It takes a long time to read the Western literary canon so to get up to speed with one's literary education, it's nice to read the brief books first. I'm looking to compile a list of short texts that are essential reads. Here's what I have so far:
Various
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- Qur'an
- Satyricon (originally longer but only fragments remain)
Eastern
Indian
- Bhagavad Gita
- Dhammapada
- Heart Sutra (should probably be read with commentary)
Chinese
- Dao de Djing
- The Art of War
- The Analects of Confucius
- The Secret of the Golden Flower
Japanese
- Essays in Idleness
- The Book of Five Rings
- Hojoki
Greek
- Hesiod: Theogony; Works and Days.
- Plato: Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Gorgias.
- Enchiridion by Epictetus
- Plays in general (selection to be made later)
Selections from the Bible
Old Testament
- Genesis
- Exodus
- Job
- Ecclesiastes
- Jonah
- Malachi (an important early expression of Messianism)
New Testament
- Romans
- 1 Corinthians
- Galatians
- Ephesians
- Colossians
- 1 Thessalonians
- James
- Revelations
Rennaissance / Englightenment Era
- The Tempest by Shakespeare
- Candide by Voltaire
Modern Philosophy
- Meditations on First Philosophy by Descartes
- Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard
- Self-Reliance by Emerson
- Monadology by Leibniz
- Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals by Kant
- Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by Hume
No Nietzsche on this list because his important works aren't brief enough. Ecce Homo points to his other works but has limited value by itself.
Modern Literary Fiction
- Notes from the Underground by Dostojevski
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy
- The Metamorphosis by Kafka
- Das Leide der Junge Werther by Goethe
- Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville
- Camus: The Stranger, The Fall
- Heart of Darkness by Conrad
- Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
- The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
- Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
- Animal Farm by Orwell
- A Clockwork Orange by Burgess
- Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck
- Traumnovelle by Schnitzler. This is the book on which Eyes Wide Shut is based.
I've tried to be selective as I'm not just trying to compile a list of all brief texts that are on some literature list or another, but really trying to stick to essential readings. If the list becomes too long then it in turn becomes a long undertaking.
So what would you add to this?
Log in
I'm not really liking how many Eastern texts are creeping in. Although the ones listed are brief, they aren't really essential reading from a Western perspective which I should mention is the focus of this list. Bhagavad Gita influenced Thoreaux, Emerson, Huxley, possibly Melville, really the whole lot, so that is relevant for us. Dao de Djing and Art of War are likewise part of popular culture in the west. But some of the others belong rather to a niche and just happen to be brief. I just compiled this list so I'm keeping them for now but in a future iteration I'll be more selective on those.
You could always re-order the list. If you want it to have a Western focus you probably shouldn't lead with Eastern. You could also split the West by geography or period to get more sections to Milk. If you had and American section you'd have Common Sense, and few more trancendentalist items which are mostly short.
Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty is only 32 pages.
Voltaire's Treatise on Tolerance is 54.
Seneca's On the Shortness of Life is 15.
Emerson's Nature is 2.
You can judge how important you think each of those are.
I've been wanting to start sharing PDFs myself, but I keep putting it off. Shorter reads are definitely the best candidates for that.
I don't like clogging the list with writings that are only 2 pages long. If an author has a lot of such writings, maybe they can be aggregated into a compendium if we can establish a canonical one. The others may warrant separate mention. Is The Ethics of Liberty canonical for anarcho-capitalists?
Oh yeah another brief essay that I would recommend to everyone is Logic and Conversation by Grice. It's more of a personal preference, however, I don't know if it should make the list. Jorge Luis Borges is also easy to include here, both his stories and his essays are brief.
An excellent post, hun.
Much like you're recommending books of the Bible (chapter-length by our standards) I recommend for part of the Western canon the chapters Erich Auerbach arranged for his book, Mimesis: https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.183999/2015.183999.Mimesis_djvu.txt
He offered in this case an historicist analysis of the trajectory of human thinking and hermeneutics, from the very physical, external world of Homer, to the very internalized, mental world of Virginia Woolf.
Woolf's prose is so captivating. I was just scanning it to learn which Woolf he covers and I just want to keep reading on. Someone had blundered but not Woolf when she wrote To the Lighthouse.
Fantastic idea!
Great selections so far. You got a bunch that came to mind.
The Tempest isn't that clear or good IMO (typically around 218 pages). The Merchant Of Venice has simpler, better universal lessons (typically around 128 pages).
Hesse is great. His Siddhartha is great too (152 pages), a Western introduction to Buddhism, short-ish, like Steppenwolf (237 pages).
Bhagavad Gita is important.
Dao de Djing (Tao Te Ching) is critical. There are a LOT of short Dao books too, but none as important.
The Art of War is critical.
The Teachings of Confucius is a boring staple of history, omit IMO.
The Jefferson Bible cut out everything but stuff about Jesus and nature, only 84 pages. Also, The Picture Bible is a classic golden-age comic book style 3-part version. I had it as a kid. I just bought it for Winton's grandkids this past Christmas.
Also short:
Derrick Broze writes a lot of short good reads, like How to Opt-Out of the Technocratic State: 2nd Edition and The Holistic Self-Assessment.
1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Trial, (and We, above), are all critical dystopias but longer.
Oh yeah, maybe The Merchant of Venice is of interest from a conspiracy realist perspective because of its warning about the greediness of jews?
And another important one I forgot is Utopia by Thomas Moore.
Not just the Jew thing, but also that gold and silver are not everything, among other things.
Utopia is now in my Amazon cart. "You wouldn't abandon ship in a storm just because you couldn't control the winds."
I've got most if not all the books I listed. When I got some I was shocked to find them to be thin or small. Others I knew.
Hm. Have you read Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? That one is brief as well. I read it but I just don't see what kind of relevance it holds to this day and age or the human condition. Yes, we all have dark thoughts. In that book, the main character's dark thoughts are externalized as a person. Beside that, the events don't escape the story itself. It just feels like a book that is about the plot. Very basic. So that's why I didn't include it although I'm open to another perspective.
Also this is kind of the issue: when I haven't personally read a book I cannot properly assess it unless I establish clear criteria for inclusion, then we can do it collaboratively in a more effective way, although I'm still somewhat trying to figure what what I'm looking for.
Here's an attempt at articulation. I'm very much not trying to waste the reader's time with homework, while still providing a good basis for general education, with a slight bias for the man of the future who is to be conspiracy aware. So books that establish conspiracy realism and make readers familiar of the dangers of totalitarianism are important. 1984 wasn't include for its relative length, but that kind of book is what I was looking for when I mentioned Oera Linda. It's already established to be significant, and additionally, it's of interest to conspiracy realists while also having a timeless quality (unlike, say, coverage by James Corbett, which is lecture rather than literature).
So V for Vendetta is a good mention in this context as well.
Thank you. Some of these had in fact come up but I don't trust llms enough. I never realized the prince is short for example so didn't include it but I support that being added. Common sense has two mentions now, I will add that as well. Regarding existentialism is a humanism, I didn't trust Lumo presenting it as notable enough but now t has a mention by you as well. The Communist Manifesto is a good one.
Molyneux makes good videos but are his writings notable enough? I didn't even realize he has published print works until now. And a lot of the other works mentioned later on in the list I don't even recognize. I'm thinking you added those in response to my post on oera Linda? Worth looking into I suppose but please select them for notability.
We was slightly too long from my memory. Is it a novella? It felt more like a short novel to me. Great read, that's not the problem. We have a decent overlap in what we read. I read Hesse's works from an anthology and didn't realize Steppenwolf was over 200 pages. I didn't exclude Siddhartha to keep the list brief and just didn't like it as much. Maybe Journey to the East is better. That one's very brief. But then Siddhartha is more notable.
TIL Oera Linda Book.
Your list set the pace. Some of your selections were longer. All near or over 200 pages were excluded.
Everything I listed was notable. But how you define that may change things.
I read Jekyll & Hyde in grade 7 or 8. It's a classic, all about the human condition, but better to be analyzed than included, IMO. There are many like that, like Moby Dick, Frankenstein, etc. There is a case to be made for classics, flowery language, and high ideals. I included my fave Cyrano for that reason. Plays are often shorter too, I added a few. And a few children's or children-adjacent books, and graphic novels, that are deeper than they seem.
Ultimately it's subjective. I loved Siddhartha, you didn't. That's fine and to be expected.
I greatly appreciate that you're respecting readers' time. I wish news, YouTubers, etc. would.
Maybe a short-book club is in order. Pamphlets and novelettes that can be read in less than four hours with even slow readers.
Maybe a conspiro-primer list is also in order with regular-length books? My bookshelf is a good start. Will be behind Santa soon enough. Even though I haven't read all of them, I collect them and their value, as I already know something about them.
Oh yeah there's also the Oera Linda book which is suppressed for its notions that challenge mainstream history so that is worth a read as well. It is in fact a recent challenge to the canon that speaks to right-wing thinkers so it should be part of an emerging canon. That is in fact also what I welcome in this list: books that we want to be part of an emerging canon where conspiracy realism has a voice, although it should still be literary and not focused on non-fiction. Oera Linda is a history passed down from generation to generation, that's why it can be adopted. It wasn't written as part of modern conspiracy realist culture but is reckognized as a significant work by members of said culture.
I could look on my shelf for short conspiro-politi-historical books, though if I haven't read them yet I don't know how good they are. Good enough to warrant purchase by recommendation, support, or curiosity.
Here's another one: Flatland. Perhaps the us constitution or bill of rights as well.