Recommended Reading List12 min read

Your Bored Brother recently got some fan mail asking for a list of book recommendations:

Recently, I read the article about Non-violent Communication. I then went on to read the book, which I found both fascinating and useful. Would you be willing to write a list of recommended reading of both fiction and non-fiction?

A Fan of Brotherbored

I’m flattered!

I rarely recommend books to others, especially people I am merely acquainted with. I suppose that’s because I usually don’t care for books recommended to me by others (probably because—understandably—they don’t share my taste or perspective.) But once in a while, if I think I understand someone’s taste in books, I’ll venture to make a recommendation.

I figure that if one person careS enough to write in and ask me, there are others who might be interested as well. Plus, I’d like to take a break from the torrent of Diplomacy-focused content I’ve published this year and write something lighthearted for the Holidays. Let’s begin!

Non-Fiction Recommendations

How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), by Dale Carnegie

This book is simple, practical, and entertaining to read. It stands the test of time, and the teachings Carnegie offers are just as relevant to today’s world as the time in which he wrote it.

You might be thinking that this is a book about business, sales, politics, and the like. Well, it is, but it’s not just about that. This book is exactly what it says on tin: it’s about making friends and influencing people generically, which is helpful of course in many spheres of life. One of my favorite aspects of the book is that many of the examples are about adults facing a challenging interaction with a child—the idea being, that learning how to navigate these interactions is often more difficult than dealing with other adults.

Carnegie directly and unequivocally advises a large number of specific practical tips. Some of these are so basic as “remember to smile at people.” Other tips are more abstract, like his advice to create an eager want in the other person to do the thing you’d like them to do (as opposed to pressure). Among the reasons I think the writing is so high-quality is that the way Carnegie phrases his ideas makes them easy to remember later.

You can’t go wrong reading this book. I’d recommend it to anybody.

The 48 Laws of Power (1998), by Robert Greene

Some people say they learned a lot from Machiavelli’s “The Prince” or Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” They probably did (I think I did), but those books are old and ancient respectively, and a lot of the subtleties are lost to time and translation. They’re not terribly readable.

Greene’s book on the other hand is digestible and modern. He takes ideas from those old tomes, as well as hundreds of other received tidbits of wisdom, common sense, and stories of our ancestors, and complies them into these “laws” that one can follow if one wants to achieve power or importance. His points are easy to understand, and the way he writes the example stories is interesting (they’re told like parables or long jokes.)

The content can be read in any order, which is interesting and makes this like a reference book. The tone is amoral, which I realize is attractive to some people and repulsive to others. Even if you’re not interested in following all the advice, it is always helpful to know how someone else thinks. Give it a shot!

The Courage to Be Disliked (2013), by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga

I’ve read a lot of philosophy. This is one of the few book on the subject of philosophy that I am willing to generically recommend. Although the authors are Japanese, they aim to teach the reader about ideas from Western philosophy that they have adopted. Hearing about ideas from Western philosophy from someone who adopted them later in life is fascinating.

Not only that, but the book is written as a fictionalized dialogue between a wise old philosopher and a frustrated young man. Pure dialogue is a writing style that is very rare to encounter in modern writing, but was once quite popular. This stylistic choices makes the heady concepts easier to grapple with, and gives the book a timeless feel—as if one is reading a far older work.

The premise is that the frustrated young man views life is inescapably complicated, difficult, and disappointing. He aims to refute the wise old philosopher‘s thesis that life is simple and happiness easy to achieve. Through their dialogue, the philosopher character takes us on a tour of ancient and modern wisdom that help a person get through what seem to be life’s complexities and inevitable disappointments.

I think often about the teachings in this book, and try as I can to apply them in my own life.

Patterns in my recommendations…

After writing the non-fiction list, I realized that my recommendations are arguably self-help books, and (in my opinion) are non-academic works of philosophy. Hm. Go figure.

Here’s something a bit more interesting perhaps. All four of these books give advice, but have a very different tone and approach (ranging from how to have a happy life to how to achieve political power). There is, though, one bit of advice you can find in all four works: never act on anger. I’d go as far as to say that these writers discourage even speaking from a place of anger. They all think of actions and words motivated by anger as counter-productive and dangerous—even self destructive.

Or as Marcus Aurelius said, “how much more grievous the consequences of anger, than the causes of it.”

This is fascinating, because the books often have totally opposite advice on other situations (“assume everyone is your friend” vs. “assume everyone is your enemy”). I think these writers all have the same advice about anger because, well, that advice is generally useful to any person no matter their goals. Evidently, acting out of anger is an extremely common human limitation, and one that is difficult to overcome.

I draw the conclusion that these overlapping tidbits of advice are the same in all these works because that advice is just generally useful, good advice that any person should follow for their own benefit regardless of their views and intentions.

I wonder, what other advice is like this?

Fiction Recommendations

The Lord of the Rings (1955), by J.R.R. Tolkien

The entire English-speaking world is at least aware of this novel, and those of you looking at this list have either read it, gave up reading it, or at least considered reading it at some point.

This novel is a 10/10 fantasy book. It stands the test of time and is always enjoyable to read; you might get something different out of the story reading at a different point in your life.

For those of you who are content with the films (which I love!), let me tell you the book is on this whole other level. The characters’ personalities, and especially their relationships with each other, are greatly simplified to focus on the action in the film.

For example, take the scene where Samwise asks Gollum to look for wild potatoes in the wilderness. In the film, this is a brief moment with the joke being that Gollum doesn’t know what a “tater” is. But in the novel, this is a much longer scene in which Gollum is trying to be helpful in complying with Sam’s repeated requests to fetch things, and Sam sympathizes with Gollum’s frustration that Sam is taking advantage of him—including requesting things that Gollum hasn’t even heard of before. Sam backs down and sort of apologizes.

It’s the little moments that are given such lavish attention that make the book so wonderful to read.

Dune (1965), by Frank Herbert

In my mind, Dune is a Science Fiction counterpart to Fantasy’s Lord of the Rings. I read both novels on the recommendation of my father when I was still in elementary school, and they had a big influence on my interests and hobbies in years to come. Dune also influenced a lot of later-published fiction, and so the novel is of historical and literary interest.

Like the Lord of the Rings, Dune is a whopper of a novel. But, that’s what makes it so interesting. Because the writer spends so much time on the details of the characters, even the weirdest people living in a baffling future 10,000 years from now seem relatable (or at least, understandable). It’s the attention to intricacies that makes Dune such an interesting read.

Among the themes of Dune are: far-sighted planning, subtle influence, and nuanced thinking. If you like complicated stories, Dune is for you.^[1]I also recommend Frank Herbert’s sequel novels, which have different ideas and tones from the original novel and each other. But, don’t bother reading them if you haven’t read and liked the original novel. The recent movie is great, but no substitute for the book.

Watchmen (1987), by Alan Moore

Yeah, a graphic novel^[2]The grown-up word for comic book. made it onto this list. If you read the non-Diplomacy content of this blog, you’ll immediately discover that I’m a big-time fan of superhero comic books.

Watchmen is at the acme of this art form. There are many high-quality superhero comic books, some of which I consider truly excellent works. But what sets Watchmen apart is that it is a self-contained story. So, unlike a lot of the really great superhero comic books that require a lot of context to fully appreciate them (which is increasingly true of superhero films now as well), anybody can pick up and read Watchmen and they’re on the same footing as any other reader.

This graphic novel contains a lot of in-universe materials, like excerpts from books and articles. It also covers a 60-year arc of time, and the story is not told chronologically (with the non-chronological storytelling being a major character concept—the level complexity in this regard is exquisite). This helps give the reader a feeling as though they are reading a comic book that requires a lot of context to fully understand, while also supplying all that context within the work itself.

The attention to detail is unreal, and nobody notices all of those details on the first, second, or even third reading. This a “thinking person’s” superhero story.

Watchmen also had tremendous influence over subsequent superhero stories. Those kinds of stories play an important role in popular culture, so don’t underestimate the value of improving your understanding of the genre.

Look Who’s Back (2012), Timur Vermes

Prrrrobably most of my readers—those who read speculative fiction anyways—have read some or all of my other fiction recommendations. This one was written much more recently, and is not nearly as well known.

Look Who’s Back is an English translation of a German-language dark comedy written from the perspective of Adolf Hilter, who has inexplicably appeared in the present day exactly where he died. He immediately sets about another rise to power…and seems to be succeeding for essentially the same reasons he did in real life decades ago.

This is an astonishing premise, but Vermes manages to tell a story that is funny, scary, and intellectually stimulating. Vermes writes a compelling Adolf Hitler character, which is important because the story is told from Hitler’s point of view.

What’s most impressive about the writing though, is Vermes’s sociological insight about how, even though technology and ideas may have changed so much from the 1930s and 40s, people are still basically same. Among the clever ideas in the writing is that Adolf Hitler is understood by contemporary people as a sarcastic Hitler impersonator whose deranged ideas must be dismissed as jokes, but who has a heart of gold because he also mixes in a lot of points that everyone can agree with. H actual contemporaries dismissed his openly-stated deranged ideas as exaggerations for political effect, so we’re to understand the fictional modern fans of this fictional modern Hitler as fooling themselves in a similar way.

I am a serious World War 2 buff. I’ve consumed a lot of history from the era, and also read a lot of fiction set in or that is otherwise about that era. I don’t recommend any of that in particular—but I am trying to bolster my credibility here. It’s not a long novel; give it a try!

Conclusion

Well, there you have it: a list of reading recommendations! If you’re looking for something to do over the holidays, or while traveling, maybe pick one these up.

It’s been a great year for BrotherBored, and I appreciate the constant engagement I get from the fans of this blog. If you want to encourage me to work harder and produce more content, consider supporting my efforts on Patreon!