Recommended Books

Recommended Books

From Seneca’s Letter II, “Discursiveness in Reading”:

Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works if you would derive ideas that shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends up having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner. Food does no good and is not assimilated into the body if it leaves the stomach as soon as it is eaten; nothing hinders a cure so much as frequent change of medicine; no wound will heal when one salve is tried after another; a plant which is often moved can never grow strong. There is nothing so efficacious that it can be helpful while it is being shifted about. And in the reading of many books is a distraction.

 

Accordingly, since you cannot read all the books which you may possess, it is enough to possess only as many books as you can read. “But,” you reply, “I wish to dip first into one book and then into another,” I tell you that it is the sign of an overnice appetite to toy with many dishes; for when they are manifold and varied, they cloy but do not nourish. So you should always read standard authors; and when you crave a change, fall back upon those whom you read before. Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested each day. This is my own custom; from the many things, which I have read, I claim some one part for myself.

Here are some great books I would like to recommend (I will occasionally update the list):