Top 5 Books

There is a pleasure worth choosing in the pure arbitrariness of the exercise: to list your top 5.

Not 50. Just 5.

Not to manage remote teams or to read at the beach. Just "your top."

My top books are like old-fashioned wine casks expertly crafted and filled with rich wine. Their authors wrapped them in remarkable styles and poured them full bold and delicate ideas. Reading them, for me, is like drinking something very rare.

And I will allow myself only one sentence each to explain their place.

In vino, veritas.

#5 BEOWULF by the Unknown Poet

Premise

A noble kingdom ruled as a good king should is attacked by the wicked Grendel, whose terrible hatred and vicious attacks are inflamed by the wholesome sounds of merriment, until the virtuous, though at times foolhardy, Beowulf arrives in a heroic legend that borders on myth.

Why It Makes the List

In our world of swirling grays, or streaming rainbows, where we find subtlety and diversion but not much moral vision worthy of our trust, the reader of Beowulf trains his or her vision in a exciting tale of daring and danger to detect a very essential distinction and always to keep it in view, the most striking contrast of all and yet overlooked time and again, good and evil.

Honorable Mention: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien and The Tempest by William Shakespeare

#4 THE REPUBLIC by Plato

Premise

Taken by aristocratic brothers whose noble aspirations haven been corrupted by a virulent sophist, Socrates asks what is justice? and carries on a conversation for the ages, in which sophistry is exposed for shame, the brothers burn with the love of wisdom, and the participants build in speech an ideal city by which they hope to catch sight of justice writ large, unless stress from a noble lie at its foundation should cause it to fracture, while one layer of irony gives way to another.

Why It Makes the List

There is no monument of Greco-Roman thinking, which together with Judeo-Christian living forms our Western Civilization, worthier of studious admiration than this dialogue in which Socrates employs his signature method, that is, teaching by means of questions, and bestows upon us so many indelible images as the Ring of Gyges, Plato's Cave, the sunlike Good Beyond Being, the Cycle of Regimes, and the Myth of Er.

Honorable Mention: Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

#3 THE ILIAD by Homer

Premise

Invoked, the muses sing of Achilles, whose twofold destiny--glorious brevity or peaceful longevity--collapses into single-minded wrath after the noble venture of his gentlehearted companion in Achilles' armor and the companion's ignominious death at the hands of Apollo and the spear of Troy's champion, amid the rallies and routs of war, stoked by vying gods under the gaze of Zeus--a wrath calmed at last in pity for the loss incurred by noble-hearted fathers.

Why It Makes the List

Where heroes display in deeds their strength, speed, and prowess in war, vaunting and lamenting and vowing, surrounded by wounds and magic and treasure; where honorable warriors speak with beautiful noblewomen and treacherous kings and diplomatic embassies; where the gods appear now as the great beings who govern the world and all human affairs as one, now as subversive agents beholden to their own idiosyncrasies--there the epic poem at the foundation of Western Civilization shows what happens when a mortal in the pride of his great strength rushes, like something more than a man, upon a god and receives a warning, namely, that he gives way or is struck down.

Honorable mention: The Aeneid by Virgil

#2 THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH by Soren Kierkegaard

Premise

There is a dying we observe which does not end in bodily death, and it is a sickness of the spirit, which may take the form of willing to be a self whom we are not or of not willing to be the self whom we are--either way, a miserable despair over ourself, whose power to define and redefine ourselves in relation to anything we may be conscious of nonetheless comes again and again to despair, which may only be cured, as the psychologist writes whom Kierkegaard creates to pen the book, by resting transparently in the power which establishes us in being.

Why It Makes the List

Many books cast light upon the interior life in regard to one thing or another--morals or prayer or logic or sentiment or maturity or creativity or something else--but only this work by the Melancholy Dane, the gadfly of Copenhagen, gives precise expression to the interior life itself.

Honorable mention: Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing and Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Soren Kierkegaard

#1 THE HEART by Dietrich von Hildebrand

Premise

While Western thinkers have rightly reckoned our knowing and willing to be of a fully spiritual nature, our heart has been seen as something inferior and somewhat ignoble, outside the better parts of poetry--but our heart is in a way the true self, and fully spiritual feelings such as joy over the conversion of a sinner, sorrow at the death of a loved one, anger at a miscarriage of justice, or gratitude for kind hospitality, in which our heart is conscious of the importance of something and in this consciousness moves in response to it or is moved by it, are a world apart from sensations like the coolness or roughness of a frosted window felt with our fingertips or a psychological mood like mirth or glumness brought on by too much drink or too little sleep.

Why It Makes the List

No author so illuminates the human condition while yet making it seem so like itself, so to speak transfiguring it, as von Hildebrand, and no one so dispels the clouds around our hearts gathered by ideologues, scoffers, and hardship, as this 20th century man impassioned for wisdom.

Honorable mention: The Confessions by St. Augustine of Hippo