MarkFord
“There is creative reading as well as creative writing.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
10 Books That Made Me Feel Smarter
(They Might Make You Feel Smarter, Too)
Some books make you wiser. Some books make you kinder. Some books make you reconsider your beliefs. And some books make you feel – well, they make you feel smarter.
Here are 10 books that did that for me…
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
I’m reading Sapiens now for the 3rd time. It’s not really anthropology, although it’s framed that way. It’s a philosophical look at the nature of man and his belief systems.
The thesis: Human history has been shaped by three major revolutions – the Cognitive Revolution (70,000 years ago), the Agricultural Revolution (10,000 years ago), and the Scientific Revolution (500 years ago). We developed the ability to think abstractly during the Cognitive Revolution. It is what distinguishes us from other animals and has allowed us to command the planet. But, Harari points out, it’s not all good. Not by any means. Most of our core beliefs today are based on unconsciously accepted myths.
I rejected this last idea the first time I read the book. Now, I think it’s brilliant.
- Ten Philosophical Mistakes
by Mortimer Adler
Critics of this book, of which there are many, condemn it because it’s a criticism of the best-known Enlightenment philosophers (Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Kant) that, according to Adler, made some critical errors in their thinking – errors that lead to sloppy and dangerous ideas by the modern and post-modern philosophers that followed them. Adler’s recommendation: Stick to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.
I haven’t read Aquinas, but I’m a big fan of Aristotle. I wasn’t bothered by Adler’s critique of Hobbes and crew. In any case, this is a great primer on philosophical thought. If you’d like a thin book that can teach you a great deal about the major philosophical ideas beneath the dominant political and social ideas today, you won’t do better than to start with this.
- Motivation in the Real World: The Art of Getting Extra Effort From Everyone – Including Yourself
by Saul W. Gellerman
You’ll have trouble finding this book. I’m glad I made the effort. It is simply the best book I’ve ever read about group motivation and productivity. It was the first book I’d read on these subjects that made sense to me, that mirrored my experiences in business.
One of Gellerman’s key insights is that people generally, and employees in particular, are much less malleable than business management theories would have you believe. In fact, if you apply his logic to your own business, you may discover, as I have, that much of the commonly accepted “best” practices are useless at best.
If you can find it, buy it.
- A Glossary of Literary Terms
by M.H. Abrams
Sometimes definitions can provide more than just the literal rudiments of understanding. Sometimes they can unlock worlds of thought and history. That’s what Abrams’s classic glossary does. I was lucky. I read this when I was young. It helped me appreciate every work of fiction I’ve read or seen since.
- Man’s Search for Meaning
by Viktor E. Frankl
This is on many lists of important/influential books. And with good reason. Part memoir and part psychological treatise, Man’s Search for Meaning recounts Frankl’s experiences in a Nazi death camp and presents the philosophical and psychological theories he developed as a result.
At the time of the author’s death in 1997, the book had sold over 10 million copies and had been translated into 24 languages.
- Economics in One Lesson
by Henry Hazlitt
The first book on economics I ever read was Das Kapital, by Karl Marx, when I was in high school. I didn’t read it cover to cover. I was using it rather than reading it, using it to confirm the naïve ideas I had about economics back then.
I read Hazlitt 30 years later, after I’d had enough life experience to understand the fundamental flaws of Communism. Economics in One Lesson will be an eye opener for anyone that gets their economic theories from newspapers and magazines. It explains why so many of the most popular views about economic dysfunction are unsound and why social agendas will almost always fail. And it does so in the clearest and most reasonable way.
- The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
by Harold Bloom
In The Western Canon, published in 1994, Bloom defends the idea that there is such a thing as a tradition of great thinking in Western literature by discussing the work of 26 writers whom he sees as exemplary.
They include William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, Moliere, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Fernando Pessoa, and Samuel Becket.
What makes this book exceptional is Bloom’s criticism of what he calls The School of Resentment, which includes Marxist literary criticism, feminist literary criticism, New Historicism, Deconstructionism, and other post-modern idiocies.
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
by Malcolm Gladwell
I have always been a fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s essays in The New Yorker. This was the first book of his that I read, and I was startled by it. It helped me understand how big money is made in business – not by coming up with “innovative” products but by jumping on a trend that has been around and percolating for years.
As I’ve said before, of all the marketing ideas I’ve heard over the years, this one was among the most useful.
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
by Robert Cialdini
There is nothing here that any seasoned marketer doesn’t know at least as well as Cialdini, who is an academic. But he does such a good job of explaining his “principles of influence” that the book became, accidentally, a bestseller.
You see, Influence was originally positioned as a caveat emptor for consumers – i.e., watch out for these nasty tricks that marketers play on you. Consumers, understandably, had no interest in it. (Such books rarely sell more than 5000 copies.) But businesspeople loved it. They bought thousands and thousands of copies, using it, ironically, as a training manual for their marketers and salespeople.
- Always Looking: Essays on Art
by John Updike
I’ve been reading art criticism for more than 40 years. In my humble opinion, 90% of it is unbearable bullshit. And if you read criticism of the moderns, the percentage of BS is even higher. Maybe 99%. The only exception to this that I have found is the criticism of John Updike, the novelist.
Updike’s essays are a pleasure to read. They both inform you about the work and comment on it in a way that is not pretentious. He takes a phenomenological approach to criticism. He reports on each piece in terms of his own intellectual and emotional experience of it. He doesn’t make judgments. He makes observations. And most of them make sense.
The Importance of Reading the Right Books
Coming from a family of teachers and writers, I’ve always believed that reading was a special kind of virtue. But since I’ve always had a touch of dyslexia, I could never match my role model readers: Frank and Joan, my parents, who could consume a 400-page book in a single sitting.
Still, I try to read one or two books a week, and I generally read about 60 to 80 books a year. That’s more than most people my age read, and much more than millennials, but it’s just a tiny fraction of the 700,000 to 800,000 books published in English each year.
Given how much there is to choose from, I remind myself that it’s quality, not quantity, that counts. The trick is to read the right books – the rare books that will make you in some way better than you were when you opened to the first page.
The above 10 books stand out in my memory as books that, as I said, made me feel smarter. They not only opened my eyes to different perspectives, they presented challenging ideas and helped me understand new ways to think. In retrospect, it doesn’t surprise me that they were almost all controversial in some way when they were published and, in some cases, still are.
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