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The Culturist Profile picture
@the_culturist_
Dec 20, 2024 • 14 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X
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I asked X: "Which book changed your perspective on life more than any other?"

After THOUSANDS of replies, these were the top 50.

The ultimate 2025 reading list… (bookmark this) 🧵 Image
Note: Titles within each section are ordered roughly by how frequently they were suggested.

By FAR the most popular suggestion of all was the Holy Bible — so here are the top theological works...
Theology:

1. Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
2. Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
3. The City of God, Augustine of Hippo
4. Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas
5. Confessions, Augustine of HippoImage
Image
Philosophy / Political Theory (Part 1):

6. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
7. Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
8. Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
9. The Republic, Plato
10. Tao Te Ching, LaoziImage
Image
Philosophy / Political Theory (Part 2):

11. Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
12. The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis
13. The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli
14. The Federalist Papers, Hamilton / Madison / Jay
15. The Symposium, PlatoImage
Image
Psychology / Self Improvement:

16. Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
17. The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene
18. The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck
19. How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
20. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen CoveyImage
Image
Economics / Personal Finance:

21. Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell
22. The Richest Man in Babylon, George S. Clason
23. The Creature from Jekyll Island, G. Edward Griffin
24. Rich Dad Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki
25. Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon HillImage
Image
Fiction (Part 1):

Dostoevsky, Orwell and Rand dominated suggestions. The most common as follows...

26. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
27. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
28. 1984, George Orwell
29. Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper LeeImage
Image
Fiction (Part 2):

31. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
32. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
33. Animal Farm, George Orwell
34. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
35. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
36. The Alchemist, Paulo CoelhoImage
Image
Fiction (Part 3):

37. The Stranger, Albert Camus
38. The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
39. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
40. Dune, Frank Herbert
41. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
42. Brave New World, Aldous HuxleyImage
Image
Classical / Medieval Poetry:

43. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
44. The Iliad, Homer
45. The Odyssey, Homer
46. Metamorphoses, OvidImage
Image
History & Other Non-Fiction:

47. The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
48. The Art of War, Sun Tzu
49. Histories, Herodotus
50. The Decline of the West, Oswald SpenglerImage
Image
We break down history's greatest books in our free newsletter.

Tomorrow we discuss Paradise Lost — and the even richer, darker Italian poem that inspired it...

100,000+ people read our newsletter every week!
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The Culturist Profile picture
Oct 24, 2025
Few people know what happens *after* the events of The Lord of the Rings.

But it's one of the most poetic and thought-provoking endings in literature... 🧵 Image
After Sauron's defeat at the end of the Third Age, the kingdoms of men are restored.

Aragorn rules the Reunited Kingdom for 120 years, followed by his son for another century. Image
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Oct 22, 2025
Knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom.

Dostoevsky knew just how dangerous it is to mistake intellect for understanding.

Here is his warning about wisdom, and his secret to becoming truly wise… 🧵 Image
In his 20s, Dostoevsky was drawn into the idealism of his age. He joined a group of political idealists who met to debate utopian socialism.

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He came to understand that the revolution he wanted would begin not in the streets, but in the soul… Image
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The Culturist Profile picture
Oct 20, 2025
Tom Bombadil is the most mysterious character in The Lord of the Rings.

He's the oldest being in Middle-earth and completely immune to the Ring's power — but why?

Bombadil is the key to the underlying ethics of the entire story, and to resisting evil yourself… 🧵 Image
Tom Bombadil is an enigmatic, merry hermit of the countryside, known as "oldest and fatherless" by the Elves. He is truly ancient, and claims he was "here before the river and the trees."

He's so confounding that Peter Jackson left him out of the films entirely... Image
This is understandable, since he's unimportant to the development of the plot.

Tolkien, however, saw fit to include him anyway, because Tom reveals a lot about the underlying ethics of Middle-earth, and how to shield yourself from evil. Image
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The Culturist Profile picture
Sep 5, 2025
The story of Saint George isn't just about a brave knight slaying a dragon and saving a damsel.

St. George matters because he holds the answer to the most important of all questions:

What actually is evil, and how do you destroy it? 🧵 Image
To understand the nature of evil, first note that the dragon is a perversion of the natural world.

Its origin is in nature, like the snake or lizard, and that makes it compelling. It's close enough to something natural (something good) that we tolerate it. Image
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It's also outside the city walls, and thus overlooked. Image
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The Culturist Profile picture
Jul 29, 2025
Why would someone who could paint the picture on the left choose to paint the picture on the right?

A thread... 🧵 Image
Picasso died in 1973 at the age of 91.

His self portraits had changed quite a lot by that age... Image
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The answer has a lot to do with Picasso himself, but also with the changing world in general... Image
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The Culturist Profile picture
Jul 11, 2025
The French Revolution was way more sinister than you think.

In a frenzy to purge all aspects of Christian life, they even changed the calendar and UNITS OF TIME.

10-hour days, 100-minute hours, 100-second minutes.

Then they made a new religion — the Cult of Reason… 🧵 Image
From 1793 to 1795, France mandated "metric time": 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, etc.

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Authorities created new clocks to make people adjust to the new units, and went about checking that the new times/dates went on all public documents. Image
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