Literature

I saw this post on another site, and thought I would use it as the basis of a literature recommendations page. I'll start by copying the list below, and hopefully over time we can have individual entries for each book explaining why they're important, a summary, etc.

I don't intend to rip his list off, but rather use it as a good starting point (for now).

Plans for this page: Refine the list, perhaps remove a few entries, maybe add a few as well. I'd like to organize it better as well to help differentiate between books that a beginner can stomach versus something that may be quite a bit more to take in.

Where do I get these books?

Your local libraries are of course the best places to start. Some of us may have access to libraries with many volumes and may have no trouble finding these books, but many others may find their library lacking these books. In this case, the Internet can be a wonderful source as well. Old books on this list of course fall under no copyright laws (if you choose to respect such laws anyway) and can easily be looked up in a search engine.

Project Gutenberg is a site with e-books in the public domain that you can download for free.

LibGen (Library Genesis) is a great site to find all kinds of ebooks. The link here is one mirror site, and you can search up "libgen" in a search engine to find other mirrors as well. It's a really helpful resource.

The Classical Period

The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer (~700 BC)

Histories By Herodotus (430 BC)

The History of the Peloponnesian War By Thucydides (430 BC)

Republic By Plato (375 BC)

The Bhagavad Gita By Vyada (200 BC)

Parallel Lives By Plutarch (100 BC)

Geographica By Strabo (7 BC)

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium By Seneca (65 AD)

Meditations By Marcus Aurelius (180 AD)

Confessions By Augustine (400 AD)

Getica By Jordanes (550 AD)

Middle Ages

The Secret History By Procopius (562 AD)

Beowulf By Anonymous (~900 AD)

History of the Kings of Britai By Geoffrey Monmouth (1136 AD)

The Saga of the Volsungs By Edda (~1200 AD)

Prose Edda By Snorri Sturluson (~1200 AD)

Summa Theologica By Thomas Aquinas (1485 AD)

The Enlightenment and Early Modern Period

The Leviathan By Thomas Hobbes (1651)

Heaven and Hell By Emmanuel Swedenborg (1758)

The Phenomenology of Spirit By Georg Hegel (1807)

Nature By Ralph Waldo Emerson (1836)

Walden By Henry David Thorough (1854)

The Brothers Karamazov By Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)

Thus Spoke Zarathustra By Friedrich Nietzsche (1900)

The Postmodern Age

The Red Book By Carl Jung (1930)

The Screwtape Letters By C.S. Lewis (1946)

Mere Christianity By C.S. Lewis (1952)

The Technological Society By Jacques Ellul (1954)

The Four Loves By C.S. Lewis (1960)

Sun and Steel By Yukio Mishima (1968)

The Patton Papers By Martin Blumenson (1972)

Nihilism By Seraphim Rose (1994)

Beauty By Roger Scruton (2009)

Logos Rising By E. Michael Jones (2020)

My Recommendations

1984 by George Orwell: A 1948 novel exploring the life of a man living in a hypothetical future in which the surveillance state is in total control. This is among my favorite books because of it's uncanny similarity to many modern practices. Although the book was written in 1948, Orwell paints a dark yet disturbingly accurate vision of what governments could look like in the future.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: