Best non-fiction books youve ever read? Preferably some educational

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>>10005728
http://explorer.opensyllabusproject.org/

Start with the greeks

>>10005738
>>10005741
ok so i realize the book i chose for my OP is a super obvious pick, but im mostly thinking about... not necessarily 1000 year old books. not necessarily the imdb top 250 equivalent of books. im looking for, among all the books people here have presumably read, which ones did you like the most?

for me, itd be, i suppose:

How An Economy Grows and Why it Crashes
Why Nations Fail
A Conflict of Vision

all more contemporary ones

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>>10005738
>>10005750
>imdb
neck yourself faggot

>>10005728
try 'discourses on livy' by machiavelli as well

>>10005761
???

>>10005774
alright, cheers

but honestly. no one on /lit/ has, like, a favorite book? best book(s) youve ever read?

>>10005728
Montaigne's Essays

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>>10005789
"lit" is filled with people in their mid 20's. their favorite book is crime and punishment or atlas shrugged (no offense). kys because I gave you a good resource and you called it a movie rating list. try leaving 4chan, stop cursing, and open a book if gaining intellect is something that's important to you because you wont find it here.

>>10005806
what i meant wasnt to compare your list (which ive been looking at) to imdb 250. just that, yknow, when you ask people for recommendations on something, you usually get the old wave of "start reading the complete works of all these dudes who died 5000 years ago. itll take two years, and then youll be ready to read more things", and thats not what i was hoping for here. just want people to recommend their favorite books (that arent fiction)

>>10005806

jokes on you retard, my favorite book is Infinite Jest

Oh, where to start... I guess if I had to recommend one book it would be The Culture of Critique by Kevin B. MacDonald.

>>10005816
>itll take two years, and then youll be ready to read more things
But it's the correct approach.

>>10005738
>Martin Luther King, Edward Said, and the Communist Manifesto in the top 20

lol American academia is fucked up

If you are interested in The Prince I would suggest The Dictators Handbook

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>>10005728
>write the edgiest book in the world as a prank
>yfw centuries later, kids and normies still fall for the prank

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>>10005918
>as a prank
CITATION NEEDED AND/OR GO BACK TO PLEBBIT

>>10005882
correct approach to what, exactly?

im not gonna read a thousand fucking super old books that are largely/partially outdated. its so elitist, that everyone has to read all of these "best" books. some of the best books ive read came out a few years ago, and im positive theres tonns of books like those. its just harding getting someone to recommend them, cuz everyones stuck on aristotle or whatever

>>10005918
nu uh, it isnt

You could try Behave by Sapolsky.

John McPhee - Annals of the Former World

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>>10005728
CV Wedgwood's 30 Years War
Churchills Marlborough
Shelby Foote's Civil War

All tied

Barbara Tuchman - A Distant Mirror

>>10005961
>not gonna read
>outdated
>elitist

You don't have the right mindset to read any book, old or new.

What you really want is to read newspapers.

>>10005941
>>10005961
http://www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/flor-mach-mattingly.htm

tl;dr, Machiavelli's hatred of Borgia and love of republicanism and public virtue (as demonstrated in his commentary on livy) is in direct contradiction to this shit.

>>10005750
Delving into hard, dry and monotonous non-fiction literature is clearly not the best option for you in your current state. I reccomend reading high school tier fiction until your vocabulary and attention span are broad enough to be able to read, comprehend and apply the implicit lessons present in the classics.

>>10005982
i am reading plenty books dude, and i am open to reading older shit. some of the best shit ive read (thomas paine, machiavelli, alexander hamilton) is pretty old, but, well, my point is just that im just trying to find the best among more modern shit. say i want to learn the politics of asia (random example), then id rather read the super fucking dope book some guy recommends me, instead of wading through a bunch of less concise material.

what im getting at is, yea those old books are good i guess, but maybe recommend something that hasnt been recommended a billion times already? when someone says "recommend good film plx" then only the normiest of normies say "pulp fiction", as if though that guy hasnt heard of pulp fucking fiction

>>10005977
>>10005976
>>10005969
>>10005968
ill check out of all of those. thanks

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>>10005977
This is a masterpiece

>In their Dance of the Savages, the masqueraders capered before the revelers, imitating the howls of wolves and making obscene gestures while the guests tried to discover their identity. Charles was teasing and gesticulating before the fifteen-year-old Duchesse de Berry when Louis d’Orléans and Philippe de Bar, arriving from dissipations elsewhere, entered the hall accompanied by torches despite the ban. Whether to discover who the dancers were, or deliberately courting danger—accounts of the episode differ—Louis held up a torch over the capering monsters. A spark fell, a flame flickered up a leg, first one dancer was afire, then another. The Queen, who alone knew that Charles was among the group, shrieked and fainted. The Duchesse de Berry, who had recognized the King, threw her skirt over him to protect him from the sparks, thus saving his life. The room filled with the guests’ sobs and cries of horror and the tortured screams of the burning men. Guests who tried to stifle the flames and tear the costumes from the writhing victims were badly burned. Except for the King, only the Sire de Nantouillet, who flung himself into a large wine-cooler filled with water, escaped. The Count de Joigny was burned to death on the spot, Yvain de Foix and Aimery Poitiers died after two days of painful suffering. Huguet de Guisay lived for three days in agony, cursing and insulting his fellow dancers, the dead and the living, until his last hour. When his coffin was carried through the streets, the common people greeted it with cries of “Bark, dog!”

>>10005993
lol could you be a bigger homo

>>10005869
lmao you got him good

>>10005993
Oh yes, once you're ready, do start with the Greeks. It's just like Shakespeare. They're outdated, seemingly unapplicable to modern life and dry, but one cannot be a true well rounded and worthy patrician without the knowledge and metaphors present in them.

>>10005993
you are the reason people who read get bullied in grade school

>>10005995
If something has been recommended a million times, maybe you should try reading it, instead of becoming weirdly hostile and refusing to even acknowledge it.

If you don't have solid foundations, you'll just run through libraries like a headless chicken.

>learn the politics of asia (random example)
Yeah, go read the newspapers.

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>>10005999
What a waste of trips.

>>10006011
t. has never read the Greeks (or Shakespeare)

>>10006020
Lol ok faggot

>>10006016
i dont refuse to acknowledge old greek books n stuff, nor am i unwilling to read it. but i am unwilling to read it all. im sure youve seen the copypasta, of like 100 books that "you HAVE TO START WITH THIS", and its like... how about no. thats a very elitist mindset, and so id rather figure out which of those hundreds of books are actually worthwhile (as i said, ive read some of it, and some of it feels largely outdated, and some of it seems ahead of its time, like paine & machiavelli). but i dont need a thread on /lit/ to tell me aristotle was a smart fucker. but i do need some help to find contemporary books that are worth reading, because they dont get giant copypasta like aristotle does.

and it is elitist, as this spaghetti perfectly illustrated: >>10005993

>>10006032
>these books are not really worthwhile bro, it's just a meme
>also I got to read them all otherwise Santa will slap my ass

>>10006032
>not reading classics out of a pure urge to be contrarian

I too have problems with the rigidity of /lit/, but that is retarded. You really do have to start with Plato and Herodotus and Thucydides and Xenophon.

>>10006048
its not out of an urge to be contrarian, its that its less interesting to me. the most interesting books ive read have largely been from the last 100 years.

>>10006048
>You really do have to start with Plato and Herodotus and Thucydides and Xenophon
come on dude, you must be joking? this board cant be THIS elitist? this is mind-boggling

>>10005728
Sorted by category:

ideological and philosophical works:
-"Hagakure" by Tsunetomo Yamamoto (there's dozens of cut versions out there that lack major parts though): basically a series of essays about dath being preferable to dishonor and ways to stay honorable without dying. basically Machiavelli without murder and torture.

-"The forest passage" by Ernst Jünger: philosophical work about totalitarian states and why and how to fight them

Instructional books:
-"The total resistance" by Dach: though mostly a military guerilla manual, this book also contains around 50 pages on the ways totalitarian countries (especially the 3rd Reich and the USSR) attempt to brainwash their citizens - interestingly, almost all of them are also common in the EU countries and the US
-John Seymore's books on self sufficiency

historical:
-"The outlaws" by E. Salomon: about "right wing" (many of them weren't right wing, but are considered such nowadays) militias in germany 1918-1923 and their motivations for fighting.

Also, multiple poetic works that you most likely won't be able to read as they're written in german, most notably "Der ewige Brunnen" and basically everything by Körner and Dahn.

>>10006060
quality post. thank you

>>10006052
It looks "elitist" to say Plato only because you haven't read him.

"Road to Serfdom" by Hayek

redpilled in 1 2 3

Andrew Motion's biography of Philip Larkin

The Kybalion

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>>10005806
You're the one who said "neck yourself faggot" over someone using an imdb list as an example.

Chill.

DotW

The True Believer
Crowds and Power
Meditations
On the Shortness of Life
The 33 Strategies of War
Why Don't We Learn from History?
Antifragile
Thinking, Fast and Slow
The Invention of Nature
The Power Broker
The Big Short
Zero to One

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>>10005996
Them dudes look like green with the trichromes n errythang

>>10006924
absolutely S U B V E R S I V E post, my dude. ill read the ones there that i havent already

>>10005750
Start with plato's republic.
>not modern enough
You need to understand the Classics before you can really understand modern Western political thought because no matter what policy or ideology it all stems from these basic ideas. If you want to give yourself a leg up you might also want to delve into Eastern Classics on Legalism and Confucianism can help you in understanding and reflecting on modern political thought as well as seeing the shape of Eastern politics in a different way.