Read Master thinkers only

The greatest philosophical works, the finest works of fiction, and books on almost every subject are easily available today in PDF format and at very cheap prices in the market. Yet, this has become one of the biggest problems for readers today. So many books are available that readers often do not know which books they should read and which they should avoid.

To make matters worse, capitalist culture has also started spreading its influence in this field, creating a serious threat to philosophy, ethics, and traditional subjects of knowledge.

Today, books on finance, quick success, how to become rich quickly, and cheap fiction filled with lust are heavily promoted. People read these books because they are promoted so aggressively and constantly placed before them that they begin to believe these are the books worth reading. They start thinking that they have become readers and are growing intellectually.

But in reality, many of these books offer nothing more than cheap entertainment. They can encourage materialism and turn people into slaves to material desires and lust. This is the kind of reading culture that capitalism is creating.

We must ask ourselves: What is the purpose of the books we are reading? Are they genuinely helping us grow intellectually, or are they simply making us slaves to materialistic desires?

Here, we should listen to Seneca. He says, “You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers and digest their work.”

At a time when the value of great subjects like philosophy and ethics is declining, Seneca’s advice is worth its weight in gold.

What he is telling us is that instead of reading shallow books by mediocre authors, we should read great philosophers such as Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, Epictetus’s Enchiridion, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, Ambedkar’s The Buddha and His Dhamma, John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women and On Liberty, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

We should turn towards the great thinkers and their works rather than constantly consuming cheap self-help books or shallow fiction.

I would also recommend reading fiction, but fiction that enriches your life rather than merely providing cheap entertainment. Read books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Metamorphosis, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Stranger, The Plague, 1984, Brave New World, and The Fountainhead. These books will nourish your mind and bring you face to face with life.

While reading, we must also remember Seneca’s advice: “Digest their work.” We should pay special attention to these words because, today, we have become accustomed to shallow reading.

We finish books in two or three days and think we have mastered them. But when we sit down to write what we have learned from a book, we often struggle to write even four arguments clearly. We cannot properly connect the book’s ideas with our real lives, and before we have truly understood what we have read, we move on to another book.

We must ask ourselves a few questions after reading each chapter: What have I learned from this chapter? What is the author trying to say through this book? How can I connect its ideas with real life?

Until you have properly digested one book, do not move on to another under any circumstances. The purpose of reading is not simply to finish books or increase the number of books we have read. The real purpose is to understand their ideas, reflect on them, connect them with our lives, and allow them to contribute to our intellectual growth.

A single book that we have genuinely understood and absorbed can be more valuable than a hundred books that we have merely finished reading.