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Eddie Hood
So I was going through my library a couple days ago and looking at all these books that helped me fall in love with philosophy. These are books that sort of primed my brain and got me ready for some of the trickier things that philosophy can throw at you. If you've always wanted to get into philosophy but don't know where to start, I've put together a list of nine books that will help you do so. Let's Get Into It. Welcome to this week's episode of the Read well Podcast. My name is Eddie Hood, and I'm your host, where I believe it's more important to read well than to be well read. So grab your favorite book, open up your notes, and let's get ready to learn something fascinating. Hey, friends, welcome back to the Read well Podcast. My name is Eddie Hood, and today we're talking about philosophical books. Now, some of these are contemporary writers, some of them have been around for a couple hundred years, but the goal is that they are somewhat easier and simpler for you to get into. Because if you want to start reading philosophy and maybe you've gone to the bookstore and you've gone to the philosophy section and you opened up something, read a paragraph, and just felt like you were swimming in primordial soup because it's so convoluted and complex, I totally understand you. I completely get how you feel. And these books will help you bridge the gap from where you are to where you want to be. Now, I'm having this conversation today because last night in my book club, we're reading this really great book right now by Dr. Robert Sapolsky called Behave. The subtitle is the Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. What he's doing in this book, and this is not one of my nine book recommendations. We're just setting the stage here. But last night, one of the book club members made a really great comment, because in this we were talking about how our brains remap how neurons literally remap to help us sort of get good at the thing we're doing. Perhaps you're learning how to play the piano, or maybe you're learning how to draw. Over time, as you work on that skill, your brain will begin to remap connections so that it can better process and help you do that thing well, we got talking about how books themselves probably are quite a good tool for helping you remap your brain. If you've ever felt like you can't focus or you're just struggling to stay on task with anything, I would like to argue that simply sitting down and creating a reading habit, even for just a few minutes a day, would will help you to get your brain back on track. You will create new mappings. Anyway, he made the comment that he joined my book club because I like to read philosophy books. And that is the core of what we read in the club now. We read both fiction and nonfiction, but always with a philosophical element. And he got into the stoics and other things and admitted last night that he was having quite a difficult time. But he stuck with it, applied the principles that we teach. And now a few months in, he says it's like a door has opened and he's able to understand things and it feels good and he's really enjoying some of these great works. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to try to apply the technique of Sapolsky's book, behave, and we're going to remap our brains. Okay, let's get into these books. Some of them are a little easier than others, and I don't have these in any spot specific order. And I've talked about some of them before. But my criteria in picking these books for you is one that they're not super long. Again, some of these philosophy books can be 6, 700 pages long and just thickly dense. Most of these books are rather easy to get through and are well written. I also, as, as a criteria, wanted to make sure I was feeding you books that have not been talked about a lot on YouTube already or on my channel. I wanted to give you some some new books to. To consider. But I have talked about some of these before simply because they helped me get into philosophy. Book number one is by Dr. John Kag. Hiking with Nietzsche on Becoming who YOU are Now. This is a contemporary book about a philosophy teacher, Dr. Kagg, who when he was younger, got a grant to go to the homeland where Nietzsche was or grew up and spend time there and learn about the philosopher. And it's the story of Nietzsche's experience in developing his philosophies and writing about them. And there is a mountain that this whole narrative sort of revolves around in this big sort of wilderness area. And Tag follows Nietzsche through the same trails he would have walked. And as he's doing this, and he's comparing the art of hiking to the ideas of Nietzsche to make them more palatable and easy to understand. So Nietzsche can be a really hard egg to crack if you're just kind of going straight into his work. This is a nice Way to ease into it. I do sell this at my bookstore@edgewaterbookstore.com and if you decide to pick it up, go, go, you know, throw the channel a bone and grab it there rather than on Amazon. Support the small businesses. Anyway, that's my commercial. Okay, the next one is just a fantastic little book that will sort of get you into Eastern thinking or philosophy, if that is your cup of tea. I find it fascinating how different Western ideas to Eastern ideas can be, and I think they both have merit. I don't think that both of them have it completely figured out. We can learn from both. And I really like this tiny little book. It's called how to Eat by Thich Nhat Hanh. His name is spelled T H I C H, N H A T H, A N, H. How to Eat by Thich Nhat Hanh. And it's this beautiful little book that has these tiny little passages that teach you how to eat your food. Now, he is a monk and he goes through the concept of living life mindfully. So it's not so much a book about thick philosophy or ideas, but it is a good door opening into Eastern thinking. And the fun thing is, is you can read a passage a day here. This isn't something that you. There's not 365 passages, one for every day of the year, but you could just pick one before you make your dinner in the evening, read it, and then try to apply that idea to your meal as you sit down with people that you love and so on. Just to give you an example of this, one of my favorite little passages in here is he has you sit down and look at your plate and before just gobbling it up, right? And then getting on to what you get onto. He asks you to think about each item on your plate and how it got to your plate, all of the people involved in bringing that amazing meal to you, because you probably went to the grocery store to buy it, but in reality, there were farmers and just truckers and all of these people that got that meal to you. And without everybody's help, you would not be eating tonight, Right? So it's just a beautiful way to be present, to be grateful, and so on. Now, Ryan Holiday is. Everybody loves Ryan Holiday if they're into the philosophy thing. And this is the first book of his I Read it is still my favorite. The Obstacle is the Way, the Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph. This book has helped me probably the most in terms of my business and applying Philosophy to business. But it's not A business book. It's a book, again, about personal trial and how to overcome them. And running a business is just full of trials. So it really helped me. I read this book a long time ago and really tried to do my best to apply it. If you know anything about Holiday. He talks a lot about Stoic philosophy, and so that's a good gateway into that. A lot of people use him to get into Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and so on, but he's a contemporary writer. He's a fantastic writer. And if you're trying to make the most out of life, check out the obstacle is the way this book reads really well, and it's easy. Okay, Sophie's World, this is another book that I sell@edgewaterbookstore.com and it's. It's a wonderful book about a young, inquisitive, intelligent girl who receives mysterious mail through the mailbox, of course, from somebody called the philosopher. And he asks her questions about life and gets her to start thinking about things that really matter. And as she begins to think about these throughout the correspondence, he teaches her the history of philosophy, going back from the very beginning of pretty much Western thought up through to more contemporary times. And it's a really great way, in narrative form or fictional form, to learn a little bit about all of the great thinkers and have a good time doing it. So Sophie's World is fun. It's an easy read, and you'll pick up a lot of sort of general knowledge about a lot of important people. We just finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in my book club. Now, I. I wouldn't necessarily call this a philosophy book, although it does lean into some ideas from Plato. However, this is more a book about a. A gentleman who takes his son on a motorcycle ride across the country and the concept of sort of how to think about something he calls quality. Quality with a capital Q. There's a lot in this book. It can be a little more confusing. I would say it's more confusing than the other books I've talked about. So is it my favorite philosophy book? No. And there's a reason why. Because what you need to understand when you read this book is that he is struggling not only with sort of himself and his relationship with his son as they're traveling across the country, but he has some mental illnesses that he's working through, and those illnesses sort of weave their way into the writing, which makes it a fantastically interesting read. But it can be a little confusing at times, so you have to Just slow down. And you have to process it. But if you're looking for a book that's got some, like, road trip vibes to it, jumping on a motorbike and really trying to get quality built into your life, it is a nice book to attempt. And I will say this, it's very polarizing. You'll either love it or you'll hate it. So I. I found that I liked it just because I had read some Plato before, but the first time I read it, I didn't like it. I liked it the second time around. Okay, we've got four more books here. These are smaller, thinner books, and they are a little more leaning into the bigger thinkers. Right. These are. These are books from the thinkers themselves. These other ones, again, are contemporary thinkers talking about older people. All right, this first one is David Hume. He. He was a Scottish philosopher, probably one of the greatest Scottish philosophers ever. And this little book is called Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. It's a tiny thing, I don't know, a little bit over 100 pages. And it's a fascinating idea here. It's really a dialogue between three people. You've got Dema Cleanthes and Philo and Dema and Cleanthes both believe in God, but one of them takes an a priori stance about God. The other one takes an a posteriori stance about God. And then one of them does not believe in God. He's a skeptic. And so it's a conversation about the existence of God. Now, Hume was not a believer in God, and so his ultimate argument here mainly is that because evil exists in the world, that is a real problem. And so he's exploring the concept of why evil exists through these. These great characters. And it's just a whole lot of fun to read. Next is Boethius, the constellation of philosophy. This is grand. This is a little Penguin Classics book. You can buy it for. What did I buy this for? Oh, $16. That's a lot for a little tiny book. But it's a good book. It reads easy. This is why I like Boethius. It's something you can read without feeling completely overwhelmed. And it's a beautiful book about sort of that deathbed experience. You know, we've got this guy who's in prison and he's about to be brutally executed. And, you know, essentially the night before, he's visited by mother philosophy and is allowed to see what really matters and what doesn't, and so on. It's a nice contrast to Hume's book on the evils of religion. Where Boethius looks at kind of more the other side. You know, what you feel in that moment of crisis and sort of your connection with self, with God, with everything else. It's a beautiful book. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. He's a French philosopher. This is our eighth book tonight. This is a fun book. I like Albert Camus very much. He was a great writer who fell into the. The school of existentialism, although he didn't always like to call himself that. He had some confrontational moments, a lot of them actually, with the granddaddy of existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre, but great writer. And the myth of Sisyphus really stems into Camus way of thinking, which for Camus, life was a little absurd, right? He. He wasn't a believer in God. He had some crazy things happen to him. And as he looked around, he's like, there's a lot of weird stuff happening. We are working really hard on this earth. And to what end? To what point? And there was a point in his life where he felt like life was just pointless or absurd or what have you. And then he wrote this book. And if you know anything about Sisyphus, this is the idea that a Greek. I believe Sisyphus was a Greek God who got into trouble and was punished by other Greek gods. And his punishment was he had to push a boulder up a hill. And the moment he got roughly to the top of it, the boulder would, of course, roll back down and he would have to continue doing this for time immemorial, right? Just continually, forever doing that. And Camus made the argument that life kind of feels like that, like you're just always pushing a boulder up a hill and it feels pointless. Pointless work, really. It's hard work, it's stressful work. But somewhere along the line, he argues that Sisyphus actually can lean into that rock and find value in that work. That although it's pointless work, there is value and beauty in that, and you can gain meaning from that and purpose from that. And it's just a great book on making sense of life. I also liked this one. This is our ninth book for today, and the final one, Rene Descartes, A Discourse on the Method. If you know anything about Descartes, he is the philosopher that the concept of I think therefore I am. He's an interesting guy. This. This little book here talks about how he came up with that passage. I think therefore I am is a large part of this. But here's the main idea. He's sitting at his home. And he is completely overwhelmed by the fact that he doesn't know what he knows. He can't quite figure out how to validate anything. So this is a conversation around epistemology or the theory of knowledge. How do you know something? How do you. How can you trust that knowledge? How can you know that it's coming from a reliable source? And he came down to the idea as he continued to question everything that he couldn't. He couldn't prove anything. He couldn't rely on anything 100%. The only thing that he could prove was the fact that he existed here now, and he was a thinking entity of some kind, therefore he existed. And that is sort of a heady concept, but it's an important one because from there he began to build his philosophy. So if you want to get into Descartes, this is a nice little book. It's tiny, it's thin. And the reason why Descartes matters is because everything before Descartes kind of leaned heavily one way. And then Descartes was a pivotal point in philosophy and began to lean away from traditional thinking and try to focus on the self and figure out what the heck is happening in here and how to live that life. Right? So it's an interesting way to go about it. So look, those are nine books that will help you hopefully get into philosophy. And I want to reiterate what I said in the beginning of this episode today, which is that in the beginning, it's going to feel like you're reading Primordial Soup. It's not going to make sense. Philosophy is not like reading Harry Potter or Cormac McCarthy or any of those contemporary novelists that you're used to reading right now. It's definitely not going to feel like any of the nonfiction you're reading. It can feel dense, but it is worth it. And if you're like the wonderful book club member who last night mentioned that he just simply stuck with it. He kept showing up. Took him about a month, but then his brain opened doors and now this stuff is available to him. I can second that. Same thing happened to me. So, anyway, I want to wish you the very best in your journey in philosophy. And until next week, as always, remember to read slowly, take notes, and apply the ideas. I'll see you all next time. Thanks for listening. If you'd like to take your reading to the next level, then head on over to thereadwellpodcast.com there you'll find daily posts on how to read well, you'll also get access to all of my book notes and tools for becoming a better reader. And as always, don't forget to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. Thank you for listening to the Read well Podcast.