If you were to go back in time and tell your 18-year-old self what to read...

If you were to go back in time and tell your 18-year-old self what to read, what kind of curriculum would you construct and what books would be the most vital?

My diary desu

The bible

Unironically the Greeks and even moreso the Romans. I don't think I would have been ready for some of the more literary or philosophical works, but the histories could have done me a lot of good I think. Besides the general "literary foundation" cited by lit users as a reason for starting with the Greeks, on a personal level as someone growing up with either an absent or a very negative father figure in my life, I learned a lot about masculinity from the Greeks and Romans that I think people with more healthy family situations naturally learned as kids. They helped me (and continue to do so) to get at least some grasp on what life looks like as a man, and have done a lot to lead me in the right direction.

I'm 24 now and started reading them at 22, but I just wish I had read them earlier. I went through college and my most tenderly formative years with no guidance, and almost totally stagnated as a person until after graduation, which is when I started reading some Greeks. I've grown a lot since then, but that growth would have come easier and gone further in an "easy" environment like a college campus, with so many opportunities to meet new people and try new things.

This. I can't really say whether it's amazing or not, I'm not that well read yet, but I had long held a sort of blind faith that 'my country' was the good guys, encouraged by my father. This book helped me to understand the much more amoral existence of governments, or at least see them in a completely different light. It made me stop wasting my time concerning myself with meaningless propaganda politics and instead focusing on improving my awareness of things.

Read and reread Milton. Read until you know him completely. Read until he is a dead fish in the water, as DH Lawrence would say.

How much background in the bible would you recommend having for reading Milton? Obviously it's biblical in content, but from my mere passing knowledge of his topic, it seems like a Thomas Mann sort of mass-extrapolation of source material that's very brief in the actual bible.

i just would have told myself to manage my time better and read more instead of fucking around so much on the internet

if i could convert all the time i wasted shitposting and playing videogames as a teenager i would be fluent in another language, or have read another 150/200 books easy

I was well on the way to discovering what I needed to be reading by 18.
13, on the other hand... we could have been a contender...

If I could go back in time and see my 18 year old self I would just beat the shit out of him. He'll figure it out when he's older.