Reading path
How to Spend a Life
The question underneath all of these books is the same: what does it mean to spend a life well? Aristotle wanted you to build virtues like muscle; Seneca wanted you to notice how fast time passes; Montaigne wanted you to watch yourself live until the watching became a kind of answer. Two and a half millennia of proposals, all disagreeing. None of them final.
In the app a path keeps your place, marks what you have read, and hands you the next work when you are ready for it.
The first button needs the app on this device; the second gets it there.
The route
- 1. Nicomachean EthicsAristotle, 350 BCE
- 2. De Rerum NaturaLucretius, 55 BCE
- 3. On ObligationsMarcus Tullius Cicero, 44 BCE
- 4. On the Shortness of LifeSeneca, 49 CE
- 5. Letters to LuciliusSeneca, 65 CE
- 6. The EnchiridionEpictetus, 135 CE
- 7. MeditationsMarcus Aurelius, 180 CE
- 8. ConfessionsSaint Augustine, 400 CE
- 9. The Consolation of PhilosophyBoethius, 524 CE
- 10. EssaysMichel de Montaigne, 1580
- 11. PenséesBlaise Pascal, 1670
- 12. Self-RelianceRalph Waldo Emerson, 1841
- 13. WaldenHenry David Thoreau, 1854
- 14. The Gay ScienceFriedrich Nietzsche, 1882
- 15. Thus Spoke ZarathustraFriedrich Nietzsche, 1883
- 16. Letters to a Young PoetRainer Maria Rilke, 1929
- 17. The ProphetKahlil Gibran, 1923
- 18. Zorba the GreekNikos Kazantzakis, 1946
- 19. The Razor's EdgeW. Somerset Maugham, 1944
- 20. The Nine Cloud DreamKim Man-jung, 1687
- 21. A Mathematician's ApologyG.H. Hardy, 1940
- 22. EcclesiastesAnonymous, 250 BCE
- 23. The Autobiography of Benjamin FranklinBenjamin Franklin, 1791
- 24. A ConfessionLeo Tolstoy, 1882
- 25. How Should a Person Be?Sheila Heti, 2010