5 Books Every Man Should Read To Become Educated In The Classics

The benefits of reading are obvious, on average men who read have a higher rate of employment. Taking it a step further, according to one report, Adults whose annual household income is $30,000 or less are more likely than those living in households earning $75,000 or more a year to be non-book readers (36% vs. 14%).

So what should you read? Stick to the classics we put together a list of the 5 books every man should read to become educated in the classics.

1. Homer’s The Illiad and The Odyssey

Homer’s The Illiad and The Odyssey is a classic. Check the price on Amazon. The oldest extant works of Western literature, Homer s the Iliad and the Odyssey are an important part of the Greek culture. The Iliad gives a detailed poetic description of the war of Troy and expounds the battle and the events during the weeks of quarrels between King Agamemnon and warrior Achilles. The Odyssey expounds Homer s energetic vision of everyman s journey through life. It recounts the tale of Ulysses journey back home, after the ten-year-long Trojan War and the fall of the city of Troy.

2. 1984 & Animal Farm

This next book comes with 2 in 1, check the price on Amazon. George Orwell feared a world where reading books was banned (1984) while Aldous Huxley feared a world where no one wanted to read them so they didn’t need to be banned (Brave New World).

In 1984, London is a grim city where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith joins a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.

Animal Farm is Orwell’s classic satire of the Russian Revolution — an account of the bold struggle, initiated by the animals, that transforms Mr. Jones’s Manor Farm into Animal Farm–a wholly democratic society built on the credo that All Animals Are Created Equal. But are they?

Orwell was a genuine badass, reading his infamous works will fortify your spirit and challenge you to take control of your life.

3. Live Not By Lies: A Manual For Christian Dissidents

New York Times bestselling author Rod Dreher captures the history of Soviet-era dissidents in this masterpiece that ties together past and present. Reading Live Not By Lies will fascinate the history buff in you, and shock your modern sensibilities. Check the price on Amazon.

4. Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a legendary work that pits a firefighter’s conscience against a dystopian state that seeks to destroy all books, check the price on Amazon.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known..

5. Catcher In The Rye

J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye is a classic to absolutely have on your bookshelf. CITR inspired Mark David Chapman to kill John Lennon, he wanted to model his life after the book’s protagonist Holden Caulfield. Check the price on Amazon.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.