I read plenty of books and I have found they are all iterations of classics. I want to read the creator of the idea. I want the purist form of the idea and that is usually found with the oldest version of a book. The reason we aren’t reading the originals is due to business. Nobody is spending there marketing budget on a book they no longer have copyright protections on. As a person seeking education and great books, I don’t want to be influenced by marketing.

Here’s how the Family Tree:

Example:

I read a book, such as John Bogle’s Common Sense Investing. In that book Bogle references many ideas that were a focus in Benjamin Grahams The Intelligent Investor. These books share a large similarity in the topic of “Value Investing”. Now which one came first? Which book is the “child” and which is the “parent”. You could continue this ladder finding books that have value investing as a major topic and grow out the family tree.

This strategy of recommending books based off the family tree would prevent you from the modern day book trap business. Books today are published based on original works that have been forgotten. The new book is no better than the original and many times worse.

Stoicism as a topic is a great example of this. Reading the originals is far more valuable than reading the self-help “best sellers” that are published today and marketed beyond oblivion to produce sales. I’ve read a handful of books that were almost identical subtract the voicing of the author. Need an example? UnF*ck Yourself, The Subtle Are of Not Giving a F*ck, You Are a Badass. That genre is being beaten like a dead horse based on zero original ideas. Go read Tony Robbins, which is an iteration of Think and Grow Rich, which could be a n iteration of Benjamin Franklins 13 Principles.