I was asked the other day about good books to read. I assumed the question was not about novels or recent research in cosmology. Rather it might have been about that much-reviled category ‘great books’, those that deserve reading because they have so much to offer. I immediately started a list, not the list but my list. Then I stopped, because I realised this needed more thought than my identifying a collection of ‘my favourite books’.
There is a choice to be made here, between books that I love to read, alone, for my personal enjoyment; and those I want to share and discuss with others. How to make that distinction? Lord of the Rings (and possibly The Hobbit even more so) is a saga I love. Tricky Bilbo Baggins, a thief and a coward, and yet so likeable. However, Tolkien’s novels are not ones I want to talk about in a book group, but rather keep the experience to myself! They have created a world I enjoy visiting, but so have books by Becky Chambers and Guy Gavriel Kay. I still like to go back and reread the ‘adventures’ of that lumbering, stupid and yet loveable Don Quixote. Heroic Lyra battling villains as she goes from child to adolescent and then to adult. Books about childhood and the traumas of adolescence: that made me think about Margaret Mahy’s books about this fraught time: The Haunting, and especially The Changeover. They are exceptional, by a writer who deserves much greater recognition than she has achieved: despite two Carnegie Medals, she is largely unknown outside of her native New Zealand.
These are all novels to inhabit. There are many others, books which have created a comfortable world in which I am happy to escape for a while. Comfortable? Perhaps that’s not the word. Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nicole Kraus, Iris Murdoch, Joyce Carol Oates, Marisha Pessl and Anthony Powell; the list goes on and on. They write about relationships, dysfunctional families, love, cruelty, misunderstandings and death. Jane Austen and that snippy Elizabeth Bennet: I reread that last week!
There is another group that has more to do with wish fulfilment I fear, when I read about the adventures of Jack Reacher, or Lincoln Rhyme. I have a particular love of detective novels, from the lofty heights of Umberto Eco’s ‘Names of the Rose’ and P D James Dalgleish mysteries, on to Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson and Sarah Paretsky. Let’s face it, I love reading, the privileged access to another’s insights and imaginations, another’s world.
All of these books are a source of solitary enjoyment, a selfish pursuit. I seldom want to talk about them to others: their magic is to be found in the world they create for me.
However, there is another list, books not just to be read, but to be discussed. What makes books like these ‘great’ is not that you can read and understand them, and apply the insights – a task I often find too challenging – but rather they offer a text to be considered, debated, challenged and examined with others. These books are there for discussion, providing an opportunity to share views and perspectives, launched on another’s wisdom.
I would even go as far as to say that some books are simply too hard just to be read, but can only be appreciated by talking about them. Let me illustrate this by one of my favourites, Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’. Here he is, explaining some of the issues in becoming a prince:
“Whence it is to be noted, that in taking a state the conqueror must arrange to commit all his cruelties at once, so as not to have to recur to them every day, and so as to be able, by not making fresh changes, to reassure people and win them over by benefiting them. Whoever acts otherwise, either through timidity or bad counsel, is always obliged to stand with knife in hand, and can never depend on his subjects, because they, owing to continually fresh injuries, are unable to depend upon him. For injuries should be done all together, so that being less tasted, they will give less offence. Benefits should be granted little by little, so that they can be better enjoyed. And above all, a prince must live with his subjects in such a way that no accident of good or evil fortune can deflect him from his course; for necessity arising in adverse times, you are not in time with severity, and the good that you do does not profit, as it is judged to be forced upon you, and you will derive no benefit whatever from it.” [i]
Just five sentences, and every one of them deserves careful reading and an exchange of views. I use this quote with senior managers, when we are talking about takeovers. You can replace ‘conqueror/prince’ by ‘CEO’; ‘state’ by ‘company/acquisition’. “Commit all his cruelties at once” translates rather nicely to the recommendation to do what you need to do in the ‘honeymoon’ period’! “Always obliged to stand with knife in hand”; sure, the CEO who keeps cutting, sacking, and eliminating is always worried that he or she will be the next to go. String out the rewards: yes! And that last sentence repays a careful reading: if you do things because you have to, then people will judge you as responding to the force of circumstances, not because you are a thoughtful, strategic leader. Do I agree? Do you agree? How do you respond to Machiavelli’s observations?
And that is the kind of discussion that often begins the consideration of this small extract. Only the beginning, however, and we can move on to explore the need to act unilaterally, the use of the carrot (little rewards strung out over time), the serendipitous nature of chance and change, and how we deal with it. This is a commentary on leadership, but a twentieth century model of command and control, and serves as a good way to explore how leadership today is – or should be – different.
It also raises another point. Is Machiavelli talking about what ‘should’ be the case, or what he has observed? A lot of the discussion revolves around a paradox: Machiavelli is an observer (a “dry-eyed empiricist”), but he is also an ethical man, a Christian. Is he making us confront our imperfections, our weak morals, in the face of what we see around us. Is he just an empiricist, or an adviser, trying to shape his comments to his powerful patrons; is he as merciless as those he describes, or a moral man trying to make sense of the world around him.
Here he is again, now going on to a much-quoted extract on ‘whether it is better to be loved or feared’:
“From this arises the question whether it is better to be loved more than feared, or feared more than loved. The reply is, that one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting. For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger, and covetous of gain; as long as you benefit them, they are entirely yours; they offer you their blood, their goods, their life, and their children, as I have before said, when the necessity is remote; but when it approaches, they revolt. And the prince who has relied solely on their words, without making other preparations, is ruined; for the friendship which is gained by purchase and not through grandeur and nobility of spirit is bought but not secured, and at a pinch is not to be expended in your service. And men have less scruple in offending one who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared; for love is held by a chain of obligation which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails.” [ii]
If you read this, you might see Machiavelli as a cynical observer of the human condition. ‘At a pinch’ men will pursue what is in their own self-interest, rather fulfill vague promises to support the ‘nice’ leader. When we discuss this extract, from the vantage point of the 21st Century, some will add more and more examples to support Machiavelli’s examples and observations. However, others will argue that selfishness is not intrinsic to our human nature, that many are altruistic and act for others (think of all those soldiers willing to die for ‘king and country’). This can lead to debating the role of culture in influencing behaviour, and even a Marxian analysis of the exploitation of the many by the few. I can spend hours on these extracts!!
What I am trying to say is that books like these are not just to be read, they are to be debated. This is not because we know better now (do we?), or that writers in the past were creatures of their culture and times (remember it was Thucydides, who said “In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.”) [iii] It is because they are thinkers, challenging us to think, too.
Do these ‘great’ books have to be come from the Western tradition? Of course not. Nor does the text have to be written in the form of complex sentences and densely argued propositions. Perhaps Confucius can be an example, who argued that a Ruler. “If he wish to transform the people and to perfect their manners and customs, must he not start from the lessons of the school?” In the same section of the Analects, he added “According to the system of teaching now-a-days, the masters hum over the tablets which they see before them, multiplying their questions. They speak of the learners’ making rapid advances, and pay no regard to their reposing in what they have acquired. In what they lay on their learners they are not sincere, nor do they put forth all their ability in teaching them. What they inculcate is contrary to what is right, and the learners are disappointed in what they seek for.” [iv]
Confucius wasn’t above making some rather pointed comments. It seems he was not so happy about how lessons were conducted. Teachers focussing on “rapid advances”, insincere and uncommitted; just as true today? That will provoke debate, and then add in the idea that some teachers might try to persuade their students of things that are not right! Right? Whoa, that is going to lead us into some deep and important territory.
And are all works only to be found from writers in the past? Only men? Of course not. I could have used Virginia Woolf as an example, and her essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’. She begins one section with a simple proposal: “Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.” After describing what little was known when she wrote about Shakespeare’s life, she continues to contrast what would have been her experience with his:
“Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers … Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring woolstapler … She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen … at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so–who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body? — killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.” [v]
I scarcely need to comment how uncomfortably close that is to today’s news. Still a (white) man’s world here in the US.
Have I made my point? Machiavelli, Confucius, Virginia Woolf, they are all contemporary in the sense their essays offer insights as important now as they were when they were created. They wrote to be read, but more than that. They wrote to have their ideas explored and discussed, to enter into intellectual debate, to invite us to ask, “and what does that mean today”: their writing as a “possession for all time”. I don’t want to think about a reading list, but a discussion list. What should be on that list? Books that make you think, that encourage you to talk to others, and I’m not going to prescribe which writing should be included!
Are there two kinds of books? Some certainly are aiming at controversy and debate. Others are more like my list of fiction writers, creating worlds for us to enter, for entertainment? But they too can provide the basis for book groups and conversations (and films and television dramas). Perhaps the difference is mine and quite arbitrary: I like some books as personal and private, while others I want to debate. Fiction, by and large, is just for me (and I should remember that when I unwisely send out drafts of a novel before I’ve reached the point it is close to finished!).
And now it is evening, and I am going to read another Virgil Flowers story. Funny, sneaky, fearless, unwilling to use a gun as he confronts madmen and murderers, he is one of John Sanford’s inspired creations. This isn’t great literature, but enjoyable. I can settle into a Flowers story with a sense of comfort and familiarity. A man who chases criminals and serial killers in the mid-west of the USA? Yes, because Sanford has made his world accessible to me: different, foreign, and yet accessible in a way I find hard to explain. And it saves me from any more thinking about a list of ‘good books to read’!
[i] Machiavelli, The Prince, Section 8, Of Those who have Attained the Position of Prince by Villainy
[ii] Ibid, Section 17, Of Cruelty and Clemency, and Whether it is Better to be Loved or Feared
[iii] Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Book 1, Chapter 22. I am using the version published by Dent, 1910
[iv] Confucius, Analects, Book XVI, Hsio Ki, or, Record on the Subject of Education, sections 1 and 10. Translation by James Legge, Clarendon Press, 1885.
[v] Virginia Woolf, A room of One’s Own; Three Guineas, OUP, 1992 Edition, pages 60-62
