10 votes

Any recommendations for reading classic non-fiction in modern times?

I've been on a long and steady roll reading classic literature, both fiction and non-fiction. I think it's important to get a perspective from earlier times that influenced our current culture and also because many of these works have withstood the test of time.

However, I'm having real trouble reading some of the non-fiction e.g. Plato's Republic and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. With both fiction and non-fiction I accompany my readings with Sparknotes to make sure I'm not missing anything important. In the case of non-fiction I often can barely get a cohesive thought out of the original text. In some cases the text is too old to be understood on it's own and in others the author has great ideas but poor writing (e.g. Nietzsche, famously). But Sparknote's is much too brief—I'd like a more involved experience.

My request is this: I'm looking for books (or resources to find such books) about classic non-fiction that

  1. distill the concepts without watering them down
  2. provide context with either modern culture and/or other works that are related
  3. are written for an intelligent layman; prose meant to communicate to a non-expert audience but with scholarly rigor

Basically, I read at a high level but I am not a professional scholar of literature, philosophy or history, yet I would like to have a bridge to such an understanding.

EDIT: I found this site to be exactly what I was looking for: https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html

4 comments

  1. krg
    Link
    I'd highly recommend looking into Oxford World's Classics as they tend to have really good notes that clarify context.

    I'd highly recommend looking into Oxford World's Classics as they tend to have really good notes that clarify context.

    3 votes
  2. JakeTheDog
    Link
    I answered my own question, sort of by accident. This site has exactly what I was looking for: https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html

    I answered my own question, sort of by accident. This site has exactly what I was looking for:
    https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html

    2 votes
  3. [2]
    blitz
    Link
    I've been kind of vaguely interested in philosophy for a while, and I was reading and listening to podcasts about the classical greek philosophers without actually reading them, thinking that I...

    I've been kind of vaguely interested in philosophy for a while, and I was reading and listening to podcasts about the classical greek philosophers without actually reading them, thinking that I was learning about philosophy. A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps is a particularly good one, and they sort of gently encourage reading the source material, but I never felt that I was "smart enough" to understand it directly, I thought I needed to have it distilled in modern terms.

    Then I read this guide on reading Plato, and I finally decided to give it a try. I bought this translation and started reading them. I was surprised at how approachable the dialogues are. It's certainly partially down to how good the translation is. If you try to read the Plato dialogues on Project Gutenberg, it's not nearly as approachable. Of course, you're not really reading the source material unless you're reading in Ancient Greek, so any translation is going to color the text, but I'd rather read a translation that makes use of modern language than a translation that tries to be as literal to the original text as possible.

    So in short, the conclusion this layman has come to is that you don't need to have a background in philosophy to read and get something out of Plato's works. Maybe you won't get everything out of it, but I feel that even a casual read before bedtime has been useful for my personal growth.

    1 vote
    1. JakeTheDog
      Link Parent
      That looks great! Looking for something in book form but it's a start. I completely agree. My situation, however, is that I've been at this point for the better part of a decade already and I want...

      A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps is a particularly good one

      That looks great! Looking for something in book form but it's a start.

      So in short, the conclusion this layman has come to is that you don't need to have a background in philosophy to read and get something out of Plato's works. Maybe you won't get everything out of it, but I feel that even a casual read before bedtime has been useful for my personal growth.

      I completely agree. My situation, however, is that I've been at this point for the better part of a decade already and I want to get a deeper but also (and more importantly) a broader understanding. Not just the content of a single text but how a particular text has aged and influenced the rest of culture. Like a combination of the content and commentary.

      2 votes