A few days ago the First Reader found a list of ’18 Classic Books Every Man Should Read in 2018′ and being an avid reader for over fifty years now, he clicked on it and read through their list. A little bit later, he made a snort of derision. “Most of these are crap,” he told me. “And some are boy’s books. At least Huckleberry Finn.” Then he sent me the link and suggested I create a list for the blog. “Do you want to make suggestions?” I asked, then pointed at the shelves of L’Amour. “Your favorite of those?”
He took a minute to think about it. “Sackett Brand if I have to pick just one.”
So I posted the question on Facebook, and Mewe, and Gab. A couple of days later, I had far more suggestions than I could possibly use for a reasonably-sized list, so I decided I’d break it up into two lists. One is a list of thoughtful books every man, and woman, should read. The other will be a book list for boys who we want to grow into men.
This is a list targeted more toward the masculine virtues, but I’ve personally read many of the books, and highly recommend them for any well-rounded mind, sex notwithstanding. We did discuss creating a list of books for the feminine virtues as well, and I plan to come back to that at another time. I’m also dropping the time constraint. These are timeless books. There’s no deadline, no one is expecting a book report from the reader here, and there’s no grade penalty if you skip some. This is a recommended list, not a required one!
And on that note, many of the contributors suggested that pleasure reading is every bit as important as the hefty mindful improvement books. Too many of today’s schoolchildren are indoctrinated to think of reading as an onerous chore and once they are no longer required to read, they quit reading. I’d challenge you, if you think you hate reading, (although I suspect few of my readers fall into that category) to pick up a fiction book and read for the joy of it. Because men are sexy when they read. Women are sexy when they read. And reading the same books makes for fantastic conversations…
Collected Works of Kipling
Collected Works by Robert Service
Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlen
Federalist Papers by Publius
Bluejacket’s Manual
Redliners by David Drake
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Old Man and the Boy by Robert Rourke
The Essay on Duty, and the Essay on Friendship by Cicero
What’s Wrong With the World by GK Chesterton
Caliphate by Tom Kratman
Plato’s Republic
Descarte’s Discourse on Method
The Way West by AB Guthrie
Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer
I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane
To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Tell the Truth by Jeff Cooper
On Hunting by Ortega y Gasset
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen by H Beam Piper
The Art of Blacksmithing by Alex W Bealer
the Cook and Housekeeper’s Complete Universal Dictionary by Mary Eaton
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
The Sea Wolf by Jack London
Shane by Jack Schaefer
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky
A Town like Alice by Nevil Shute
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Harvest of Stars by Poul Anderson
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The Rise and Decline of the Third Reich by William Shirer
War as I Knew It by George S Patton Jr
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Autobiography of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
All’s Quiet on the Western Front by Erich M Remarque
For Whom the Bells Toll by Hemingway
May Your First Love be Your Last by Gregory Clark
Nero Wolfe (any title) by Rex Stout
Conan by Robert Howard
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Abolition of Man by CS Lewis
Declare by Tim Powers
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenhitsyn
The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck
The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer
Chilton’s Easy Car Care
The Art of Manliness by Brett McKay
The Unorthodox Engineers by Colin Kapp
She by H Rider Haggard
Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know by Hirsch
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
Lone Star Planet by H Beam Piper
Dune by Herbert
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long by Robert Heinlein
On War by Clausewitz
The Nightwatch by David Atlee Phillips
Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts
The Martian by Andy Weir
Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brien
The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll
True Grit by Charles Portis
Complete Do It Yourself Manual from Handyman Magazine
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Finite and Infinite Games by Karse
this Kind of War by TR Fehrenbach
Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour by George Washington
Comments
32 responses to “Classic Books Every Man Should Read”
I will note that in my college law class, we had a final paper on one of the constitutional amendments, The instructor thought me citing the federalist papers was interesting… apparently no one else in the entire class did
Wow. Just… Yeah. I need to make my kids read them.
I was also the opnly one that did the second. This was also about two years before Heller.
Nit, Caliphate by Tom Kratman is TOO NEW to be a classic. 😉
Well, I hate the term insta-classic, but… I can’t quibble that it’s a must-read for the modern era.
“The Martian” is even newer…
With that opening, I would recommend John Ringo’s “The Last Centurion,” or the series beginning with “Live Free or Die.”
For developing “adulting” in boys – the “March” series by Ringo and David Weber.
40+ years ago Jerry Pournelle published list of books needed to restart civilization after the apocalypse. Not the same thing. but I bought his top 4. They were: 1) The Way Things Work (Vols I and II); 4) The Merck Manual; 4) The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.
Were any of them reloading manuals?
I’m going to have to see if I can track that down. I have a Merck, it was my Dad’s and it’s outdated but precious. I have *coff* several chemistry texts and books.
Well, for Dr. Pournelle’s purposes, the older, the better. IIRC, one of his selections was the 1910 Britannica.
I think I missed the post on FB, doggone-it!
Good list though. I’ve even read several of them.
Unlike my usual, I only posted this on my personal timeline. Even at that, it got overwhelming – something like 190 comments this morning! Feel free to add suggestions in comments. I’ll be doing the ‘boy’s to men’ list tomorrow.
For “Classics” I would add Common Sense by Thomas Paine.
I would have suggested King Solomon’s Mines over She. She just didn’t flow well for me in the middle of the story.
For the boys-to-men suggestions:
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, you could pair it with Speaker For the Dead, but they are very different in style.
The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien should be on every list for boys. The same with The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by Lewis.
The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Willamson is a favorite, but I hate giving him publicity since he’s such an A-hole online.
Captain’s Courageous by Kipling probably falls under Collected Works up above.
Several of those are on the list already! LOL – maybe I ought to have published them simultaneously.
I would not so humbly suggest that the name and the purpose of the list be repurposed.A list such as this is waaaay too general, and should be customized to for each reader. For example, as a general suggestion, give your kid The Hobbit. If s/he likes that, THEN give them LOTR. They’ll be prequalified for it, not to mention more equipped an inclined to enjoy and understand.I’d make a List of Books I’d Hate to Admit I Hadn’t Read. (Assuming, of course, it was someone I wanted to like me.) I can forgive an ADULT for not knowing much about Pirsig’s Motorcycle Maintenance, but no Romeo and Juliet, MacBeth, or Travels Abroad?
This list was created in direct response to another list – I’ll link that one in when I’m home again, I missed it this morning. Tomorrow’s list is different, and I’ll talk more about that in the preliminary comments.
No Edgar Allen Poe?
No Lois Bujold?
Only one Twain?
Twain gets a much larger mention in tomorrow’s list. No, this was classics, so there were few modern author suggestion. I love Bujold and agree that the Vorkosigan books, at minimum, are must-reads. But I don’t make the lists – I let other people nominate titles. It’s always fascinating to see what’s suggested. And what isn’t!
Feel free to add suggestions in comments.
I would mash together “Cordelia’s Honor” which I think is classic age and also put “”Young Miles” , then Curse of Chalion as LMB’s musts.
I’ll even add Lackey’s The Last Herald Mage trilogy.
Poe is harder but Telltale Heart and The Raven.
Enders Game by Card
I suspect Cordelia’s Honor will make the feminine virtues list.
I would have suggested ‘The Name of the Rose’ by Eco
I would agree. A good read.
An interesting list. A few are still on my TBR list honestly. Others though, Plato’s “Republic”, ick ick ick….
How did Starshiip Troopers not make the list?
It’s on the boy’s list for tomorrow.
The unspoken purpose of this list, of course, is to provide a general road map of further reading material. just like any good dealer, or like Jim Baen used to say, the first hit is free.
Precisely. With any list I curate, actually, they are meant to be appetizers – to leave you hungry for more. To introduce you to new authors and books but they are certainly never an end-all-be-all list. Even the way I generate the lists is intended to whet the curiosity, by involving dozens if not hundreds of respondents.
As two other books:
Shirer’s *other* book The Fall of the Third Republic (about France) is probably better than his Third Reich book.
Potter The Impending Crisis. It’s about American from 1845 to 1861, and how we moved from one country in which Unionism was the core political issue to which all other issues such as slavery were secondary, to a country marching into a civil war. Potter answers the key question ‘We had had slavery for centuries. Why did we have the Civil War when it happened, and not decades sooner or later?’
I’ll second Potter. His writing is magnificent, and although the book is older, it is one of the few I kept from grad school because I knew I’d be referring to it again.
I tried Moby Dick on a couple of occasions, but I never slogged through it.
I have read a surprising number of the books on the list.
As was already said, a good starting point.
[…] list was born out of the list I curated last week, it’s just taken me some time to get my act together and publish this one. This is, as all my […]