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The Odyssey
The founding adventure story of the West. A soldier spends ten years trying to get home from a war, through monsters, witches, and the sea, winning by cunning more than force. Walked one monster at a time in Emily Wilson's translation.
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The Art of War
The oldest and most famous book on strategy, from China 2,500 years ago, and its central lesson is a twist: the best way to win is never to fight at all. Read everywhere now, from boardrooms to ballfields. Seven translations side by side.
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The Symposium
Plato's dinner party on love, climbing from drunken jokes to the sublime, and the source of Platonic love, which almost nobody has right. Where the idea that you have an other half comes from.
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The Kama Sutra
The most misunderstood book in the world: not a sex manual but a guide to living well, of which desire is one civilized art. The prudish Victorian translation that made it a scandal, set against an honest modern one.
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The Prince
Machiavelli's blunt manual on power as it really is, not as it ought to be: a ruler who insists on staying good among the wicked will be destroyed, so he must learn how not to be. The book that turned a man's name into an insult, walked one cold lesson at a time.
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The Grand Inquisitor
The most powerful argument against God ever written, buried inside a Russian novel. Christ returns to earth, and the Church arrests him, for the crime of handing people a freedom they cannot bear.
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In Praise of Shadows
A Japanese reply to Western taste: beauty lives in shadow, age, and imperfection, not in bright light and the brand new. Wabi-sabi, explained through a dim room and a cup of tea.
