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Comment by WillAdams | Hacker News Reader

For my part, one of the most striking things which I recall from my youth was reading Dumas' _The Count of Monte Cristo_ and the Abbé Faria contending that everything a gentleman needed to make his way in life was contained in less than 100 books --- which he had memorized the content of, and could impart to the young Edmond Dantes.

A naïve younger me tried to brute force this by reading one non-fiction book from each major section of the Dewey Decimal system catalog, but was stymied by the paucity of a high school library in a county in the second smallest tax base in the state....

Since then, I've actually been trying to put that list together (and lightly updating it for availability from Project Gutenberg/Librivox).

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...

Suggestions and comments and recommendations welcome.

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I am about a quarter of the way through Modern Library’s top 100 and it has been a worthwhile journey. It is “just” literary fiction but it is among the best humanity has produced. I have learned so much about the human condition, my ability to articulate ideas has improved tremendously, and I feel like my mind has been “freed from the tyranny of the present” (to quote Cicero).

https://sites.prh.com/modern-library-top-100

Seeing that I am on HN and can unleash unrestrained pedantry I wish to ask where Cicero actually writes that because I cannot find it?

The full quote is allegedly "The purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present." ...I picked it up in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, but he didn't cite which work it came from. Goodreads attributes it to "Selected Works".

The Roman version of "trust me bro"

I thought Mark Twain said that. /ducks

I dodn't think it's a quote; more a paraphrase of: https://www.loebclassics.com/view/marcus_tullius_cicero-orat...

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

That’s a very … liberal interpretation.

I find it fascinating how many interesting quotes turn out to be fabrications of unknown origin.

I suspect what happened here (and possibly in other similar cases) is that some author glossed a body of work in a way that made sense in context, and others mistook it as a quotation. It's as if I remarked that Isaac Asimov said a lot of prescient things about robots, and people saw that and started quoting it:

> A lot of prescient things about robots.

> -- Issac Asimov

would have loved to see some non native English speaking authors on the list. (instead of listing some authors twice - as great as they are). There were 2 Russians that stood out but no Camus, Feuchtwanger, Remarque, Musil, Borges, ...

Yes, it's kind of a strange slice - we get Faulkner three times and we get Joseph Conrad no fewer than four times(!), but not a single book from Dostoevsky or Tolstoy? No Bulgakov, no Turgenev? No Flaubert?

Lermontov's 'Hero of Our Time' is probably my favorite Russian novel, and I say that as someone who absolutely adores Dostoevsky. It still feels relevant and modern.

FWIW, I would argue that Tolstoy is extremely overrated as a writer (but agree with your other suggestions).

English was Joseph Conrad's third language.

Or just rename the list "Top 100 Novels in the English Language".

I've read more than half of those, and every time I see that list, I really wish that almost every book would be paired w/ one which enhances/comments on either the book or that same theme.

e.g., _Kim_ by Rudyard Kipling should be paired w/ Robert Heinlein's _Citizen of the Galaxy_, or _The Grapes of Wrath_, which was cribbed from Sanora Babb's notes w/o permission should be paired w/ her _Whose Names Are Unknown_:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1197158.Whose_Names_Are_...

I really like this idea. I didn't even know about Whose Names Are Unknown... added it to the queue.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42133491

I’m not a literary scholar, but this seems like a great use case for ChatGPT. I’ve used it for music explorations and found it surprisingly good at providing context and interesting suggestions. I tried your idea with The Grapes of Wrath and it surfaced Whose Names Are Unknown, with a thoughtful explanation. Obviously it’s qualitative, but you can shape the prompt to reflect your taste and still get some worthwhile discoveries.

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/68150654-bebc-8010-ad4b-050f5b39d4...

I would also suggest the childrens books Cheaper by the Dozen, The Musicians of Brennan, Morris' Disappearing Bag and The Red Badge of Courage.

I'd maybe throw in some of the little house on the prairie books as well, especially the one where they all almost froze to death.

I think being able to appreciate books as an adult is pretty contingent on being exposed to good books as a youth.

Anyone who puts "Ulysses" at the top of a best books list is suffering from expertitis. Ulysses has a massive user experience problem. It's hard. Dense, convoluted, absurd. If your friend asks you for a good book, you don't recommend it. The only time you do is when your college English major, or advanced highschooler, who is bored with the tropes of even very good novels wants to stretch themselves. Then you hand them this book.

I agree, and in fact I did not start with Ulysses and do not recommend people do. I read 2-10 on the list, then Hamlet, then Ulysses - which I feel mostly prepared me for it. I did love it, but it is not an easy read, and took me the better part of a month to get through.

Why are you conflating "best" with "what you would recommend a friend"?

Many of the best things in life are hard. And you wouldn't necessarily recommend them to a friend.

When you consider specific domains, often the best instances of X tend to be harder versions of X. Or, when people become familiar with many instances of X they seek out the "best" instances of X. Its natural that those best instances would be difficult for people unfamiliar with the domain.

"Many of the best things in life are hard. And you wouldn't necessarily recommend them to a friend."

Yup.

How did you find Ulysses, was it a good read for you?

>Or, when people become familiar with many instances of X they seek out the "best" instances of X

I think you're saying the same thing as the GP? Ulysses is a book for lit nerds, which I suppose the Modern Library board were.

Looking at the list, there's hardly any books from after mid 20th century. That makes me think that the board comprised primarily old lit nerds, who stopped reading long before voting. The list is also super ethno centric, which makes me more dubious still about the claims for "best" anything.

According to the NYT[1], between 1950 and 2018 95% of published English-language fiction authors were white. That Top 100 Novel list contains at least 3 black authors, Ellison, Wright, and Baldwin. Considering that the percentage of black authors for the period 1900-2000 was probably even less than for 1950-2000, and that there are actually only 75 unique authors in that list, on its face I don't see the bias by the voters. The bias is in the disproportionate share of published white authors.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/11/opinion/cultu...

Yes, this list reads like one a Midwestern high schooler would go through to impress his failed literature teacher, who will write him a nice recommendation letter for the ultra-conformist university of his dreams, dooming him to 25 years of debt and a miserable life working as a consultant

Yes, but now tell us how you really feel.

> Ulysses has a massive user experience problem

Seems this book is not intended for you then!

> It's hard. Dense, convoluted, absurd.

These are a few of my favorite things!

Exactly. This is extremely boring piece of writing.

There's definitely some of that going on.

I've gotten the same feeling watching old movies a second time.

I would watch a movie when I was young, and it just came out. It would be "modern", maybe state of the art, and it would have an impact on me. But I was young, and easily impressed by the cliche or trite.

And then I would watch the same movie decades later. Times changed, the art has changed, casting, pacing, effects have all advanced to support the storytelling. And I am older, a different person, and maybe more aware of what is "timeless" with a little more experience under my belt.

It might be a historical deep dive, but compared to the available material our present has, some older media should drop off the list.

Expertitis is not a thing and your criticism is based merely on public perception of the book and not the book itself. In case it wasn’t clear, I disagree completely: Ulysses is very worthy of the honor. It is as approachable as it is lofty.

I have never heard that book described as approachable.

It’s not, really. If you try to read it you will fail miserably with a completely unenjoyable experience. It’s kind of like The Bible or The Odyssey, anyone who recommends it is out of touch.

If you think Ulysses is dense, convoluted and absurd, try Finnegans Wake.

I prefer The Ginger Man to both. Glad to see it make the cut.

I’ve read 53 of the fiction, 10 of the non-fiction (which tracks with my being an English major).

What an awful list!

And I say that as a Modern Literature major who has read a lot on that list. FAULKNER IS A TERRIBLE WRITER! And while James Joyce and some of the others are good writers, they don't deserve multiple entries in the top 100.

It's clear this list is really "5 librarians personal favorites."

It was from a list of 440 books (possibly what Random House then had in stock) and voted on by the board members --- it's been widely criticized/commented on, see the Wikipedia article for some further links on this.

Can you recommend a better one? I picked it at random when I wanted to explore literature, but it seemed to be cited often enough.

One that does not omit Dostoevsky or García Marquez over mediocre books in the English language would be a good start.

Again, this list is from Random House, a major American English-language book publisher.

My suggestion would be to start with the authors nominated for a Nobel prize for literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Lit...

Filtering by those available in readily available English translations should yield a workable list.

The sentence "FAULKNER IS A TERRIBLE WRITER" is one of the most incredible sets of words I've ever had the misfortune to lay my eyes upon.

The Sound and the Fury is an incredible piece of art with a beautifully structured narrative, in my reading of it. Why do you say he's a terrible writer in your opinion? Who would you rank higher?

I don't think this is a very good list that should call itself top 100. Maybe anglophone top 100, but even then I'd question some of the choices. I completely ignores a ton of more important works in non-English languages.

The Modern Library is a publishing imprint of Random House so it’s pretty much focused on works in English.

You inspired me to do the same. I just ordered the first five, and will continue down the list.

Out of the list, I read 8 books so far, but all of them in Czech.

Enjoy your journey!

This list is kind of strange. Firstly, it is very "anglo-saxon" oriented. It is a mixture of "Big Literature", interesting for someone who is literature student, like ULYSSES (which is at the same time a great novel and a boring as hell novel) with true gems, like Orwell or Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski with additions like Robert Graves writing, which has mostly entertainment value equal to average pseudo-documentaries from Netflix and pop stuff like Vonnegut' books (which are, at least, not boring).

Still, a lot of interesting stuff, Orwell, unfortunately, never gets old, pity Ray Bradbury was omitted, as Fahrenheit 451 is getting more and more up-to-date.

Really wish they had that list in order of difficulty - if you start with Ulysses, you're gonna have a bad time.

That's a dreadful list in my opinion. Absurdly Anglocentric (esp. Americo-centric). I'm not saying they're bad books but a really far cry from "among the best humanity has produced". Not a single south-american novel? Not a single romance language book as a matter of fact? I highly recommend you diversify your reading choices.

Open to suggestions.

Elsethread, I suggested Nobel Prize Winners --- just start at the beginning, see what is in your local library which interests you, and skip over the authors who have ceased to be relevant enough to be in the stacks.

One notable highlight, which I'm pretty sure was the first work by a Nobel Laureate I read is Herman Hesse --- I'd recommend his _Magister Ludi_ (also published as _The Glass Bead Game_)

The first flaw with any cannon: It nearly excludes women. I looked through the first half of the list. I only saw two books written by women.

"Be careful… about this reading you refer to, this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind."

- Seneca, Letters

I was surprised to learn that the temptation to read too many things was also a problem 2,000 years ago. This inspired me to work on a short list of books that I know deeply.

That sounds horrific

Sucks that the vast majority of those books were lost forever. Early Christianity was a scourge in that regard, how much culture we lost forever because of those zealots.

I didn't realize Early Christianity had a monopoly on the destruction of books? As far as I know the burning of rival civilizations has been happening for thousands of years.

I'm speaking specifically about Western classics (esp. Roman).

I would say that material decay, neglect, economic collapse, war, and changing cultural priorities played a far greater role in the loss of these texts rather than the ones lost to zealous Christians. It's just weird to single that group out when their actions represent a minority in the overall loss of these ancient texts.

Which centuries did you have in mind? In what countries were these purgings? Which authors were purged and by which sects of early Christianity?

I ask because "Early Christianity" as a period ends with the First Council of Nicea, and Christians before Nicea were (a) not at all unified and therefore had very different opinions on things like pre-Christian literature and (b) not very politically powerful and therefore unlikely to have had a major impact on book survival.

If you have specific citations for when and where these systematic and catastrophic destructions are purported to have taken place I'd love to hear it, otherwise I'm more inclined to chalk it up to "most texts don't survive from most eras for all kinds of reasons".

I'm talking about Christianity from Theodosius up until the high middle ages. So "early Christianity" is indeed not correct.

And the rest of the questions?

My understanding is that the idea that Christians destroyed vast numbers of ancient texts was heavily exaggerated by anti-Christian polemics during the Enlightenment. There were some isolated instances, but even some of those, like the Library of Alexandria, were much less significant than the polemics assumed. The Library of Alexandria had already largely fallen into ruin and disuse by the time Christians are supposed to have gotten to it, and the works left there had already been copied all over the Mediterranean anyway.

The other problem with this line is that it ignores the enormously important role that Christians had in preserving large numbers of texts. Did they selectively preserve texts while allowing others to disappear to time? Probably. But when each copy has to be transcribed by hand, it's to be expected that what survives is the stuff that the people responsible for preserving texts thought was most important.

It would be very unfair to accuse someone of burning books just because they didn't manually copy everything that had ever been written and instead only copied their favorite texts.

St John's College is known for their Great Books curriculum - the foundation of their four year program - where students read the primary text of western civilization.

It's always held a soft spot in my heart as my own experience was mostly reading derivative descriptions and the rare times when I was able to read a primary text during my coursework were always my happiest memories.

1. https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-bo...

I’ll never forget the night sjc students invited me to smoke weed and listen to some Charles Mingus.

Trying to learn Newtonian Mechanics from Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is kinda dumb though.

I certainly noticed that it was ineffective in discussing implications with the students. I found Boyle's observations far more effective in teaching science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Pri...

> Trying to learn Newtonian Mechanics from Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is kinda dumb though.

It'd be like wanting to improve your cardio health so you try to climb K2. The edition I have has 150+ pages of just introduction. You have to wade through all of that just to be able to figure out how to read the rest of the tome. It is cool, though!

Let’s be honest, trying to learn Newtonian mechanics by majoring in the humanities probably isn’t the best approach. Maybe that’s not really what the program is meant for in the first place.

I had an elective class at St. John's where we read selections from Newton's Principia (ISBN 9781888009262) together with William Blake's long poem "Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion".

The goal was not to learn how to do physics calculations, but to understand each writer's concept of reality and humanity's relationship to it. I remember that Blake really focused on the worth of actually instantiated reality, what he called "minute particulars", in contrast to Newton's abstractions:

    He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars
    General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer:
    For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars
    And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power.

Also, Newton's Principia uses Euclidian-style demonstrations to illustrate many of his points, whereas today we would use algebraic calculus. That was fun, since everyone in the room had also worked through the first book of Euclid's Elements.

Similarly, a related project is an effort to assemble a chronological list of books where the oldest text which is still valid given contemporary knowledge of the subject is listed includes Euclid's _Elements_ of course:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355?shelf=chronol...

One issue I have with modern teaching of both Math and Physics though is that they give the "correct" answer to fast which teaches the material and accelerates learning but I think it also leaves a lot of motivations for why certain decisions were come to and how which is important.

Recently I've been following long with the Distance Ladder challenge I saw on 3 blue 1 brown with Terence Tao. Going through those question is motivating because those questions are based in solving navigational problems. I fear that with the ever increasing the low friction in life we are stealing the challenge and things for people to consider to build up there problem solving ability before the curtain is pulled.

I think its also more motivating to learn considering more interesting questions especially in math. All this to say going back to the source material while not the most modern accurate physics it usually does include large amounts of motivation to explain why things are logical and what they are doing it for. To be fair I haven't read the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia but I have read other old book and wager it has similarities

Hmm but you can (an in fact do, in many physics programs) follow the historical development of theories using modern textbooks. The pedagogical value is in understanding, not exactly in wading through the archaic language and the confused early papers.

Even for modern theories like general relativity people study by textbooks written many decades after the fact, with a clear picture after things were settled, and not by Einstein's first papers :)

Absolutely but I think when people are first learning math especially they ask this question, why are we learning things like trig and or logarithms? The answer we give is usually they are important for the future math people learn. That is very uninspiring to students in my opinion (ages 12-18). While its true they will use them in the future those two things were invented to reason about the distance between the sun and the moon, the size of the earth, and other hard questions. Even doing machine tool work you'll quickly develop an appreciation for trig if you are doing any time of manual machining.

Logarithms were used percisely because they made long tedious multplication and division into simple additiona and subtraction. That's really valuable if you don't have calculators but when we don't talk about this it makes things feel arbitray. There properties don't stop being useful after we have calculators either but the motivation in my academic career was basically ignored until college (sample size of 1 :( ) but I think its something that I hear from many many people.

This is how I feel about learning street fighter. On one hand yes I can learn how to do Ed’s dream combo by watching Momochi in tournament then reading a discord message that writes it in numpad notation, but I think it’s equally important to understand what motivated him to sit in training mode and figure it out. What was he trying to achieve other than an optimal combo? What situations was he looking for answers in?

I really like this analogy thank you :) It really captures the argument but in a totally different way know what to do is not quick useful if you don't know why you are doing it. One is entirely high level of thinking.

Newton intentionally made it difficult because he didn’t want to be bothered by questions from lesser minds.

A co-worker mentioned this school when his son selected it for a visit, and I quite envy the young man the chance to attend --- I believe I got everything from their reading list --- if I missed something, let me know.

They have a graduate program available at a distance if you feel particularly drawn to their learning style. Basically covers a subset of the UG curriculum.

Yeah, I considered that --- just not an option financially --- my workplace is actually next door to a private university, and I've been considering getting a Masters in CS there, then going on to get a PhD....

I'm not sure what's the value in spending time reading obsolete scientific books. "The Fahrenheit Scale"?

Interesting that they don’t consider any eastern cultures to have produced any books worth studying.

I actually did your Dewey Decimal project: https://www.dahosek.com/category/dewey-decimal-project/ I read one book out of each “decade” of the Dewey catalog from my local library (which is reasonably well stocked). It was a bit less than the predicted 100 books since there are some gaps in both the system and the collection of my library, but it was an interesting way to discover things I didn’t know I didn’t know.

I like your idea, but it's missing any sort of practical skills (which Dantes and Faria certainly had).

What would be more interesting, IMHO, books that Cyrus Smith from The Mysterious Island had memorized.

Just from what I saw on HN, I remember Gingery books on metal workshop from scratch, and some homesteading manual from late 19th century.

The most important books are things like first aid and CPR. Or better yet a class because hands on experience beat books learning.

I love the Gingery books and they are great foundations for a hobby. However even in a end of civilization scenario we only need a small minority who knows that content who can teach the rest - that is at best, but quite likely there won't be enough industrial base to produce the aluminum needed and so you are stuck with useless knowledge. Even your 19th century homesteading tends to assume far more industrial base to make some annoyingly hard things.

Most so called practical skills are either not practical in modern civilization (there is far too much population for us all the be hunter/gathers even if we want to); or they are only practical in context of current times. I've seen how to wire your house for electric lights books from the 1920s - most of the things shown wouldn't pass code today. My house was built in 1970, and there are a lot of things that still work but there is good reason we don't allow that anymore.

Had Self-aid and buddy care when I was in the service, and became qualified and volunteered as an EMT for a while after getting out. I do have a Wilderness Survival First Aid Book on my Kindle, and I'll definitely add it to this list.

I actually had a copy of _The Metal Lathe (Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap, Volume 2)_ ages ago, and slotting in the full leatherbound edition of all 7 volumes is likewise a good fit.

Trying to focus on intellectual things --- practical skills invites the list becoming an extension of my various interests (note the extant shelves on archery and woodworking) and their various intersections, e.g.,

https://www.lumberjocks.com/showcase/archery-case-ascham-of-...

Edit: did add a first aid book, as well as the 7 volume edition of "The Gingery Books".

“The Good Life” by Helen and Scott Nearing has an excellent bibliography/citations section.

How to build stone houses, compost and farm organically, etc. A good primer on homesteading. Contains references to things like 19th century homestead manuals

I've considered adding "The Foxfire" books (which I read when I was much younger) and perhaps a text by Roy Underhill, but as noted elsethread, this is intended as an academic/social list.

Based on your interest in Tacitus and Thucydides, I might recommend the The Histories of Polybius. [1] It is absolutely mind-blowing to me that he actually witnessed the events he writes about, and how analogous it is to modern-day geopolitics.

By the way, thank you for providing your list of books - I picked up a few future reads from it.

1. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44125/44125-h/44125-h.htm

Agreed, added. Thanks!

My pleasure!

I'll assume you've run into Mortimer J. Adler's Great Works of the Western World and are familiar with the selection. For those not in the know, the 60 volume set was done by a somewhat sparse group that included many people like Isaac Asimov and William F. Buckley Jr. (what a spread there).

The thing that always made GWWW a killer collection was Adler's syntopicon to the 58 other volumes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Syntopicon

The term 'syntopicon' was coined for this effort and is essentially a way of indexing information. Like how a dictionary uses words to sort the data, and an encyclopedia uses a subject, a syntopicon uses a topic. Think 'jurisprudence of judges' and not 'African elephants'.

I've always thought that more book collections should include a syntopicon to them. With the modern AI revolution, I'd suppose that it's a lot easier to do so now, but it's still a lot of work and effort to edit the 'link table' for these things. More enjoyable though and great for giving the collector a really good grasp on the books.

Try putting in your list of books and then ask your AI of choice the help put together a syntopicon for it. Here's a (poor) example:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6815ad20-9d54-800a-853e-2517d64a15...

Interesting, I have a facsimile version of the first edition of _Roget's Thesaurus_ which orders concepts numerically, and I always wished for a reference list to match.

Agree modern indexing is great for researching terminology, and wish it could be more easily extended to concepts, but not sure modern Large Language Models with their compression/hallucinations/outright-errors are workable yet.

> reading one non-fiction book from each major section of the Dewey Decimal system catalog

This actually sounds really fun. Not so much in an optimized way, but more like just going to the library and picking a decimal heading and then just selecting a cool-looking book in that heading and reading it, then repeat.

It was.

Tried to do it again in college, but using the LoC headings, but ran out of time and graduated before running out of college/headings.

To this day, when going to the library, I try to keep this in mind when looking over the new books, and if there is one on a major/notable subject I can't recall having read a book on, grab it.

I'm sure you're familiar with the Harvard Classics (5 foot shelf) and have browsed their volumes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics

You can download them all for free here:

https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212

The Reading Guide at the bottom of the page is the best way to get into them, I think. It's a daily ~15/20 minute selection. Be aware, it's the book's page number that is referenced, not the .pdf's page number.

Very cool. I actually inherited the collection as part of my dad's library. It's almost complete, missing a few (Elizabethan dramas if I recall). My process has been to periodically pick out a volume and start reading, been doing that for years -- I'll check out the guide. May be time to introduce some methodology.

I only read great literature, classics, history books my whole life. This year (Aged 48) I decided to pepper in a "fluff" book or two. I forced myself to read something I normally wouldn't. I read "The Situation" (Jersey Shore) and Mathew Perry (Friends) "auto" biographies. I actually had some profound insights about depression and substance abuse from those two. Of course, I don't recommend you read either, but if you never read "airport fiction" or "pop biographies" it might prove interesting.

How would you characterize the differences between the two categories of books that you read?

I've come around to the idea that anything and anyone can be interesting and enriching if you approach it with the right level of curiosity.

Doesn't always play out but it adds to the spice of life when you can draw insight from places you never expected to.

There are some works from the more recent past that might add to this list:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21...

https://www.nypl.org/voices/print-publications/books-of-the-...

I wish I could experience the feeling of reading The Count of Monte Cristo again

Well, Steven Brust's _The Baron of Magister Valley_ is basically TCoMC w/ the names changed and serial numbers filed off in a fantasy setting.

Also, if you haven't read _The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo_ by Tom Reiss I'd strongly recommend that:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13330922-the-black-count

thanks for the recs!

Judging from the French movie (with Pierre Niney) I saw last year (which was awesome btw) , and my vague recollection of the book, there's lots of physical skills involved. It's not just an intellectual pursuit, but more like applied science in getting vengeance. Really fun read. Big chunk of social media is self improvement. Stumbled across this guy yesterday and actually gives pretty solid advice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYsr2jkf_3A

Point!

Added:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/803453.The_Sword_and_the...

(which I have a copy of and re-read when I was considering taking up fencing, but my wife demurred)

You might enjoy the movie "Young Sherlock Holmes" than. If you haven't seen it, great fun. And it ends in a fencing scene like Hamlet.

If your wife isn't happy to see you fencing (which I can understand) you might want to take a look at archery instead? And add this book (which impressed me during my teenage years) to your reading list:

Zen in the Art of Archery - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_in_the_Art_of_Archery

It's a long story, but my wife was fencing at the time.

As regards archery, it's long been an interest of mine:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...

One of my personal favorites, but a very difficult read: _Summa Technologiae_ by Stanislaw Lem. It's so difficult I haven't actually finished it. It's remarkably dense.

Some books I would put on this list: Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell, Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal, Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington, 1984 by George Orwell.

Dumas himself had a personal library of about 6,000 books at its peak. If you don't already have them on your list, historians have mentioned several books that were known to have strongly influenced him:

Walter Scott's historical novels, particularly "Ivanhoe" and "Waverley," which inspired Dumas' approach to historical fiction

James Fenimore Cooper's frontier adventures, which influenced his action narratives

Lord Byron's romantic poetry and persona, which shaped Dumas' conception of the romantic hero

Schiller's play "The Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa," which Dumas translated and adapted early in his career

Shakespeare's dramatic works

Memoirs of historical figures, particularly those from the 17th and 18th centuries, including Courtilz de Sandras' "Mémoires de M. d'Artagnan," which became the foundation for "The Three Musketeers"

Plutarch's "Lives," which informed his understanding of classical historical figures

Works by Abbé Prévost and other French novelists of the 18th century

The Bible and classical mythology

I love this idea, and the lost is full of gems, but I see a couple of issues. If you actually intend you or anyone else to read these and stay sane I'd remove the mathematical tables (there is value in reading these, but only for a very rare soul), the Bible (lots of really dry stuff about begetting and knowing), the complete works of Shakespeare (hard to understand without careful study, way too long to cafefully study).

Shakespeare is worthwhile but much easier to understand when you see it performed, which is how it was meant to be experienced anyway.

Yes, exactly. A lot of people forget that he wrote ‘plays’ and not ‘reads’

He had to; a large part of his audience would have been unable to read.

A lot of European literature was poetry for the same reason. Its only because literacy rates have risen that prose has become more popular.

My Shakespeare class in college was based around performing a play at the end of the semester. We read about half a dozen plays, but the bulk of our work was based around preparing to perform Hamlet (each semester, a different play was performed, with fall being Comedies/Histories and Spring being Tragedies/Romances).

The big challenge is that a lot of plays are rarely performed. I had the good fortune of hearing an interview with Kenneth Brannagh where he talked about how Shakespeare is better experienced by watching a performance than reading a text and he made an aside about how it’s unlikely you’re going to get to see Henry IV part II performed and then spotting that there was a free performance of that exact play being given at the Chicago Cultural Center. This turned out to be part of a series of staged readings of all the plays. I missed the beginning of the sequence, but stuck around to the end. One of the coolest moments of this came when I was attending a play at the Goodman Theatre which had the actors interacting with audience members during intermission and one of the actors in the play recognized me from the audience of the staged readings.

There are more or less accessible TV performances. The definitive complete collection is probably the BBC Shakespeare, available on iPlayer and DVD.

Some of the plays have also snuck onto YouTube.

Highly recommend Shakescleare for anyone reading Shakespeare, esp students:

https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translati...

> the Bible (lots of really dry stuff about begetting and knowing)

I'd suggest replacing the Bible with just the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke[0], and John). Removing it entirely seems like a mistake since you'd lose a lot of the literary and moral underpinnings of Western culture, but having to read the bible in its entirely sounds exhausting. I did it (reading all four gospels) recently and can attest even outside of the religious aspects the retelling of the same tragic story in four different was is a fascinating literary experience.

[0] Technically we should through Acts in there too since Luke-Acts are essentially one book, but it's not a gospel so I left it out. Plus quite frankly while I did read it I found it way more boring than the others; turns out that Jesus fellow is a way more interesting main character than Paul :)

I think the Bible can mostly be distilled to Genesis, Exodus and the Gospels without losing too much. Each of those books is eminently legible in its own right. You could arguably make the sermon on the mount its own book, “communist manifesto” style.

I think those individual chapters would be super compelling to modern readers with or without a religious background, but their legibility is held back by the rest of the Bible’s contents. How is someone non-religious supposed to figure out that it’s ok to start reading a book at section 2, chapter 1? :)

I'm inclined to agree, except to add that Ecclesiastes stands on its own as a great piece of philosophy, and Revelations is pretty influential as well as having some pretty entertaining madness.

It's argued that God had a plan (all-knowing). The compelling argument to read the Old Testament in full before the New Testament is that this whole thing was a deliberate sequence. That's if you are willing to entertain the notion on a literary level (forget about belief). Take the story of Samson for example, one argument is that God showed that humans would persecute a man whom humanity couldn't even contemplate could have gotten his powers from God. It's a setup for Christ.

You can distill if you are looking for moral teachings, but you can't if you want to know this guys (that guy up in the sky) full plan, in which case you have to entertain that it was a sequence of events. It's very weird, but almost makes going through the whole Bible fascinating as a serial drama. One thing led to another.

I totally agree. I think for theological reasons (if your goal is to convince yourself that Jesus is the Messiah of the Abrahamic religions), then it can’t be distilled.

However, I do think the abrahamic origin stories (genesis), the tribulations of the Jewish people in Egypt and reception of the Ten Commandments (exodus), and the moral teachings of Christ that replace those commandments (gospels) are more or less self-contained and free-standing, if you’re trying to understand them at face value.

The gospels in particular contain a good moral teachings that are arguably more valuable than anything else in the book. Like really clear directives on how to live and carry yourself.

In my Weird Bible, I’d cold open with the sermon on the mount, followed by the Pharisees and the passion, and recursively hyper-link to every New Testament or Old Testament thing that supports those “primary” stories. I feel like if you arranged the Bible into a neat “tree” structure that way, the main load-bearing trunks would be the books mentioned.

I appreciate your points. Morality is what most people want to take away from all of these books, but the thing they want to leave behind is one requirement that God seems to have, and that's straight up obedience. Obedience doesn't really fit inside morality, and in fact if you just distill morality out, obedience won't make it. The Old Testament hammers home the need for obedience to God's laws in story after story, until finally God just kinda lets us know that "hey you guys really cannot follow the law, so lets shift to a relationship framework with Christ". That's how I've been making sense of WHAT the Old Testament is in the context of the sequence, and further, why I don't ignore it because it seems to be he values both morality and obedience (and again, obedience doesn't fit into morality - Just the story of Abraham and his son, there's nothing moral about it).

It's a thoroughly Christian view, that being humans lack the capacity to follow God's laws because we're inherently sinners - but that's a whole nother' can of worms. It's kind of like a Kindergarten teacher (God) letting the kids run the show for a day (Old Testament), just to make it clear, they can't manage it. It's quite a thing to believe such a supreme being would run a sequence like that on us (in fact, that's how I make sense of a lot of the craziness in the world, that God would in fact let things run its course, however messed up (even in modern times, e.g - the narcissistic scale of social media, wars, factory slavery in China, migrant slavery in Mideast construction projects, abject poverty in the third world, pure greed and gluttonous abundance in the west, drug epidemics that rival plagues, etc, where all of these things are just as Biblically fucked up as parts of the Bible)). It's my only case for why the Old Testament is quite relevant to understanding the fullness of God. In short, the desire to understand how and why God would work in this way leads me to consider the entirety of the Bible, beginning to end.

Fun topic!

I appreciate yours! And agreed it’s a fun topic :)

I don’t have much more to add but I’d really recommend you to read Tolstoy’s “Confession / What I Believe”, because I think you’d find it fascinating even if you don’t agree with it completely.

He has a metaphor (in a very Tolstoy-esque way), in which the world is like this bountiful, picturesque farm filled with sharp, durable tools, beasts of burden, rich soil, and so on. It was given to us and filled with people who each have their own slice of it, who eventually grow jealous and guard their slice and think themselves better than everyone else. The garden overflows with weeds, the well runs dry, so on. And then God rolls up and is like “how did you guys manage to mess it up so bad this time??”, fixes everything, and then tries to give us rules to prevent the disarray from occurring again. People start off ok, but then we invent new rules or ignore the existing rules in our own self interest, backslide, rinse and repeat.

Tolstoy’s thesis is basically that we’ve done the same thing to Jesus and the sermon on the mount that the Pharisees did to the Ten Commandments. i.e. constructed all these artifices and dogma that somehow allow Christianity to coexist with authoritarian, hierarchical, violent structures in our own self interests. We’ve let the garden spoil. No wonder the world is biblically messed up :)

Anyways that’s the core thesis but there are many other fascinating ideas in there, I really recommend giving it a try!

Right up my alley (very much aligns with I've been thinking), will absolutely check it out!

Yes, but the Gospels are "complete." You obviously gain much by reading the OT before it—not to mention the apocrypha like Enoch and Jubilees which are quoted directly and indirectly in the NT—but the Gospels have the entire "message" contained within them.

Isaiah for the poetic language and imagery deeply embedded in Western culture. Psalms for raw expression of the emotions at the heart of the human condition: suffering, rejection, abandonment, joy, and praise.

Tony Judt.

"Reappraisals" and "When the Facts Change" should be on top of everyone's reading list. Few indeed are those who can write prose as crisp, succinct and erudite as he did.

My mom grew up in Bangladesh with a classic British education (augmented with Russian works that were popular in the country given the socialist alignment). She speaks English with a heavy accent despite living here for almost 40 years, but will randomly reference great works in conversation. The other day she worked a reference to a greek tragedy into a dig at Pakistanis. I’ve come around to the idea that this isn’t merely a class flex, but rather these works have distilled observations about the human condition as well as building blocks of the society we live in even where we don’t recognize the provenance.

Exactly correct. In reading some highly regarded works two things occurred to me, first that the author had captured into words some fundamental aspect of the human condition. Second was that it's easier to think about something presented as a story than it is when it is presented as an alternative to how you currently think.

If you tell someone there position on some topic is wrong, they will argue with you. If you tell someone a story where the character takes the same position they have and then through experience and personal growth comes to understand how it is wrong. They can come away realizing that they might have it wrong. Great trick when it works.

One contemporary author who often writes fantasy and science fiction on social issues is Steven Brust, and he has a rule that when he puts his personal viewpoints into the mouth of a character, he uses a character whom the reader would have a narrative reason to dislike, which forces him to be honest with himself, and more impartial with the reader.

That is a great technique.

ah yes, read 100 books, abide by 1,000,000 rules

the proper framework can set you free

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