I've always read fiction growing up, now i want to read for self improvement and knowledge...

I've always read fiction growing up, now i want to read for self improvement and knowledge. How is this book list I made? what should I add to it? what should I cut out?

Consider starting with the Greeks.

Must that be first? I've read the Iliad and the odyssey but that is a lot of greek literature.

No. It's just a Veeky Forums meme.

good.

Great list, Aurelius and Nietzsche are great, although I would only read the latter after you have acquired a broad general knowledge of philosophy, as he is quite challenging and easy to misunderstand

I would recommend reading Humes Enquiry, Richard Dawkins "Unweaving the Rainbow", Paines "Rights of Men" or Hitchens version of that as well as some basic book about political philosophy (Locke perhaps).

Also a bit more history (maybe start with Burr by Gore Vidal) and science (Dawkins) to broaden your knowledge. I feel like your Military section is overly large

Bump

Great! i'll look into those, any recommendations for Locke? Yes, my military section is large because it is an interest of mine and I can use these books as a buffer to not get burnt out plus it is part of General Mattis' book recommendations for leaders (with some others I was recommended) so I still consider it self improvement.

if you're interested in the art of war, check out the book of five rings too. tao te ching and dhammapada if you're interested in what musashi miyamoto came from.

Okay! thanks

I don't recommended Nietzsche if you don't have a good grasp of philosophy already. And even then, you probably shouldn't start reading him directly but instead read someone else's book on Nietzsche's philosophy. To appreciate Nietzsche, one should already be familiar with the Greeks and also Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer, at least!

Philosophy of science is also important, you should check out Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Jürgen Habermas, Francois Lyotard and Thomas Kuhn.

In the political category I'd say that Ayn Rand's doorstopper is total crap. Why don't you read, for example, Friedrich Hayek's books if you want to read some "libertarian" author? I highly recommend Machiavelli though, and Michel de Montaigne's Essays (published in 1580) goes well with it.

Other "political classics" recommendations:
Theodor Adorno/Max Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment
Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Robert Michels: Political Parties
Stefan Zweig: The World of Yesterday
Hilaire Belloc: The Servile State
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract

Some more recommendations in the religion/sociology/history domain:
Émile Durkheim: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Johan Huizinga: The Waning of the Middle Ages
Mircea Eliade: The Myth of the Eternal Return
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie: Montaillou
G. K. Chesterton: The Orthodoxy
Pierre Bourdieu: Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction

Okay I can read the Greeks but any specific Kant, Hagel or Schopenhauer works?
Ill definitely write those down thank you!
This is the second time i've read this why is it crap? and should I skip the topic all together?
Really? good I plan on reading the prince next!
thanks for all the recommendations! is there any advice in the order of which I read them?

Thank you! i needed more in that area! what would you recommend reading first out of those?

Again, maybe you shouldn't read Kant, Hegel or Schopenhauer directly, at least not all of them. The gist is to understand the outline of Kantian metaphysics (transcendental idealism) and how it was the starting point for the whole German Idealism and eventually the Continental Philosophy. Hegel (Phenomenology of the Spirit) and Schopenhauer (Critique of the Kantian Philosophy, The World as Will and Representation) were the most notable philosophers building on Kant's thought, while also critiquing/criticizing him. Nietzsche's role was to provide a kind of an endpoint to the whole Romanticism/German Idealism movement, attacking Romanticism's/Schopenhauer's "world-weariness" and "resignation".

Rand's book is crap because it shoves Anarcho-Capitalism down your throat and as a science fiction story it is just too long-winded and dull. Reading actual economics/sociological books with realistic ideas about capitalist/libertarian systems is more fruitful. Just read the plot of Atlas Shrugged from Wikipedia instead and some reviews.

Its difficult to put those books/authors I recommended in any order. Maybe the more "accessible" and/or more "important" are these:
Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery (the whole falsificationism stuff etc.)
Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic... (a prime example of a well-articulated political-sociological theory)
Émile Durkheim: The Elementary Forms... (in the same vein as Weber, both are founders of modern sociology)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract (classical political philosophy, the foundations of the sovereign state and republicanism)
Adorno & Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment (somewhat Spenglerian critique of the Enlightenment and its products: Capitalism, Fascism and Communism, one of the founding texts of the "new left")
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie: Montaillou (classic in so-called micro-history, detailing the lives of "ordinary" people)

>Jurgen Habemas
What about his student Hans-Hermann Hoppe?

I didn't know Hans-Hermann Hoppe was Habermas' student! Well, I haven't read any of Hoppe's books but judging from what I've read about HIM, they are quite different. HHH seems to be a bit bonkers and he hangs out with the "alt-right" personalities who like his monarchist-anarcho-capitalist stuff. Habermas is nowadays a moderate socialist and supports the EU and the "European Establishment" in general. But his old books are still great!

My first impression of the list is a younger me but in a different time. You seem to have picked up on the Peterson hype. Which I'm not going to judge.

However, I personally wouldn't read Mein Kampf which is gibberish and maybe neither The Communist Manifesto. I do think it is good to read about both national-socialism and communism from a historical or history of ideas perspective. I enjoyed Revolutionary Dreams by Richard Stites which discusses Russian communism and anarchism. I've read about National-Socialism from different kinds of sources.

I cannot recommend Oswald Spengler at all. Admitted, I have not read him, but have read about him in other sources. If you want to read about laws/cycles in history, try The Great Leveler and War and Peace and War.

Since you are interested in military tactics perhaps you will enjoy How Wars Are Won.

from /pol/ right?

Get the fuck back to your containment board

Alright, I have heard Spengler is controversial maybe I will try that. I have picked up on the Peterson hype for many reasons, but I understand that I need to read more as well as listen to his critics. Can you really get the same feel for Marx and Hitler's beliefs reading those? I have studied both of the movements from a historical perspective but one of the reasons I put those two books down was to get thoughts directly from the source.
That is a lot of detail, thanks so much for this! it seems there is quite a bit to read just to get a basic understanding and continue

>read to improve myself
You niggas never stop making me laugh

Its only a containment board to those with retarded beliefs, and i am not one of them.
I picked these based on book lists from general mattis, /pol/ and a few other personalities. I like /pol/s reading lists because there are some good recommendations from perspectives that most people actively try to avoid, also because /pol has so many ideologies constantly trying to shitpost in competition it leads to a wealth of different "redpilled" book lists that you can pick apart. There is a reason I posted here and thats to find out which ones are garbage and what to replace them with.