The most recommended Nietzsche books

This was one of the first books that got me thinking critically about ‘dark tourism’. Harrison inspired me to look at how the dead maintain their relations with the living. In turn, the book galvanized my thinking of the many touristic places where the dead cohabit the world of the living. These range from graves, monuments, and memorials, and made me think about how we give the dead a memorialized afterlife. Drawing upon philosophy, history, and poetry, Harrison teaches us that as we follow in the footsteps of the dead, we are not self-authored. Instead, the thought of death shapes the communion of the living. Within the ‘Dominion of the Dead’, the dead become our guardians where we give them a future so that they may give us a past. 

Waite’s book is an often brilliant account of how Nietzsche (and Heidegger too) have duped the philosophical and cultural Left. The book is too long, and also often unwieldy and self-indulgent. Yet it contains many gems. Part of what I was trying to do in my book was to make some of Waite’s best insights accessible by writing a much shorter, more punchy book.

In this book, Bakewell describes the philosophy of Michel de Montaigne in, as she writes, one question and twenty attempts at an answer.

Although I spent much of my time during the early 1990s reading philosophy, I read little of Montaigne’s work. I had focused on the writing of the ancient Greeks and, as a result, I had failed to notice the important work of Montaigne. Bakewell’s clever, question-based approach is engaging.

I strongly recommend it, even if you are familiar with philosophy and Montaigne’s abundance of writing.

I’m not normally one for biographies but I read two excellent ones this year (the other being Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life). This one though, the excellent telling of the life of one of Philosophy’s, and indeed Literature’s, greatest practitioners, the titan that was Frederick Nietzsche, I simply have to call attention to. 

Meticulously researched, scholarly but never stuffy, it makes the life of Nietzsche an intellectual page-turner, recommended not only for fans of the great thinker, but anyone curious about one of the most remarkable intellectuals we were lucky to have tread our planet.

I was gifted this book recently and it is the gift that keeps on giving.

I am an avid walker and the way the author interspersed poignant life stories with his own on walking was lovingly poetic. This quote “the walker is king, and the earth is his domain” is the one that defines the entire message of the book. I’ve been on many pilgrimages in life and witnessed many a transformation but none like the ones these philosophers uncover.

It was a joy to read the profound messages in staying present while walking as exercise. Grab a friend and enjoy walking together as you put one foot in front of the other and have meaningful conversation. 

In truth, I have been reading the works of Guy de Maupassant for years.

However, this is the first time I have had the opportunity to read all his works. Maupassant was the master of the short story, and a most descriptive writer. Reading his stories transports one back in time to the late 1800s in France (my favorite era in history).

England may have been the greatest world power during that epoch, but it was France, especially Paris, which set the cultural standards. Maupassant influenced a number of later authors, including Leo Tolstoy, O. Henry, Somerset Mongham, and Henry James.

Frederick Nietzsche praised him, saying, “I cannot at all conceive in which century of history one could haul together such inquisitive and at the same time delicate psychologists as one can in contemporary Paris: I can name as a sample – for their number is by no means small,… show more.

Reading Nietzsche without understanding the contexts he was working in and against is a bit like trying to interpret a text thread among friends from only one of their vantages. Without the context of ‘who,’ ‘what,’ and ‘when’ Nietzsche was reading and responding to, interpreters cannot grasp why he used the particular terms, phrasings, or rhetorical devices he did. Campioni, D’Iorio, Fornari, Fronterotta, and Orsucci—each remarkable scholars in their own right—deserve our gratitude for having cataloged Nietzsche’s (mostly) still-preserved personal library as it stands in the Weimar archives. Even better, they chronicled the margin notes, dog-eared pages, and various frustrated cross-outs or excited approbations that Nietzsche scribbled into those books. Nietzsches persönliche Bibliothek has sat next to my keyboard for years, and still offers surprises when I wonder ‘did Nietzsche read Dostoyevsky in German or French translation’ or ‘which biology anthologies influenced his understanding of Darwinism?’

I’m a big philosophy fan, but I also appreciate anything that can poke fun at the great philosophers. I’m also generally a bit of a romantic disaster, and this book manages to weave together philosophical insight, wit, and dating advice (good or not) to create a thoroughly entertaining read. Most importantly, you’ll feel very smart reading it.

This is another absolutely delirious book. One part detailed study of Freud’s most divisive concept, the death drive, and one part messianic call-to-love in the style of Nietzsche, I was very skeptical to begin with. But as I persisted, I began to see the charm and power of Brown’s project. He is someone who really wants to make history by talking about it in such grand terms. He wasn’t the first to try this, but there is perhaps a case to be made that he was the last.

Nietzsche was the master diagnostician of the challenge of living in a secular world, once God was dead. The Birth of Tragedy develops a powerful theory of culture, its necessity for human wellbeing, and how it works.

The basic assumption is that human life is lived on the surface, driven by a substratum of demonic instincts, nightmare fears, and a barbaric will to lust and sadism. Culture’s task is to transform these unconscious drives into harmonious and beautiful images that capture the mind and give an orderly direction to how humans conduct their lives.

But for culture to have that commanding power it needs to be founded on a fixed and primordial sacred site. Without that, the modern problems rise: nihilism, rancour, and depression.