Give These Books to Your Son, Part I

A Reading List to Make You a Better Man

If you prefer the audio of this article, click here.

In the next two articles on the Substack, we’re going to give you something of practical value. People have been requesting reading lists since the very beginning of Imperium, but never have we done one like this: a reading list to put some hair on your chest. This will be aimed at a fairly young man, maybe on the verge of adulthood. But older men will get a lot out of this too, and no doubt there is much that you’ve missed. Some of these works are challenging, but all are worth the effort.

The list is in order of which came to mind first. At the end of the second article we will give you a recommended reading order.

Every European National Epic

This is cheating a bit, but we’ve got a lot to get through. You need to read the major epic poems of each European folk,¹ there really is no alternative. This is an absolute minimum condition for being a well-read person, but it can also do you tremendous good as a man. The Iliad is soaked in gore, so perfect for men of burgeoning testosterone, but it also puts on display martial values, honour and shame culture, and ruthless in-group preference. If you took this poem and inverted every element in it, you would come up with modernity in all its weakness and incontinence, and this description more or less fits every founding national epic. If you lived by what you found in Iliad, Beowulf, Volsunga Saga—and I mean really lived by it, took it as seriously as the bugman takes breakfast cereals—then you would be the most formidable human alive.

A partial list:

• Homer

• Aeneid

• Beowulf

• Ulster cycle

• Volsunga saga and the heroic lays of the Poetic Edda

• Morte D’Arthur

• Song of Roland

• Tale of Igor’s Campaign

• El Cid

• Nibelungenlied

• Kalevala

Hagakure

The work of a retired samurai who was refused the chance to commit seppuku and follow his lord into death. The Hagakure forms a complete picture of bushido, the way of the samurai, an austere and uncompromising mode of life not unlike that of the chivalric knight. In these orations, Yamamoto Tsunetomo teaches that a samurai should live as though already dead, embracing death to act decisively without fear. He demands complete and utter obedience to one’s lord, even to the point of epistemic obedience, an incredible ask and almost incomprehensible, but he also notes that “a house with but two or three such men serving it – its future is assured.” Any political movement who puts into effective practice the principles in this volume will be simply unstoppable.

The Book of Five Rings

The Book of Five Rings is ostensibly a manual of swordcraft but like the Hagakure, it manages to convey the essence of bushido. Written by an undefeated swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, it outlines the principles for victory in five sections each related to one of the elements. Like Yamamoto, Miyamoto emphasizes discipline to a degree that is almost unattainable, and demands a mindset that is truly foreign to modernity. Harnessing the “secret art of the samurai” in non-combat situations like business is rather cliché, but this book can actually help you win at almost anything.

Watership Down

This book was made into an animated movie that famously scarred a whole generation of children. Instead of getting cute bunnies frolicking in a meadow, the kiddos got a tale of castaways founding a new society on rivers of blood. The fact that this tale is told from the perspective of rabbits gives it a mythic quality (complete with an actual mythos and creation stories)—when the dog bounds across the landscape it might as well be a dragon, and in the climactic battle you might actually weep. The movie is pretty good but the book is fantastic.

Mario Puzo – The Godfather

The movie is absolutely required, but you should read the book too. Everyone knows The Godfather, but its significance lies in showing exactly how clannishness can work in modernity, with loyalty to family trumping loyalty to abstractions. This book pairs well with Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which is about how dysfunctional clan justice gives way to the justice of the city—The Godfather shows how the dysfunctional justice of the state gives way to the justice of the clan once again. As we move further into anarcho-tyranny and as capture of state institutions for the good of the folk looks ever more remote,² this book shows what kind of social structures will survive the future. The book offers an even richer exploration of honour, loyalty, and violence than the movie.

Daodejing

The main philosophical work of Daoism was a major signpost guiding me to where I am today, and although I now disagree with some of it, the book is required for a well-rounded worldview. There is nothing overtly masculine in here—in fact its ideas of wu-wei (“action without action”) and ziran (“spontaneity”) are rather feminine—but the Daodejing is a first rate work of human genius. This is the greatest work ever conceived which presents a transcendental, what we have called an axial perspective, and part of its greatness is that it shows the paradoxical and fundamentally irrational basis for transcendence. In this book you will learn that what is rooted is primary, that what is great is what is ancient, and that all unity depends on difference.

Thomas Carlyle – On Heroes

Thomas Carlyle single-handedly redeems the British from any accusations of being inherently liberal.³ His entire corpus is essential, but On Heroes is the book a young man should read first. Originally a series of lectures, Carlyle makes case studies of the hero as he has appeared in different guises in history—as a god, a prophet, a poet, a priest, a man of letters, and a king. In it he gives us several criteria by which we might recognize a great man—sincerity, forthright truth-speaking, vision, etc.—and we also discover that a great man need not even be ambitious, only righteously intolerant. This is not an easy book to read—Carlyle’s allusions are dizzying and his prose is elevated, second only to Shakespeare in the English language. But every man should read this work for a deeper understanding of real greatness.

Robert E. Howard – Various

Robert E. Howard is the ultimate purveyor of the “male power fantasy” as all the worst people would term it—really it’s just exciting fiction with traditional masculine archetypes. What makes Howard stand out is his constant exploration of the thin line between barbarism and civilization, where he pretty much always comes down on the side of barbarism, seeing conventional society as weak and domesticated. In today’s longhoused environment of pathological harm avoidance, the amoral powerviolence in his stories comes as a breath of fresh air, bringing us back to a natural state where even the most rough-hewn morality is not something given, but something won, something pulled out of the muck and mire of contest and struggle. I actually prefer his poetry to his prose. For that, look at Song of the Naked Lands; for his Conan stories, start with Beyond the Black River.

Havamal

The most famous work of Germanic wisdom literature. This poem came at an important moment in my own spiritual journey—reading stanza 138 brought me face-to-face with an otherworldly intelligence, with the High One himself, in a way that left me disoriented and still does. For all its bewildering heights though, Havamal is mostly quite a down to earth work, a series of gnomic verses that tell truths that we all learned and then forgot and need to learn again. It is of course much more than that—Havamal contains much arcane and runic knowledge which even the deepest minds have yet to penetrate. It is high and low, deep and accessible, folk wisdom and esotericism. You will not understand all of it at once, maybe not in a whole lifetime—but you will come away richer from each reading.

Analects

Confucius’ Analects are considered—at least in the Western mind—as a foil and counterweight to the transcendental poetry of the Daodejing, but the Chinese see no such dichotomy. That said, the two works are quite different both in their approach and in what they have to say. Like parts of the Havamal, in his collected sayings called the Analects, some of the truths Confucius tells are so plain and straightforward that you might be forgiven for thinking “is this it?” And yet he is the philosopher of the Chinese, a deep-minded people. Calls to “practice filial piety” and “set language in order” are the tips of icebergs below the surface of which are immense metaphysical and moral depths. If you are a traditionalist of any kind, Confucius will strike a sympathetic chord, even if his ideas are particular to his people. Get yourself a good annotated edition—you will need it. I recommend the Annping Chin edition.

Harold Lamb – Genghis Khan: The Emperor of All Men

When the libertarian tells you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, he forgets just how much is already in place for that to happen. Genghis Khan is a true rags to riches story though, the story of a boy who goes from hunted prey animal with nothing to his name, to the “emperor of all men”—in the most hypercompetitive human environment ever to exist. If you only read two genres in this world, it must be epic poetry and the biographies of great men—this is a full and complete education in itself. Genghis Khan is the pattern of the great man, and every episode in his life is rich with lessons and principles of how to survive and thrive in a hostile world. We released this book as the Genghis Khan entry in our Great Men series.

Sophocles – Ajax

At least one work of Greek tragedy belongs on this list, and Ajax is the most profound, if not the most celebrated. Ajax will take some working up to, as it assumes a familiarity with the Homeric stories that follow the Iliad and Odyssey, where the Greek heroes return from the Trojan war and meet terrible fates. What makes Sophocles’ play truly great is that it gives the clearest picture of the archaic Indo-European man, right on the verge of his being eclipsed by the new man of Greece, the heroic if naïve warrior-aristocrat being passed over in favour of the silver-tongued orator. Ajax prizes honour above all else, and when his honour is slighted, he does the unthinkable. Except it isn’t unthinkable to him because he embodies our honour-obsessed barbarian roots. If all men felt the same as he did, terrible behaviour would be extremely rare in this world.

Plutarch – Parallel Lives

This work kills two birds with one stone in that it is a key work in the Western Canon and also a series of biographies of great men. Written at a time when history was not considered “value neutral”, Plutarch wants to hold up the very best that men are capable of, and his framing of pairing two figures (Theseus vs. Romulus, Lycurgus vs. Numa Pompilius, Alexander the Great vs. Julius Caesar, etc.) lets him bring out the nuances and personalities of each. This work had an immense influence on our ideas of leadership and heroism—Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and the American founding fathers are all impossible without him.

Nietzsche – Thus Spake Zarathustra

Another book you will need to work your way up to, Nietzsche’s masterwork casts his philosophy of radical aristocracy in the form of a novel. Zarathustra was the historical prophet of Zoroastrianism, the first axial theology, which introduced the ethicization of religion, whereas before him religion was essentially tribal and non-universal. In this book Nietzsche makes him atone for his sins by announcing that “God is dead”, and morality by extension. We are no longer living in a world of grounded absolute moral truths—we will have to go it alone, and he introduces (or really, reintroduces) the idea of eternal recurrence into the history of ideas, where we must live so boldly that we can say “yes!” to life even if it were lived over and over forever. Whether you agree with him or not, Nietzsche’s call for us to embrace the will-to-power and turn human potential into superhuman potential, must be reckoned with.

The Joy of Cooking

No, this isn’t a joke. I don’t care what Andrew Tate says, any man who can’t cook at least a few dishes well is not a true man, no more to be respected than a man who can’t change a tire. This is a classic recipe book that gives simple instructions to make very good dishes. It has been curated over the course of 90 years to date, so unlike trendy recipe books that nobody will use 5 years from now, everything here works and tastes good. If you can cook something decent for a woman she will respect you. One of the absolute basics for being a grown ass man.

Next week we will be back with the second half of the list. Thanks for reading and please subscribe if you liked this.

For Part II, click here.

1. And throwing in the Shahnameh and the Mahabharata wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

2. Trump’s good work so far in his second term notwithstanding.

3. A false and slanderous accusation.