9 novels that are better than any self-help book

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]This video is sponsored by Squarespace.

[00:00:02]More about them in just a moment. I am a firm believer that reading great fiction can improve your life, often far more so than books explicitly written with that aim in mind. So, I've put together a list of nine books that I am extremely confident will treat you better than any self-help book. And in some cases, I actually think they offer a welcome alternative to the particular excesses and flaws of the self-help industry more generally. Some of the books I'll mention in this video, I've also talked about on the channel before, and some will be brand new. My name is Joe Foley, and this is unsolicited advice. The Road by Cormack McCarthy. The Road is arguably McCarthy's bleakest, but also potentially his most hopeful book. That sounds strange, but just hear me out for a second. It is incredibly bleak because it's set after a post-apocalyptic event where the brutalities of mankind aren't only visible, they're borderline universal. Whereas in something like Blood Meridian, the reader can pretend to themselves that there is a more civilized world out there beyond the confines of the book. The road offers no such poultry consolation. However, it is also a hopeful book because it follows the relationship between a father and his son and their love for one another as they travel across this complete nightmare. The son particularly is an uncommonly pure-hearted character. He becomes a symbol for the spark of goodness inside all of us that can persevere, however vulnerable and afraid, even in the most horrifying of circumstances. The road is a sort of culmination of the various gnostic themes in McCarthy's broader work.

[00:01:44]Because here in the figure of the sun, we have a living instantiation of the numa, the little piece of god that according to gnostic philosophy, we each have inside of us. The book is written a bit like a religious fable in classic McCarthy style. And that adds to the sense that within this single tale there is a broader significance to be found for our picture of humanity. One of the main reasons I chose this book in particular is that a perennial human problem is how to deal with evil and specifically the evils of other people.

[00:02:16]We all know that people can be cruel and hostile and on a more trivial level just make life difficult. Likewise, we often are in situations where we are powerless to face such intense interpersonal evil.

[00:02:29]If we were to fully comprehend the amount of needless suffering that mankind has caused itself throughout history and continues to do so today, I'd think we'd struggle to get out of bed in the morning. And at some level, I think that self-help authors know this.

[00:02:44]And this is why so many self-help books are focused on how we interact with other people and how to generally manage being with others. But often times, these books pretend there is a merely personal solution to the problem. And if we all just take the right mental attitude, then all of a sudden we will be insulated from interpersonal suffering. But even the most worked through philosophies in the world have only ever thought of this as a pipe dream available to the most advanced practitioners or occasionally as a limit that we can approach but we can never quite reach. Ancient Stoic authors are notoriously divided on whether the figure of the sage is actually attainable or whether it's something to strive towards despite its ultimate unattainability. And because the road is so very bleak yet also contains these very notable sparks of hope, it puts the reader through a very particular emotional journey whereby they are forced to look an almost comically dire and tragic situation full in the face. and yet affirm that there is still something worth living for and striving after. The contrast with your average self-help book is pretty palpable. There is no omnisolution in McCarthy. There's no one thing that will suddenly take all the pain away and make everything better. If you're anything like me, then at the end of the book, you'll be left both with a sense of how awful humanity can truly get, which I think is always a pretty worthwhile thought to have to prevent us from sleepwalking into becoming monsters, but also how even in the midst of this extreme awfulness, even tiny pieces of brilliance will still remain. It's not quite a grand story of redemption, but it is a stubbornly hopeful book, and it manages to be so without pretending that the post-apocalypse isn't that bad or by sticking a tright bow on it at the end.

[00:04:38]I don't want to spoil it, so I'm not going to say much more than that. But what I can basically promise you is that the road will stick with you. And not just because it is shockingly dark at points, but more because there are these brief moments where that darkness subsides. And if anything, I think those are the passages in the book that will stick with you. But before moving on, I just want to take a quick moment to thank today's sponsors, Squarespace. If you're looking to build a website, then you know it can be a real hassle. First, you have to find a domain name and then construct the entire thing from scratch.

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[00:05:42]Head to squarespace.com/unsolicited advice and use the code unsolicited advice to get a 14-day trial and 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain name. But anyway, back to the video. Aellow by William Shakespeare.

[00:05:59]Some of the most difficult human emotions to process, at least for me, are things like jealousy and envy and pride and anger. One of the reasons that Oll remains my absolute favorite Shakespeare play is because it deals with each of these with like frankly absurd levels of insight. I know it's not the most controversial take in the world, but Shakespeare really did have an insight into the depths of the human condition. Oll follows a Moorish Venetian commander Oll who has recently married Desdona, the daughter of a Venetian nobleman. Slowly over the course of the play, Iago, who Oll considers his best friend, but actually hates Oll with a passion, convinces Oll that Desdona is having an affair with Casio, who is Oll's captain. The play is over 400 years old, but I still don't want to spoil it. Many readings of the play focus on the significant racial elements since Oll's status as a Moore is a huge part of the way his character is treated and interacts with the other characters. But beyond this, the way the play examines the gradual deterioration of Athell's mental state and the break in his trust with Desdona just has a tremendous amount to teach us about some pretty universal human experiences. As Iago gradually talks around, we see the breaking of a human mind in action.

[00:07:18]First, Iago plays on Athell's insecurities. People have already tried to split him and Desdona apart because of his Moorish status. Why should he not expect that she too would eventually consider him unsuitable? This somber inadequacy both makes it easier for Iago to manipulate Oll and slowly morphs within Oll into a monstrous kind of rage. The most famous line in the play is probably, "Beware my lord of jealousy. It is the greeneyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on."

[00:07:49]And it's true that jealousy is a big theme, but I think that just as much of a theme is pride. Both individual pride because we get an insight into the vicissitudes of Oll's self viewpoint and self-conception and social pride as Oll occupies this strange place as both a celebrated general and a Moorish outsider. And although I hope that none of you will ever have a supposed friend deceive you into thinking that your wife is having an affair because you passed them over for a promotion, the emotions that Oll deals with or fails to deal with are very similar to experiences that we will probably have. Things like wounded pride or romantic fears or humiliation or deeply regretting losing your temper are not limited to Venetian military strategists. And similar to many of the books on this list or play in this case, the value in Oll is mostly in the emotional experience that you get by experiencing it, which is why it is difficult to communicate this in exact propositional language here. I'm sure that there will be behaviors in Oll that you'll recognize in yourself. And just as valuable is where you relate to the kind of villainous tendencies of Iago.

[00:09:01]Iago, just as much as Oll is jealous and envious, but he's envious of Casio and Oll. Unlike Oll's rage though, in Iago, the envy transforms into a cold, calculated, amoral desire just for revenge at any cost. Depending on your temperament, you may find that Iago, rather than Oll, is the person you see yourself most in. I think it's important to recognize our own capacity to truly be a cold, conniving bastard because there are so many cognitive capacities that work very hard to convince us that we're morally better than we actually are. And the reason that Oll works, at least for me, is that at its core, it is a dynamic of jealousy, pride, anger, a desire for revenge, and deceit. And these emotions in themselves thrown together aren't that unusual. But because it's Shakespeare, it's raised to a level of oporatic drama. For the record, that's why I think Shakespeare is so brilliant in general. But that's a story for another day. The point is, read Oll. It will help you understand things about yourself that you didn't even know were there. Or better yet, watch Oll. It is a play after all, and I've dropped a link to a particularly good production of it in the description. So, check it out. Let me know what you think. The plague by Albear Kamu. If the road deals largely with the heights of interpersonal evil, then the plague deals with all sorts of unpreventable evil, that is the suffering we face from the world in totality and the effect that it has on us. Kamu wrote this work partly as an allegory for the German occupation of France during World War II. But according to his notes, the intended meaning stretches far wider than this.

[00:10:44]Personally, I like the plague specifically for its treatment of senseless suffering. suffering that can't be reasoned with or necessarily combed effectively, but must simply be endured in an almost stubborn hopeless rebel kind of way. The plague also presents a very different response to suffering than the road. Rather than running from suffering or trying against all odds to safeguard a small sliver of hope, the plague encourages this outright revolt against suffering, even if you're barely making a dent on the sheer amount of suffering out there.

[00:11:20]It's a bit difficult to get your head around, but when you read the book, you will kind of understand what I mean. I think The Plague is also the most pro-social of Kamu's novels. Whereas The Stranger, his more famous work, follows a solitary absurdist in their sole encounter with the world's meaninglessness all by themselves, The Plague follows a group of people as they encounter the world's meaningless suffering embodied in the the infestation of the plague. And the difference between these two tales is pretty stark, as I've spoken about on the channel before. But my favorite moments in the plague aren't even necessarily the more overtly philosophical parts. A lot of people really enjoy the transformation of the priest, Father Panlu, from his initial stance of justifying the plague as a manifestation of God's wroth to describing his own faith as not just humility but humiliation. a word that he uses to describe his total submission to God's will even when he doesn't understand it in the slightest and when he is seeing you know innocent children dying around him and can barely comprehend what could possibly justify that and yes this is one of the more interesting character arcs in the novel and it's one of the more explicitly philosophical ones as well but what I really like in the plague just personally are the small moments of downtime that we between our protagonists. Most of the characters that we follow are volunteers who risk their lives to fight the plague and minimize the sufferings of others, even when it starts killing off the volunteers themselves. And when the volunteers are also just totally unsure as to whether their efforts are making a difference in the slightest.

[00:13:02]Occasionally, we'll get a scene in the novel where these characters are just sat around talking to one another about their hobbies or their interests and their pasts and their vain hopes for the future. These scenes aren't necessarily very dramatic. They're quite often just casual conversations, even though they do have quite uh poignant emotional notes to them, but they're also some of the only real moments of levity, but also just everyday human connection in the book.

[00:13:34]And for me, The Plague illustrates two things better than any novel that I've ever read. First, life is so much more fragile than we think. a disaster or a disease or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time can either change your life permanently or just snuff it out completely with no way of you predicting or preventing that. And I think at some level we know this when I say it out loud it sounds basically obvious. But I think it's such an uncomfortable truth that we put it out of our minds as quickly as humanly possible when it unwelcomely pops up in there. But I think this is a mistake. Secondly, the characters in the plague are in an absolutely disastrous situation and they only have one another for comfort. As many of you will know, I have long been an advocate for the deep importance of togetherness in the face of the difficulties of life. And in the framework of the plague, it becomes clear exactly why this is the case and how it can help. The volunteers don't even really have hope. In fact, they explicitly disavow hope multiple times.

[00:14:37]But they do have their fellow human being, and that is something. Again, I note a general contrast with the themes of the self-help genre, which as a general rule tend to focus on what you as an isolated individual can do rather than how you can connect with other people. And to be clear, I don't always mind this. Asking what you can do by yourself is not always a bad thing, but it has always struck me as a little limiting. And I think that reading something like the plague, it just helps hammer home the importance of togetherness and communal support almost even at an existential level. And I think that can be a much needed counternarrative to the prevailing one that I often see given. I also have a recommendation for a particular addition. This is the everyman library one. Uh it's a hardback. I don't know if you like hardbacks. And kind of I don't often like hardbacks, but I do like this particular kind of hardback because as you can tell, it's actually I don't know if it shows up on the camera very well.

[00:15:35]It's actually sewn into the binding very well. Quite a lot of hardbacks. The reason why I often don't like hardbacks is because they sometimes just glue the pages in and then the pages fall out and it's all absolutely terrible. But this, you know, I've had this for years. You can see that the covers started to wear away. But the actual book itself remains in very good condition. And it doesn't just have the plague. It has the fall.

[00:15:56]that has some short stories. It also has the myth of Seisphus in there. It's it's a very very good addition. So, yes, I I recommend that uh very highly. Esop's Fables by Esopish.

[00:16:07]This is kind of cheating because obviously this is a whole bunch of stories, but they do fit in one book and it's not a particularly large book, so I'm counting it. You will have heard a lot of these stories. The boy who cried wolf is in here, as is the tale of the fox and the sour grips. And the stories in Esop's fables aren't particularly long. Sometimes they're as short as a few sentences. Each of them is seemingly intended to illustrate a particular moral lesson. And there are some very famous phrases that originate in this book. Here are just a few of them. Don't count your chickens before they hatch.

[00:16:39]One swallow doesn't make a summer.

[00:16:41]Honesty is the best policy. All of these come from Esop's fables. Unlike some of the other books on this list, there is a particular way I recommend reading the fables and a way that I don't really recommend. Historically, these stories have been used to teach quite small children simple life lessons. And to that extent, they don't permit much argumentation within each individual story. So that's how I wouldn't recommend reading them. But when they're taken in their totality or just in groups, the lessons within the stories are often in tension with one another in various ways. And I think that that realization in and of itself is good for dispelling a rather tempting idea that we can learn a few lessons about life and then just be on our way now enlightened forever. Uh this idea is probably best illustrated with an example. Take this fable called the crow and the pitcher. A thirsty crow found a picture with some water in it, but so little was there that, try as she might, she could not reach it with her beak, and it seemed as though she would die of thirst within sight of the remedy. At last she hit upon a clever plan. She began dropping pebbles into the picture, and with each pebble the water rose a little higher, until at last it reached the brim, and the knowing bird was enabled to quench her thirst. Necessity is the mother of invention. First of all, there's a really fun fact here because this is almost exactly one of the experiments used by the neuroscientist Nikki Clayton to study COVID cognition and the use of tools.

[00:18:17]But anyway, compare that with the story of the fox and the stalk. A fox invited a stalk to dinner at which the only fair provided was a large flat dish of soup.

[00:18:28]The fox lapped it up with great relish, but the stalk with her long bill tried in vain to partake of the savory broth.

[00:18:36]Her evident distress caused the sly fox much amusement, but not long after the stalk invited him in turn, and set before him a picture with a long and narrow neck, into which she could get her bill with ease. Thus, while she enjoyed her dinner, the fox sat by, hungry and helpless, for it was impossible for him to reach the tempting contents of the vessel. The fox is in a very similar situation to the crow. But for him, necessity is not the mother of invention. And in fact, this situation is presented without a particular solution at all. Obviously, I think the reason for this is that it's trying to illustrate a very different lesson. The lesson that different situations are suited for different people's natural propensities and that we should take that into account when we evaluate the world. But taken together, this raises the question, when are we meant to apply the first lesson and when are we meant to apply the second? This is a genuinely interesting conundrum and it only comes about by engaging with the text but also questioning it at the same time.

[00:19:39]Obviously, it's good to do this for pretty much everything you read, but Esop's fables are really good for inculcating this as a habit specifically because so many of the tales offer slightly contradictory lessons and so the questions will naturally arise in your mind. This is probably because the tales weren't likely written by one person, but were collected over the course of centuries, which is why I said that Esop's fables are written by Esopish.

[00:20:04]Either way, it's a very easy read, but I do think that it provides lots to think about. It also helps to combat what I think is one of the most unfortunate ideas that swims around the self-help industry, which is to pretend that all of life's problems have a neat, marketable answer. It's ironic considering that the fables individually pretend to give such neat answers, but as soon as we read them together, we find that the totality of the fables actually encourage us to do the opposite, regardless of if that was their original intention. The Screw Tape Letters by CS Lewis. CS Lewis is probably most famous for writing the Chronicles of Narnia books and for his more general work as a public spokesperson for Christianity. But I think his more mature fiction is absolutely fantastic. And while it is unapologetically Christian, there is plenty in there to enjoy regardless of your particular theological stance. My favorite of these older works is the Screw Tape Letters, which is a series of fictional letters between an older demon, Screw Tape, and a younger demon, Wormwood, who's his nephew. As Screw Tape advises Wormwood, on how to entrap the soul of his patient, a person on Earth who Wormwood is tasked with tempting away from God. As you can see, it is an explicitly religious novel, but I still maintain that Lewis is incredibly perceptive when it comes to human behavior and aspects of human psychology. And by putting things in grand theological terms, he places relatively familiar concepts in a really quite compelling light. Take this passage for example. You will say that these are very small sins. And doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the light and out into the nothing. Murder is no better than cards, if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to hell is the gradual one.

[00:22:07]the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. In some ways, this is restating an observation that many of us will have heard before at some point, that it is surprisingly easy to just unconsciously wander into betraying every value we've ever professed to care about. This has been observed by numerous philosophers throughout history. Most famously, Hannah Arent coined the term the benality of evil to describe those people during World War II that allowed themselves to commit truly atrocious actions simply because they weren't thinking too hard about it and they took comfort in just following orders. It actually turned out that her main cited example, who was Adolf Ikeman, didn't really demonstrate her point at all, but the observation is still more generally useful. One of the reasons that I like recommending Lewis, especially to non-Christians, is that I often think that his ideas are very worth engaging with, but that at the same time, working out exactly where you disagree with Lewis is very helpful. Again, especially if you're not religious and if you are a Christian, you still might interrogate his particular theological stance. This is helpful in much the same way that finding out where you disagree with a very clever friend can help you better illuminate your own position. Take the point made in the passage just quoted where the road to dissolution is painted as more dangerous because of its gradual steps. There is a sense in which this is probably true. I can think of a time during my teenage years where my friends and I began making lightigh-hearted jokes at one another. But because we were teenagers and didn't quite know when to stop, it eventually developed into something really quite unpleasant.

[00:23:48]Now, obviously that's a trivial example, but the good thing about trivial examples is they're probably closer to our everyday lives. However, we can also critically engage with this observation that Lewis makes because the theological underpinning to this passage is that separation from God is the supreme evil.

[00:24:05]And it doesn't really matter in the grand eternal scheme of things whether you get there with a piece of grand violence like a murder or a slow drift towards Satan through mediocre sin. But if we don't share Lewis's theology, then how does this change our view? How much of the observation survives? I would argue that the psychological observation about the benality of evil and the slow march towards a negative change in character holds pretty firm. But given that your average secular person is far less interested in eternal souls than Lewis's, they might want to place more emphasis on which particular actions are undertaken by the agent, whereas Lewis is more concerned with the proximity to God. I find Lewis's novels very edifying to read because there's always something in there that I strongly agree with and there's always something in there that I strongly disagree with, but I always learn something in the process of disagreeing with him. Even if you do share Lewis's Christian viewpoints, you are unlikely to agree with everything he says. And he's not afraid to wear his own theological peculiarities on his sleeve. So, there will be plenty of disagreement for you to chew on as well.

[00:25:13]But it is it's it's such a valuable disagreement to chew on because he is very clever. In my view, one of the wonderful things about reading authors that have incredibly strong opinions is that they inadvertently help to encourage you to think for yourself cuz there will be moments where you think, I definitely don't agree with that. But because of the power of their writing, you will be forced to come up with a definite counterargument. A lot of self-help books are interested in teaching you exactly what to think.

[00:25:42]Whereas engaging in dialogue with these books will, I hope, teach you how to think or at the very least help you on your way. The Idiot by Theodore DSTVski.

[00:25:53]I was going to put Notes from Underground here, which is also a fantastic book and one that will definitely expose your own shortcomings in a million different agonizing ways.

[00:26:03]But frankly, I talk about Notes from Underground basically all the time. And I think that the idiot actually touches on a wider variety of aspects of the human condition, both in the realm of interpersonal interaction and intrapersonal reflection. So if I did have to recommend one or the other, I would probably choose The Idiot. The flip side to this is that The Idiot is much longer than Notes from Underground, but it is a very entertaining read and so it doesn't feel very long. The three core characters of the idiot are Prince Mishkin, who is a painfully innocent and kind-hearted man, blissfully unaware that anyone else might ever mean him harm. Nastasia Philipovna, a young woman who has suffered abuse as a child and now thinks that she deserves nothing good in her life and views herself as tainted. And Reagan, a passionate young man who loves nostalgia and has a complex and somewhat battled friendship with Mishkin. I don't want to spoil any of the story elements, but I just want to point out how well each character reflects some admirable qualities, but also some that we would rather avoid.

[00:27:10]DSTVski describes Mushkin in his notes as a perfectly beautiful man. But at the same time, that intense kindness is not tempered with situational wisdom, and that sometimes leads to Mushkin doing more harm than good and ultimately doing himself an awful lot of harm. Nastia is hopelessly self-destructive, but also clever and charming. And at base level, her flaws are deeply relatable. How many of us can say that we truly never act in self-destructive ways? Reggin's passion and intensity is really quite attractive, and you can imagine it being taken in so many fantastic directions, but he also has violent outbursts, and his passion can manifest in deeply ugly ways. Obviously, there's so much more to say about these characters, but I'm just going to leave it there. The thing about the idiot is that most of us won't have every one of these strengths and flaws, but we will likely have some of them.

[00:28:01]And DSTVski, as always, does an excellent job at putting them in conversation and conflict with one another. There are moments where Mushkin's kindness goes down very well.

[00:28:11]And there are moments where it comes back to bite him and those around him.

[00:28:15]There are times when Nastasia's cleverness allows her to get the upper hand in situations and and resalvage some measure of dignity. But there are also times where she turns that cleverness around on herself and makes it a servant to her own self-hate, crafting purposefully ingeniously self-destructive plans for reasons that seem absurd to the people around her. In some situations, Regginian's passion is just what is needed, and in others, it brings disaster in its wake. DSTVKI himself said that when he was writing this book, he largely thought of it as throwing the characters together in different situations and just seeing what naturally happened. And while this does mean that it's one of his less overtly thrilling books, it does give him an awful lot of room to explore how these psychological types, for one of a better term, behave in relatively ordinary situations. And after all, most of us do live in ordinary situations. I think that The Idiot is the book where DSTVKI's psychological genius really is on full display, but without so many extraordinary events actually happening.

[00:29:24]It's sort of it's the closest that you'll ever get to having dsttoyki visit your living room and make observations about you like you're a zoo animal. And for the record, I mean that in a very very good way. And just to clarify, there aren't just these three characters. Those are just the main ones. Dstvki also has time to work in extended analysis of the vicissitudes of family dynamics in his treatment of the Apansions as well as an examination of despair and mortality and loneliness in the character of Epolit. Overall, I can promise that this book will help you understand yourself and the people around you better in some way. I don't know which way because people are incredibly different and the characters are incredibly different, but I can be confident that it will happen. I also think that one of the key themes of the novel is severely underrepresented in self-help literature and generally in our modern discussions of what we might call the good life. And that theme is kindness. The thing that strikes most people about Mishkin, myself included, is that he is extraordinarily kind and gentle and patient and loving with people. Absolutely to a fault. I've spoken on the channel before about our tendency to consider kindness and other centered care as foolish or naive. And in some ways, the idiot does concur with this assessment, at least at certain moments, given how poorly Mushkin's selflessness sometimes works out for him. But despite this, when you're reading the book, it's difficult not to admire Mushka and to think that in some ways he is right despite his actions so often being so very imprudent. If most self-help books are asking you how you can best serve yourself, The Idiot asks how you can best serve others. And it doesn't give a simple or particularly pretty or onenote answer. But then again, if it did, it probably wouldn't be a great book. The point is, the question itself is worth asking, and this book will emotionally and cognitively force you to ask it. A collection of Greek and Roman myths.

[00:31:34]We've already talked about Esop's fables, and this recommendation comes from the same sort of principle. Ancient Greek myths have been continually interpreted and reinterpreted throughout history and each author tends to place a slightly different emphasis on particular aspects of the story depending on you know what they happen to be interested in. There are of course classic canonical tellings of certain myths like those you find within the Iliad and the Odyssey, but even then people have retold stories from these canonical texts in entirely different ways depending on their particular perspective or what they plan to get across in the telling of the story.

[00:32:10]Maybe the most famous and obvious example of this is Oid's metamorphoses which retell a variety of quite familiar Greco Roman myths with a distinctively satirical take in line with Ovid's general mixture of brilliance and also light-heartedness. So I sort of have twin recommendations here. There is of course the classic collection by Robert Graves which goes through an awful lot of Greek myths and also has quite good academic references so you can check the original sources for where these myths evolve from which is always pretty good.

[00:32:44]Having said that, Graves' book is also quite academic at points and it tends to place more emphasis on trying to balance the viewpoints of different original sources than it does in just straightforwardly telling a good story.

[00:32:57]Though I do maintain it is a very entertaining read. But if you are after a more casual read, then I would recommend the short book Greek myths, Heroes and heroins, edited by Gene Menses. It brings together a variety of different authors as they tell and retell various myths involving well heroes and heroins the the clues in the title. It's a bit lighter and a bit less academic than the Graves book. So if you would prefer that then that's the one that I recommend you go with. Although I've picked Greek myths because that's just the tradition that I'm more familiar with, my general reasoning here could apply to any collection of myths from any particular culture. You might want to pick out the verse or pros eder or retellings of those if you're more a fan of Norse mythology. You might want to read some ancient Indian mythology if that takes your fancy instead. In each case, I really think the important thing is that these old stories have stood the test of time, and that gives you an insight into a perspective that's often very alien to your own. I think that's the value in an awful lot of fiction, but I think that it is just particularly pointed when we're separated from the original source of the story by literally hundreds of years of history.

[00:34:08]They say the past is a foreign country, and that's a sentiment that I broadly agree with. For me, part of the value in reading mythological stories is in realizing just how perennial some of our personal issues are. Take the very first myth in that Mensis book, which is the story of King Maidas, who famously wished for the ability to turn whatever he touched into gold. I'm sure that many of you will have heard this tale at some point in your life. It's commonly told to small children, at least in Europe.

[00:34:37]But the actual ideas involved about the short-sightedness of our wishes and our wish for more money in particular is just as relevant now as it was in ancient Greece. The image of King Maidas clutching the newly minted statue of his own child who has come up and hugged him and caught him unawares and has thus subsequently transformed into gold is really quite haunting. And although the idea of money clouding our view of things that are ultimately more important is quite familiar, I don't think that its familiarity dulls its relevance because have we actually heeded this lesson? Like really, have we sat down and thought about it? I mean, maybe certain individuals have, but I I don't think that it's been adopted on a wide scale at all. That being said, like in the case of EOP, much of the insight here is in putting these myths and stories in dialogue with one another.

[00:35:30]What is it that makes one hero's choice misguided and another's admirable? Why is it that we aortion praise and blame in this way? And how might our way of judging things have changed since the conception of these tales? One of the great things about reading mythology and I think about Greek mythology specifically is because their value system is honestly quite alien to our own. And so it confronts us with another worldview that clearly large numbers of people, including very clever people, found incredibly compelling. And it asks us to thus interrogate our own guiding assumptions via this contrast. So yes, absolutely pick yourself up a book of mythology. I promise you won't regret it. Wthering Heights by Emily Bronte. I did a whole video about this book not that long ago, so I won't spend too much time on it here. But the reason I wanted to put it on the list is because, well, love and romance are very important parts of a human life and Wthering Heights has extended treatments of both the highs of romantic passion, but also how love can become quite disastrous if it is treated unwisely. Obviously, the most famous part of Wthering Heights is the tormented love between the older Cathy and Heathcliffe. In their romance, we find an example of incredibly strong passions that nonetheless ultimately manage to make both parties completely miserable. Heath, Cliff, and Kathy, despite their supposed love for one another, treat each other absolutely monstrously, partly because they just don't know how to manage their strong emotions because of their upbringing and their social situation. Moreover, Heathcliffe himself exposes the flaws in one of our most dearly held modern illusions that mere material success and extreme worldly ambition is the answer to all of our ills. Heathcliffe spends his entire adult life chasing the extremes of social status and wealth and power and it ultimately just turns him into a very rich, very powerful, very unhappy man. However, Wthering Heights isn't relentlessly tragic. Towards the end of the novel, we see the next generation in Heron and the younger Kathy who both in their own ways have been victimized by Heathcliffe. And by slowly finding connection with one another, they use their mutual affection and love to grow and develop both individually and as a collective in the way that the elder Kathy and Heathcliffe just never could. I like the picture of love and relationships that's present in Wthering Heights because it isn't hopeless, but it also doesn't pretend that romantic passion is uniformly benign either. I think it cuts a pretty good middle ground between the extremes of idealism and pessimism. And look, I'm not saying that it will teach you how to have a perfect relationship. If anything, it's more helpful as an idea of sort of what to avoid. But I do think that any treatment of love as a sphere of existence that doesn't engage directly with the felt emotions themselves will inevitably leave something quite important out. Because Bronte is such a fantastic and incredibly emotive writer, Wthering Heights can make you as a reader vicariously go through the emotions of the characters within it. And although I think we can learn a lot from non-fiction books about love, I think we can learn even more from novels like Wthering Heights. And considering that, as I said, relationships are likely to be some of the most important parts of anyone's life. And they're also something that pretty much everyone will struggle with at some point. I think it's very helpful to draw on a great mind of the past like Bronte to give us a bit of a bit of guidance and a bit of a helping hand at the very least a starting point for our own reflections.

[00:39:14]Scripture from a religion that you don't believe in. This one's a bit controversial because obviously scripture isn't fiction for a lot of people. But if you're not a member of that particular religious tradition, then at the very least it is fiction to you. and scripture can give you an insight into how one large group of people who are still alive and with us today approach life and philosophy as a whole. I've made no secret of not believing in God. But at the same time, I've also made no secret of the fact that I quite like to read the Bible. In particular, I very much enjoy reading the wisdom literature from the Old Testament, which includes some of my favorite books like Job and Ecclesiastes, and also the Psalms and the Song of Songs, which I'm less familiar with, but I will dip into on occasion. From the New Testament, I really enjoy reading the Gospel of John.

[00:40:04]And I also like to read stories from the Trypotitaka despite not knowing whether they happened in the case of the less supernatural stories or feeling pretty confident they didn't happen in the case of the extremely supernatural ones. My point is that I don't believe in these traditions, but I do find them incredibly valuable to read. And similar to what I said about ancient myths, the reason I think that it's worth reading scriptural texts even if you don't believe in the explicit spiritual contents of those texts is largely a kind of survivorship bias. These texts survive in part because millions and often billions of people throughout history have read them and taken some kind of inspiration from them. I'm sure that a Christian will get more out of reading the Bible than a non-believer like myself, but I still think there is so much that a non-believer can take from the text. Here's just one example.

[00:40:55]In the book of Ecclesiastes, I think we get a very honest and in-depth look at an existential crisis thousands of years before modern existential literature. We get an insight into the psychological states that accompany such a crisis. The protagonist, who is traditionally considered to be Solomon, describes feeling that every day is the same as every other and that there is an emptiness in his heart that isn't even quelled by a a full embrace of pleasure and hedonism or his place of power and wisdom. He has the sense that life is one long slow plot towards death and at the end of the day there is nothing new under the sun. That's actually where we get the phrase nothing new under the sun. Since this is scripture after all, he eventually does find some solace in God. But this isn't celebrated as a simple and easy joy. The author remains somewhat ambivalent about his situation.

[00:41:51]There is no spiritual ecstasy, and there's no pretending that solving such an existential crisis is easy. We only get the first glimmers of what may eventually become the author's piece.

[00:42:03]Now, obviously, this is just one example, but I'm sure that you could find similar insights in almost any scripture that has worn the test of time in this way. My point isn't that you should become religious or have these texts convince you of their faith. I've not been convinced by any of them, but it's to see what other people see in them and then hold those insights up to your own philosophical scrutiny. Take my reading of Ecclesiastes just then. I take an awful lot from the descriptions of there being nothing new under the sun and feeling like every day is a cycle and the feeling that you just end up back where you started the next morning with another day uh ahead of you seemingly unbearable in its featureless bleakness. However, that doesn't mean that I agree with everything in there.

[00:42:50]The passage where the author argues that submission to God is the only way to get over this and have some semblance of a meaningful life is one that I disagree with pretty firmly as I've stated on the channel numerous times. At the same time, I can see how he reached that conclusion and I can ask myself questions like, are there some people for whom religious belief genuinely is necessary for them to feel like life is meaningful? And if so, are there things that I feel are necessary for a meaningful life that are in fact just results of my own peculiar psychological constitution? When we were talking about CS Lewis, we spoke about the pleasure of reading a text that firmly disagrees with you and yet one where there's clearly still something quite worthwhile in it. So, you're effectively forced to kind of wrestle with it until you decide what you think of it. And I think that reading scripture that you don't believe in works on a very similar principle.

[00:43:49]You know that there's something in there because so many people have found so much in there, but at the same time, you will have points of major disagreement.

[00:43:56]And tussling that out is part of the immense value of approaching scripture in this way. A word of warning though. I think it's very easy to pick up scripture as a secular reader or a reader from another religious tradition and immediately leap to trying to find out everything that's wrong with it.

[00:44:14]Now, this is a fine enough exercise if that's what you're after, but I don't think that you'll get very much edifying out of reading the text in this way.

[00:44:24]Instead, I think it's worth trying to see what value other people have found in the work and seeking out that value yourself. If you have a friend who does believe in the scripture, like the literal contents of the scripture, it can be very helpful to talk to them about this. Essentially, I'm arguing that you should read the text charitably, but without totally letting go of your critical instincts. If nothing else, this in itself is very good practice since balancing charity with critique is a skill that we will continue to refine over our entire lives as readers. So, as an agnostic, I'm recommending it. Please go and read some scripture. For many people, these books act as the northstar of their entire existence. So, I am absolutely certain that you will find something in there as well. Okay, that's all from me. I hope you found the suggestions helpful. I think that each of them illustrates a slightly different approach to bettering yourself and learning things than your average self-help book. And I'm absolutely confident that each of them will also be a pleasant or at the very least edifying read. Although do let me know your own recommendations in the comments below. And if you want to check out my system for reading and hopefully understanding very difficult books, I have a video on that right here. Thank you so much for watching and have a wonderful