[RD] Which 'Great Works' are low-hanging fruit?

Very strange question. I think most of the books that usually come up in debates or discussions are political by nature

Depends on who you hang out with, I'd say. Usually for me the books that come up most in discussions are the more easily read classics (brothers karamazov, the metamorphosis, faust, moby dick, old man and the sea, and so forth) and entry level philosophy (existentialism, pop phil, kant, marx etc.)

What kind of political books are discussed in your circles? I honestly cannot think of a single one besides maybe "Deutschland schafft sich ab" which caused some heavy discussion years ago.

Evaluating art on a yield to time ratio seems so alien as to be absurd. So I reject this premise on its face.

If you’re looking for a good book to read, I recommend The Master and Margarita. It is an excellent comedy about the Devil coming to Stalinist Russia. It is an absolute joy.

If you simply must persist in attempting to garner the greatest amount of cultural information with the least amount of effort, then read The Sandman comic series.

hey! that's like, one of the best books ever written. good rec.

What I'm really looking for are books with a deep cultural influence that are easy to read. It isn't about becoming educated 'like the elite', it's about dipping my toe into their ideological current. I know the generalities of what Marx said, but I don't know what context he said it in.

In that case what you really need to read is the old and the new testament, preferably a scholar's edition.

Then.. Start with the.. Mesopotamians, then the Egyptians, then the Minoans, the presocratics the Baghavad Ghita and other Indian mythology and there you have your entry to the earlierst literature in the world, basically.
 
Last edited:
I second Ordinary Men. It's regarded as one of the most important books on the Holocaust and it's very important in general genocide studies as well. As far as conversational/debate benefits go, the Holocaust, war crimes, and genocides come up pretty frequently. I've found that conversations with my friends, dad, girlfriend, etc., all benefit from familiarity with the book.

I second Lolita also. It's very entertaining and it comes up fairly often, at least in my conversations. There's the entertaining plot and raw substance, but beyond that, it has amazing writing and interesting commentary on morality, art, the United States/consumerism, and lots of other things. High ROI for sure

You've probably heard of (or read) Thinking Fast and Slow since you read SSC? It's long but worth reading. It offers a great overview of the history and content of the study of cognitive biases. As you might know, the old idea was that irrationality was caused by ignorance or emotions that cloud judgement. It was a revolutionary idea that people are actually just irrational by default in many circumstances. Kahneman was instrumental in proving this. As for the conversational and debate-side of things, he says in the foreword one of his goals is to enrich the language we use to talk about people and cognition, so there's that
This is exactly what I'm looking for. Not household names, but the books that everybody in a particular field reads.... What I want personally? I know very little about economics. I could also use some help in nutrition (although I'm wary of it; most books on the subject have got to be pseudoscience). And I'm also looking to get into Wittgenstein, but I doubt I'm competent to read his original work.
I also assume you're familiar with the Hungry Brain and maybe you've read it, in which case you can skip ahead. If you haven't actually read it, I'd would strongly recommend it. The author, of course, is a legit scientist, not a fad nutritionist. He writes lots of super interesting explanations of how parts of our brains work and you'll learn about neuroscience well-beyond just what's relevant for nutrition. Once you finish it, you might find yourself low on patience when you have conversations with your friends about diets, nutrition, or obesity.

For finding books everyone in a particular field has read, but you could try going to websites for university classes on, say, philosophy/Wittgenstein and check out their syllabi. Look up the books you find, especially what's in the intersection of all of the reading lists. I've done this a few times before and have found some high quality books/textbooks that were high-yield

Companion books can be a good high-ROI resource, btw. E.g., something like "the Arguments of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason" is probably more worth your effort than actually reading the original book. You probably just have to be aware that companion books don't always explain the debates and disputes over interpretations. And you if you scan syllabi, you might find ones that are better than just sparknotes or googling
 
hey! that's like, one of the best books ever written. good rec.
It is truly, truly excellent. Bulgakov hits a remarkable sweet spot between humor, social commentary, satire, and just being a really great novel.

--

If the goal remains to get something to talk about at cocktail parties with as little effort as possible (which I still think is a fool’s errand) then what you want aren’t books. You want poetry and short stories. Read through the best short works of Kipling, Shelley, Rumi, Gogol, Gil Scott-Heron, and the Beastie Boys and you will have ample ammunition to entertain people while sipping martinis.

Avoid nonfiction for this stuff. You obtain the same essential observations of the human endeavor from other forms; in this nonfiction is, at best, the same thing with little artistry. Nonfiction is great for becoming an expert on something, but that's not necessarily what you want for the cocktail party.
 
@Mouthwash

If I understand this correctly (and feel free to correct me if I've misunderstood), you're looking for literature that you can discuss at parties or other gatherings (do you attend any conventions, for example?), and you would prefer that we help compile a list that "the elite" are also interested in.

That's a really tall order, because while you want to appear smart and impress people, one of the goals people should have at such gatherings is to only appear smart and impressive, but to not appear boring.

Not that I consider myself "elite" but I've attended my share of parties and conventions, and the moment someone walks up to me and starts talking about the bible, I will do one of two things: I'll either walk away if they give the impression that they're trying to convert me, or I'll end up in an argument with them.

If they walk up to me and want to talk about Shakespeare, that's a different thing. I enjoy discussing Shakespeare.


One of the novels that's a popular conversation piece right now is The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. A right-wing religious cult called The Sons of Jacob has taken over the U.S. government (in the lower 48 states; Alaska and Hawaii are all that's left of the real U.S.) and set up a repressive religious theocracy in which women who aren't Wives are the literal property of the state. Their excuse for this is a fertility crisis in which very few children are born anymore, so fertile women are forced to serve as Handmaids to the elite Commanders... for the purpose of becoming pregnant and having a baby that she is expected to surrender to the Commander and his Wife, and then she's sent on to another elite couple to produce another baby. And so on.

Popular opinions of the book (and the current TV series based on the book) is that it's "torture porn" or "based on Donald Trump" or "why aren't they talking about what the Muslims are doing to their women, why pick on Christians?".

These opinions are completely missing the point. The point of the book is a warning about what could happen if religious fundamentalists get hold of that much power, and what they could and would likely do with it. The book isn't based on Trump (it was published in 1985 in Canada), and neither was the first season of the show (the election hadn't happened yet and Trump was just one candidate among many at the time the show was written and shot).

There's nothing in the book that hasn't happened somewhere before, at some time in history. Atwood says she was thinking about the Puritans for some of the material, but yeah, there are elements of the repressive parts of Islam there, too. It's not a "bash the Christians" novel.

This novel has never been out of print since 1985, and it's my understanding that it's on the reading lists for many high school, college, and university English/Literature courses (I graduated before 1985, so I read it because I like Atwood's writing, not because it was required reading).


All that said, it's a bit hard to know what literature everyone really reads and enjoys, as opposed to what people are told they should read but don't really enjoy. It's funny... the other day some people got into a discussion about Moby Dick, because we belong to a comics site and one of the child characters in Heart of the City had a toy whale in his bathtub. The popular consensus was that the book was pretty boring. I wouldn't know, since I've never read it myself.
 
It's funny... the other day some people got into a discussion about Moby Dick, because we belong to a comics site and one of the child characters in Heart of the City had a toy whale in his bathtub. The popular consensus was that the book was pretty boring.

It definitely is. Both the movie and book. It was mandatory in 8th grade for me. Possibly one of the worst mandatory readings I had to do.
 
Some Fiction Ideas:
Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees
Montesquieu, The Persian Letters, and The Spirit of the Laws
Goethe's Faust
Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Voltaire, Candide
The Odyssey/Illiad
The Aeneid

Some Nonfiction Ideas:
Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, Loyalty
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality
Jürgen Habermas, The Social Transformation of the Public Sphere, Legitimation Crisis, (maybe: Between Facts and Norms)
Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author"
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques I-IV or Myth and Meaning
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology
Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify
Leora Auslander, Cultural Revolutions or Taste and Power
Leopold von Ranke: Histories of the Romanic and German Peoples from 1494-1514
If you haven't read Marx or Hegel yet, those would also be worthwhile to look at, though they aren't authors I would recommend lightly to anybody, so, at your discretion.



If you're purely looking to comprehend and riff on Western Cultural memes, then the best bang-for-your-buck would probably be in reading The Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, and working your way through Shakespeare's, Austen's, Dickens's, and Dostoyevsky's respective corpora. And then some other bits and bobs like The Fable of the Bees, Faust, Dante's Trilogy, Voltaire, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Das Niebelunglied, etc.

May be worthwhile to read through some Christian writers too if you're really interested in getting a good grounding. Augustine's Confessiones and De civitate dei, Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica or De Anima. Also Aristotle's Organon and Plato's Republic if you haven't read those before.

Well, I did mention readable stuff, but these are nice to know about too.

EDIT: Sorry, I came off as more snarky than I'd intended. Aside from heavyweights like Dostoevsky and Dickens, a lot of these are really good suggestions.

@Mouthwash

If I understand this correctly (and feel free to correct me if I've misunderstood), you're looking for literature that you can discuss at parties or other gatherings (do you attend any conventions, for example?), and you would prefer that we help compile a list that "the elite" are also interested in.

I think it's incredibly useful (and an easy way to springboard yourself into something approaching 'knowledgeable' in a subject) to know these sorts of cultural touchstones. And I also think simple books that nonetheless survive for long periods tend to be free of fluff and egregious biases.

One of the novels that's a popular conversation piece right now is The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood.

Pretty much only among leftists.

It definitely is. Both the movie and book. It was mandatory in 8th grade for me. Possibly one of the worst mandatory readings I had to do.

That's what Wishbone is for. ;)
 
Last edited:
Pretty much only among leftists.
So you only associate with right-wing people in RL? Do you hand out questionnaires every time you meet someone, to determine their political views before you'll have a conversation with them? :huh:

BTW, there are plenty of right-wingers posting on the Handmaid's Tale pages on YouTube. Most of them post things like "I haven't read the book or watched the show, but I've seen a trailer and that's all I need to know that this is a horrible, sinful show and God is going to get everyone in it and everyone that watches it."

That's not any kind of scope for an intelligent conversation, is it? But it's what I've come to expect from a lot of right-wing fundamentalists, given how hard they're trying in RL to roll back women's rights and the rights of minorities. :huh:
 
So you only associate with right-wing people in RL?

No, but I'm looking for things that more than one side of the culture war is interested in (a sure sign something isn't going to be read a hundred years from now). I also wouldn't include a book recommended by someone who raved about how it 'totally dismantles modern feminism'.

BTW, there are plenty of right-wingers posting on the Handmaid's Tale pages on YouTube. Most of them post things like "I haven't read the book or watched the show, but I've seen a trailer and that's all I need to know that this is a horrible, sinful show and God is going to get everyone in it and everyone that watches it."

So? If you go to Youtube videos about the book itself you're going to encounter whatever right-wingers have stopped and tried to see what the fuss is about. Doesn't mean they have any major presence in right-wing circles.
 
No, but I'm looking for things that more than one side of the culture war is interested in (a sure sign something isn't going to be read a hundred years from now). I also wouldn't include a book recommended by someone who raved about how it 'totally dismantles modern feminism'.
The novel has been in print continuously for 33 years. And don't kid yourself that right-wing politicians aren't reading it and wondering how much of it they could pull off... denying women the vote, for example. Some of the female Tea Partiers spoke in favor of that several years ago, as I recall, as did Ann Coulter.

And I have no idea who you're talking about when you say "I also wouldn't include a book recommended by someone who raved about how it 'totally dismantles modern feminism'." I never said that, and I don't even know where that's coming from.

Or how about forcing women who have miscarriages to hold a funeral for the fetus? That's something that some of your right-wing politicians are all for.

So? If you go to Youtube videos about the book itself you're going to encounter whatever right-wingers have stopped and tried to see what the fuss is about. Doesn't mean they have any major presence in right-wing circles.
I encounter right-wingers who claim they haven't read the book, haven't seen the movie, haven't seen the show... but they just KNOW it's full of sinful, anti-American, anti-Christian SIN.

Kinda funny, since the actress who plays the main character is a Scientologist who got her knuckles verbally rapped for claiming the book is not a feminist novel, and the Scientologists have this weird patriarchy thing going on. The character herself, as presented in the TV show, is Catholic.
 
The novel has been in print continuously for 33 years.

Well, the current zeitgeist does actually seem quite similar to the 80's... on the left. So if nothing else, it is a masterpiece of keying in to that particular mentality.

Every Great Book I've ever heard of is appreciated everywhere in the political spectrum. That's not an argument for centrism, it's simply an observation that genuinely deep and enduring ideas aren't recognized only by one way of seeing the world.

And I have no idea who you're talking about when you say "I also wouldn't include a book recommended by someone who raved about how it 'totally dismantles modern feminism'." I never said that, and I don't even know where that's coming from.

I was giving an example of a partisan book that better reflects my side.
 
Last edited:
Well, just to name a few off the top of my head:

The Art of War by Sun Tzu: AoW is something of a primer for strategic thinking and military matters. Parts of it have been made hopelessly outdated by modern technology, but parts of it still stand, and the strategic advice is still solid. What I find to be the most interesting about this book is the subtle pro-peace message contained in that book. AoW tells you how to wage war, but it also subtly underscores the point that often it is better to prevent a battle rather than to win one. It's like a subtle anti-war message in a place where many generals are sure to read it. AoW is also a fairly short book, so reading it won't be a big investment time-wise

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli: I don't have a fresh opinion to give you since it's been so long since I've read it, but essentially the Prince is one of the early works on political realism. Machiavelli takes a cold hard look at how a prince should rule. It's practical advice at the expense of morality and ideology, which is why Machiavelli gets such a bad rap. I don't think the Prince was a very long book either

I would like to second The Prince and The Art of War. Both are best read without tripping too far ime.
 
I've heard the Art of War is overrated trash, actually (not my words, just reporting that it has a substantial hatebase). What exactly is it like?
 
What I'm really looking for are books with a deep cultural influence that are easy to read. It isn't about becoming educated 'like the elite', it's about dipping my toe into their ideological current. I know the generalities of what Marx said, but I don't know what context he said it in.
Then I recommend that you read the Bible, Das Kapital and (if you can stomach it) Mein Kampf.
The first because it's all-pervasive and even self-declared atheists unconsciously follow things said there. Also, that way you'll know how little many of the current-day ‘Christian’ politicians, evangelisers, opinion-makers and so on really draw from the Bible. (and also, since you're Jewish and in Israel, you should know as much as possible about what the official history is)
The second because it's also all-pervasive and many ultra-capitalist free marketeers follow a lot of Marx's analyses, even if it's under the ‘embrace it to manage it’ philosophy or the ‘hell yeah, so this is how you exploit the workers’ bit.
The third, because so many people right now espouse it that reading the source is better and good preparation for being able to spot them -it's far easier when you can quote their words back at them and explain to them how they're paraphrasing this. Think, for example, that many supporters of Israel in the US actually want that to a) cleanse their good safe Protestant lands of the big-nosed Jesus-killers and/or b) fulfil their particular interpretation of the Bible that says when all the Jews are in Israel then the end of the world can happen.

So yes, those are meant to help you call out people.

Machiavelli and Sun Tzu are also something I'd recommend. Adam Smith wouldn't be a bad pick either.
 
I've heard the Art of War is overrated trash, actually (not my words, just reporting that it has a substantial hatebase). What exactly is it like?
In less inhibited moments, I sometimes say that Sunzi was a trash can.

Many of the things that one can learn from modern strategy texts are also in the thirteen-chapter text attributed to Sunzi, Master Sun's Military Methods. Many of them are tried and true tenets of military philosophy not obvious to every observer, like the overwhelming importance of a relentless pursuit. Other things are common sense (although most observers would generally say that strategy is a fundamentally common sense topic): flexibility is a good thing, actionable intelligence is a good thing, morale is important, don't fight battles you don't have to, don't let yourself get boxed in, make sure you have supplies, etc. Others are essentially matters of definition; the author of the thirteen chapters, for example, spends a great deal of time proving that force multipliers exist. With all that said, I don't think that many people would say that the thirteen chapters completely lack value and that the reader will learn nothing about warfare if she reads it.

Many of the things that one finds in the text are specific to the classical Chinese idiom and are not that useful for the modern student of warfare. Other times, the author contradicts himself, making a universal statement of truth in one sentence and specifically denying it in a later chapter. Now, this is not necessarily wrong. Warfare is in most particulars a situation in which the commander balances a large number of competing risks. It is not wrong to point out that certain kinds of ground are disadvantageous to fight on, and then to also point out that accepting the risk of fighting on bad ground in order to take advantage of some enemy vulnerability is often a good idea. The author of the thirteen chapters' language is overly prescriptive in many places, but that's an artifact of the genre and possibly also of the translation. Sometimes, the author combines good advice with bad, especially in his description of the demeanor of a commander.

The author is also straight-up wrong about some things that are not merely a matter of historical context. Most egregiously, the author fosters a belief in what is possible in war that is not realistic: that a commander can orchestrate victory beforehand, and that battle is merely a bit of dramatic irony, playing out what has already been decided. Like virtually every author in the world before the publication of Vom Kriege, the author of the thirteen chapters badly understates the extent of fog, friction, and chance in warfare. Instead, the author's understanding of warfare is highly schematic: there are nine contingencies, five traits dangerous in a commander, five phases of battle, and so on. Many of the author's ideas about warfare seem to rely on an obliging enemy, one who can be easily understood and duped into doing exactly what you want him to do. This may be a useful thing for a literary general interested in royal patronage to project - the image of an infallible master with all the tricks who can make opponents look like fools - but it is an actively counterproductive way to view warfare.

Some readers who are well versed in the study of warfare have insisted that they can read all sorts of higher-order concepts in the Military Methods. For example, there has been at least one person to argue to me to my face about the meaning of the following passage:
Sunzi bingfa 4.14-15 tr. Ames said:
Therefore, the expert in battle takes his stand on ground that is unassailable, and does not miss his chance to defeat the enemy. For this reason, the victorious army only enters battle after having first won the victory, while the defeated army only seeks victory after having first entered the fray.
This person steadfastly believes that the quoted text is in fact an example of operational art, a concept that did not even exist until the twentieth century. Reading this into the text here is deeply anachronistic and also betrays a misunderstanding of the concept of "operational art", which is a bit more complicated than trying to make sure one is adequately prepared for battle. Note again here that Sunzi's words imply that it is even possible to ensure that victory in battle is "unerring" (4.13), when in reality most soldiers now fully understand that battle is the most chaotic and most risky aspect of human endeavor. Battle is, fundamentally, a lottery, and too many things can go wrong for even the greatest commander of all time to guarantee victory. Adequate preparation and planning are undeniably valuable things, but the means that the author of the Military Methods attempts to use to get them across are suboptimal. Here, overly prescriptive language leads not to a minor contradiction but something that is actively dangerous.

You might think that readers are generally smart enough to know what is good about the Military Methods and what is bad. You would be wrong. Even soldiers succumb to the notion that there is such a thing as a way to guarantee victory.

With all that said, there is nothing wrong with a good strong active read of Master Sun's Military Methods. The text is extraordinarily short; the thirteen chapters ought to take you about twenty minutes to read and annotate.

The thing I don't like about the text is not the text itself. The text was a product of its time and has limitations like any other attempt to discuss warfare in any depth. The thing I don't like about the text is actually people's propensity to act as though it holds all the keys to warfare, that people who read it are automatically geniuses and people who do not read it, or who ignore its precepts, are imbeciles. The level of unthinking hero-worship one finds with the Military Methods is kind of astounding. It's much worse than the Clausewitz-worshipping Wehraboos, who for all their slavish obedience to the old master at least avoid being egregiously, disastrously wrong about any aspect of warfare. Avoid the hero worship, and you'll be all right.

EDIT: clarified one point
 
Last edited:
Oedipus the King
The Odyssey
Hamlet
The Prince, as has been mentioned
Dante's Inferno
 
Dostoyevsky's The Gambler. Hollywood has adapted this into a film twice, the first an iconic 70s film starring James Kahn. It's the most insightful portrait into the mind of someone stuck in the grips of compulsive behavior I've ever read.

Someone mentioned Orwell, and his novels are ok. He also did some essays for journals of his time and I would highly recommend Shooting and Elephant. He describes a scene during his time in Burma where an elephant used as a beast of burden went mad on a city street and had to be put down. I don't know why I found it so moving, but I did.

Anything by Kurt Vonnegut. His works are just a wonderful survey of the tragedy and the comedy of human existence. I also like to daydream that some day someone will take up actually writing the collected works of Kilgore Trout. If you aren't familiar with Vonnegut Kilgore Trout is a fictitious sci-fi writer who is a recurring character in his novels. Vonnegut floats premises for several works which sound incredible, but alas were never actually written.

Anything by John Steinbeck. He's pretty much why I'm a lefty today.
 
Dachs, you are too harsh on Sun Tse. It is not a manual on how to win any war. Think about the intended reader.
As a primer for a 16 yr old emperor embarking on his first war, his book is full of good, albeit hard to implement, advice
 
I've heard the Art of War is overrated trash, actually (not my words, just reporting that it has a substantial hatebase). What exactly is it like?
People say a lot of things. It’s like 30 pages and you have two recommendations for it. It’s very simple and straightforward and rational.
 
The Art of War is more about thinking than commanding in the field.

The books that are easiest to talk about with enthusiasm are those that you enjoyed reading. Find the subject matter (or fiction group) you enjoy and read read read to find the best books in it for you. Reading "classics" just to say you read them and sound smart is a waste of time. Rather than rehashing the allegory of the "Old Man and the Sea", introduce your friends to new and wonderful books they might not be aware of.
 
Of Mice and Men is super easy to read, you can consume it in like an hour and a half. Siddhartha by Hesse is similarly a nice easy read.
 
Top Bottom