented of my bad attitude and bought all his other books too. Great writing, expansive vocabulary, sharp wit, lots of jokes, and a heavy dose of humanity. If you're even moderately intelligent, Dickens is a must-read.
Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hell’s Angels, The Great Shark Hunt. Always a beautiful trainwreck.
Nora Ephron. Heartburn, Crazy Salad, I Feel Bad About My Neck. What? Nora Ephron? The 1970's Jewish feminist? Yes: sparkling, flowing prose — and not just brutally honest, but one of the greatest comedians I've ever read. Ephron can tell you heartbreaking stories and have you laughing out loud. Like Thompson, not to be imitated in real life — just on paper.
E.B. White. Writings from the New Yorker, On Democracy. Beautiful, bite-sized thoughts in manly English.
P.J. O’Rourke. Holidays in Hell, Republican Party Reptile, Give War a Chance — I also made sure Eat the Rich and All The Trouble in the World are on my “favorites” shelves, even though I haven’t read them. P.J. O’Rourke is the funniest man on this list, easily, and you can’t have an education if you don't know how a good joke is written. Dirty and still upright, somehow.
David Hackworth. About Face. Killer war memoir about hardship, leadership, personal growth under fire, and the decline of the U.S. military. “There are bold soldiers and there are old soldiers, but there are no old, bold soldiers.” This is non-fiction every man should read, but I couldn’t class it with C.S. Lewis and Samuel Johnson.
Michael Herr. Dispatches. It’s a negative Vietnam memoir, but the writing here is unbelievable. Go for the style more than the subject.
David Foster Wallace. Consider the Lobster. One of the best essayists Gen X ever gave us. Funny, sad, gross, brilliant.
Evelyn Waugh. Decline and Fall is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read and its prose is so good I bought Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honor Trilogy. Beware: extremely racist characters. Despite this, the cleanest author of the seven here.
James Baldwin. Collected essays (start with The Fire Next Time). The patron-saint writer of the Civil Rights Movement. I’m not asking you to agree with him: I’m asking you to wrestle with him.
Talkers.
That last section was full of style but not so much the fundamental substance. Last it might be asked, are there any books by talkers I might recommend — of substance without the style? Absolutely — and if you’re in the mood for a straightforward plain-English book with no frills but some really fun ideas, I’d send you to the following.
John Burke. Imagine Heaven. The most important non-literary book I’ve ever read. A cataloguing of near-death experiences which will change your whole life immeasurably. Responsible (alongside God Himself) for my conversion back to Christianity.
Sebastian Junger. Tribe. A treatise on social relations and mental illness that insists we weren’t built for the modern age.
Thomas Sowell. Black Rednecks and White Liberals. The sharpest black intellectual of the past hundred years. Not a writer, but a compiler of facts and arguments.
Jonathan Haidt. The Righteous Mind. Moral psychologist looks at why people believe the way they do. Will change the way you look at do-gooders.
Ludwig Von Mises. Human Action, Socialism. The great exploder of bad economic theories. A must-read if you want to understand economics.
Mike Cernovich. Gorilla Mindset. Probably the best short way to learn how to reframe your mindset. Extremely important.
Chris Voss. Never Split the Difference. The FBI’s top hostage negotiator teaches you what he learned about arguing. Can you afford to pass this up?
Rory Miller. Facing Violence. A look at how to prepare for and deal with violence — legal and psychological ramifications included.
Jack Donovan. The Way of Men. A brutal look at why men are unhappy, and what they need (spoiler: it’s a gang).
Isabel Wilkerson. Caste. A quick overview of what black people had to go through in this country. The conclusions are insane, sometimes, but the facts are shocking.
Henry Hazlitt. Economics in One Lesson. Easy-to-read primer on how to not get conned by politicians and utopians.
F.A. Hayek. The Road to Serfdom. The most clear explanation of how socialism has to turn into fascism.
This is a daunting list, and probably too much for most people to read; but if you have to start with anything, take the Bible, the bite-sized sagery, the first fifteen of the Non-Fiction section, and Imagine Heaven. Next go to the fun list, and move on from there.
Yours,
-J
P.S. Did I miss a book you consider essential? Throw it my way in the comments section.
Also I'd add here that the books I listed, particularly in the non-fiction section, are many times "hard reads.” They were for me at first and they probably will be for you too. This is your fault, not theirs. It’s your job to bring yourself up to their level, not theirs to bring themselves down to yours.
The first time I read The Federalist I had to read some paragraphs six times before I understood them. Now I can breeze through Samuel Johnson, who is easily the hardest of the lot. If you want a beefy brain then feed yourself on steak and move some real weight. Leave the pastries and beach reads for the fat ladies.
George the Freemason had received promises of land in exchange for his service as a major to the Crown and Parliament. He was surely not alone in this regard. Now we can understand why the secessionists bargained so fiercely in Paris for the British to cede land all the way to the Mississippi.
Here's a map of an adequate proposal made by the French in 1782:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_North_America,_1782_(Life_of_William,_Earl_of_Shelburne)_(edited).jpg#mw-jump-to-license
Note well the proposed western boundary of the USA, the most pernicious and most dangerous empire in human history. The secessionists rejected that boundary, which was more than fair, and a few years later they published their new Constitution for no better reason than to strengthen their grip on land to which they had no possible legitimate claim.
One might now argue that the British, too, had no legitimate claim on "Indian Territory". Ok, fine, but then the British had no right to offer the territory to the American gangsters. Given the powerful financial interests involved in the USA since the days of Haym Solomon, the American empire looks like a racket to plunder the land for wealth needed to restore Israel to state power. (All of this is "self-evident" in a way that TJ's "Creator" is not.) So the Treaty of Paris (1783) is fraudulent, at least in part, but remember that it tacitly affirms the propriety of sedition, insurrection, and secession. This affirmation applies equally well to the USA and the UK, the successor to the Kingdom of Great Britain.
What we need to read is often a function of our thoughts. So I have other recommendations:
(1) Here's a brief commentary, both
written and spoken, on an old testament still called new: https://www.jewsforjudaism.org/knowledge/videos/six-reasons-why-jews-don-t-believe-in-jesus
(2) The 11th tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh. But before we dive into that fictional source of material which found its way into other fiction, lets read and contemplate footnotes d and i at https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+6&version=NABRE
(3) Æsop's Fables, trans. by Townsend. Probably mistranslated but still useful for knocking street stupidity out of a person. Our cultural background as slaves and our contemporary politics suggest two fables immediately:
Hercules and the Wagoner: https://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/aesop/aes013.htm
The Bitch and Her Whelps: https://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/aesop/aes262.htm
Then circle back to the first one about the excuses made by a wolf.
(4) Mishle (Proverbs) has 31 chapters. This suggests a daily reading, but not without the hazards of becoming lost again in the dangerous literature of Israelite supremacy (Ex. 19:5-6), Judean supremacy (Gen. 49:8-12), and egocentricity elevated to a supreme principle of existence (Ex. 3:14).
(5) Read mathematical proofs such as those showing the infinity of primes and the impossibility of writing √2 as a/b, where both a & b are integers. Very important to theology, esp. any which bloviates about a god and its willpower being greater than anything and everthing else. Any god which exists is no less a prisoner of laws (regularities) of existence than humans and other mortal beings.
It's by the way that Bibles give an incorrect value for π at 1 Kings 7:23 and 2 Chron. 4:2. π≠3. You would think that Nazis obsessed with the numbers 22 and 7 would have gotten a better approximation when dabbling in the occult and channeling their omniscient god(s), for π≈22/7. But no.
(6) A Brief Introduction to Eight Liberal Arts: Logic, Linguistics, Dialectics, Rhetoric, Mathematics, Cosmology (which encompasses physics & astronomy), Ethics, and Harmony.
Still unwritten, but the conceptual subtitle suggests numerous readings. As you can see, I've condensed elements of Capella's model, generalized a bit (e.g. linguistics, not grammar), added categories, and deëmphasized two aspects of music in order to suggest a broader conception of harmony.
(7) The Dhammapada (trans. by Narada with English and Pāli source). 423 verses in 26 chapters. Includes an important verse about no one, not even the buddhas, being wholly praiseworthy and without blame. Jesus the Mountebank could have avoided his grotesque suicide by meditating adequately upon the Dhammapada's condemnation of egocentricity.
(8) Artcle VII of the Constitution of the USA. Notice that it pretends to state the law on "Ratification" and "Establishment" before both ratification and establishment. Correct lawyering teaches that the source of relevant law can't be in the C itself. The preamble is another blatant fraud, for fewer than 1/2 of "the People" participated in the ordaining mentioned there, and many resisted. The preamble also implies that absolutely everyone has authority to rule. Now we have "liberals" demanding that ignorant, childish teenagers be allowed to vote. Of course, the Federalist calls no attention to these problems. And why would it have? The objects were "empire" (No. 1, 1st para.) and profiteering, such as through land speculation and financial swindles.
The picture of a vast criminal enterprise—now an existential threat to the entire Earth and its many beings—comes into better focus by scrutinizing the DoI, too. This piece of agitprop insists that we ought not to cast aside an old, familiar form of government for light and transient causes. Then it lauches into a diatribe about the alleged abuses of a single bad king. Motives included bitterness about the British actually trying to protect the interests of the "merciless Savages" to the west of the Appalachians. Consider, for instance the Royal Proclamation of 1763.