Ten Classic Books I Recommend For Any Stage Of Life

A book enables you to think and rethink. You can practice conceptualization more deeply in a book than you can in any other medium. Reading will lead you to integrate your own personality at the highest and most abstract level of organization because you will be learning to think.

Great books observe people, particularly those that involve interesting and profound character transformations. After all, the greatest of books are not about ordinary people during ordinary times in their lives — such ordinariness is not useful since we already know how to be ordinary. Talented writers create stories that distill and aggregate; they omit everyday, common material but include much excitement. Fiction is, therefore, a distillation of compelling experiences.

The following list is one of books that attend to the distillation process, with a few nonfiction additions included as well. They are works I have recommended for years and continue to do so, as they have all been particularly influential to me.

1. “The Road to Wigan Pier” by George Orwell (1937)

‎HarperCollins

George Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier” was published in 1937 by the Left Book Club, a highly influential Left-wing publishing group during that time. Born as an upper-middle-class Englishman, he worked his entire life to overcome the snobbery that came with such a standing. (“Down and Out in Paris and London,” another worthwhile read, recounts his experiences as a low-end service worker and drifter through two major cities.) In the first part of the book, he details the lives of coal miners and their families after spending time with them in mining towns in the northern UK. They led tragically wretched lives in extenuating harsh conditions — no teeth by 30, black lung by 40. Socialism wasn’t all that popular in Britain at that time, and Orwell was an astute critic of socialist thinking but was also sympathetic to it and the working class. He sought out to discover if Marxists have sympathy for the working class, his findings of which he extrapolates in the second part of this book. He illuminates the understanding that much of socialist thought found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor.

2. “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway (1952)

Scribner

Published in 1952, “The Old Man and the Sea” was Ernest Hemingway’s last major work of fiction and one he won the Pulitzer for the following year. Thirty years prior, numerous American writers ended up as expatriates in Paris after World War I, Hemingway among them. Part of his transformation to a great literary figure came as a result of being out of his home country. After all, you can’t see what your country is until you leave it. You have to go into the unknown. You already know what you know, so you must go where you have not been. While Santiago, the protagonist in “The Old Man and the Sea” is, indeed, a fisherman, he has not caught a fish in 84 days, so he travels far out into the sea in pursuit of saving his livelihood. This tale is one of an agony-induced battle of life and death against external circumstances — fatigue, sharks, hunger — and enduring faith of identity, resilience, and relentlessness.

3. “Beyond Good and Evil” by Friedrich Nietzsche (1886)

Penguin Classics

It is difficult to estimate how intelligent Friedrich Nietzsche was, but I suspect he was one in a billion. A full professor at the young age of 24, he was not even required to write a dissertation — in a time when that never happened. Nietzsche, like the authors of most great works, unconsciously collected patterns from his interactions with the world and then gave those interactions initial formulation, the patterns of which are deep and multi-level. His formulation translates the patterns and interactions into seeds of future ideas, a formulation that makes “Beyond Good and Evil” an incredibly dense work. In it, he is interested in the problem of value, though not in a scientific manner, such as how the world functions. Nietzsche is concerned with how you should conduct yourself in the world. We are active creatures, always moving from one point to another, and we are guided by our desires — not only in so far as individual desires, but also as part of a structure that consists of how those desires relate to others. This constant mutual and formative dance between an individual and a group culminating in the organization of society and psyche is the process about which Nietzsche writes. Reading philosophers like Nietzsche allows you the opportunity to think through how to beneficially organize your desires in a manner you would not be capable of doing on your own.

4. “Notes from Underground” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864)

Vintage Classics

“Notes from Underground” is a great book — a very short, absolutely brilliant, compelling, dark read. It is the confession of a miserable, resentful, murderously genocidal bureaucrat who evaluates his own soul and confesses his sins. It is also a critique of the idea of utopia oriented toward security. Dostoevsky explores a set of ideas that are currently and culturally tearing us apart, and he critiques the idea of a materialist utopia — more specifically, an idea of an eventual utopia based on security and safety. In this novella, he posits an interesting notion: that if people lived in a utopia where all they had to do was eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species, they would go mad and destroy it, just so something unexpected and remarkable could happen. In other words, we would find the forbidden fruit. Dostoevsky knew we are made for more than safety and security. He knew we are made for adventure.

5. “Modern Man: Search of a Soul” by Carl Jung (1933)

Martino Fine Books; Reprint Edition

“Modern Man” is a philosophical work that addresses various facets of spirituality. Broadly, Jung’s fundamental contribution is, in my view, his analysis of hero mythology. Unlike Nietzsche (who believed that with the collapse of religious systems, we would have to consciously produce a new set of values), Jung believed the psyche was the source of all value. For Jung, the path forward was not a matter of creating new values, but of discovering the already-present, dormant values within us. In order for us to benefit from the same protective structures that our ancestors benefited from, Jung thought we must understand what they mean consciously. (This is, after all, the same philosopher who proclaimed people do not have ideas; ideas have people.) Jung was trying to resurrect deep religious representations so people could align themselves with those representations once again.

6. “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl (1946)

Beacon Press

Viktor Frankl’s background is grounded in existentialism, the philosophers of which are concerned with authenticity — namely, truth. Philosophically, we know we cannot come up with an ultimate definition of truth because we are not infinitely informed. However, that does not eradicate the validity of the concept of truth. One of the ways to contend existentially with that is to determine what is false. In “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Frankl documents his experiences during World War II as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps. He was convinced the horrors of Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Mao’s China took place because the individuals who made up those societies were inauthentic in their own use of thought and speech. He did not frame this as a following-orders theory, but, instead, as a bottom-up-pathology theory. Admittedly, Frankl is not a classic personality theorist; further, he addresses something that is deeper than the positive illusions of terror management theorists. Frankl’s theory is based on the analysis of an entire century: that societies become carnivorous and pathological in precise proportion to the degree to which the individuals who make up that society become deceitful and irresponsible. I have never encountered a political or economic analysis or claim that has anywhere near as much power. And while it is a terrifying proposition, it is a proposition that elicits meaning: Your life is meaningful.

7. “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding (1954)

Penguin Books

William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” is a work that delves into decisions between right and wrong, formation of a new social hierarchy and the power sought within that hierarchy, and distinguishing elements of order and chaos. Golding was a philosophy teacher before he joined the Navy, so it makes sense his novel would explore philosophical wonderings. Psychological literature shows that about 4% of two-year-old males will kick, hit, bite, and steal when grouped together, but despite their temperamental proclivity to be aggressive, most are usually socialized — whether by parents, siblings, or an external influence — by the age of four, at least to a degree that helps them control or integrate their aggression. Little clinical evidence suggests those traits can be ameliorated past four. Some boys are naturally conscientious while others will become so if their culture ascribes to such conscientiousness. Without such culture, they regress. “Lord of the Flies” plays out some of these notions, among others, when an airplane crashes on a deserted island, leaving a group of preadolescent boys the only survivors. Ultimately, a totalitarian state makes itself manifest through the boys’ attempts to govern themselves.

8. “A Confession” by Leo Tolstoy (1882)

Amazon.com. Independently published.

Leo Tolstoy won the Nobel Prize for Literature five consecutive years and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909. He was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church but underwent somewhat of a spiritual crisis in the 1870s, which he writes about in his 1882 publication of “A Confession,” a short but exceptionally powerful book. At the height of his international fame as the most well-known author in the world, he had wealth beyond imagination at the time; he was influential, admired, and greatly respected. But for years, he had an obsession with suicide, to the point he would not go into his barn with a rope or gun because he feared he would either hang or shoot himself. He found a way out of his despair, and he describes the causes of why that happened and what he did to find solace — and answers.

9. “Life at the Bottom” by Theodore Dalrymple (2001)

Publisher:‎ Ivan R. Dee

Theodore Dalrymple has been compared to George Orwell, which is high praise indeed. He is one of the writers I admire for the content and the quality of his prose. Dalrymple has traveled the world over, witnessing the depths of poverty in places from developing countries such as Africa to inner cities in Great Britain. “Life at the Bottom” has had a profound cultural impact. In this work, he espouses what could be described as the philosophy of poverty as he distinguishes between the poverty of multigenerational impoverished segments of society and the poverty of absolute deprivation he encountered in developing countries. I was struck by his combination of broad, worldly experience, his career as a psychiatrist, and his willingness to pen such critical observations, a combination I had never encountered with any other thinker before reading “Life at the Bottom.”

10. “Cancer Ward” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1968)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition

I have read, studied, and taught the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for most of my career. I was given the distinguished honor of writing the foreword to the single volume 50th anniversary abridged edition of his “Gulag Archipelago” in 2018. This was perhaps the single greatest honor that has ever befallen me, given the historical importance of Solzhenitsyn’s book, as well as its great personal impact on me. Solzhenitsyn completed “Cancer Ward” in 1966, seven years prior to “The Gulag Archipelago” and 21 years after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter that led to his arrest and sentencing of eight years in forced labor camps followed by exile. In 1957, he was formally rehabilitated and settled down to teaching and writing. Drawing on his own experiences in labor camps, Solzhenitsyn centers this book on patients in the cancer ward of a hospital while simultaneously telling of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge.

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Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of “Maps of Meaning,” “12 Rules For Life,” and “Beyond Order.” You can now listen to or watch his popular lectures on DailyWire+.

Be sure to order his newest book, “We Who Wrestle with God” (Portfolio/Penguin)