>>15321
Get a good translation of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. They are full of sincere common sense musings that the author never intended to publish. The fact that he was a Roman Emperor is the least interesting thing about him, and he has much to say about how to live life content - and the importance of being moral, even when everyone else is caught up in the pursuit of wealth, or idle pursuits like sport teams. Some things never change.
Niccolo Machiavelli's the Prince is also a good start for a young mind. It has an unearned reputation as an edgelord's guidebook to betrayal, when it's actually just another book on common sense, this time applied to rulership. What it has to say about picking allies, coming to power and staying in power is universally applicable on all levels of human society.
Xenophon's Anabasis is worthwhile as a more fun, but still productive read. 10,000 Greeks get stuck in the middle of Persia and have to fight their way through 2,300,000 Persians to get home. Xenophon, an awful student of Socrates, ends up having to take the reigns of leadership over the stranded Greeks after their leadership is decapitated. It has a few things to say about the value of free-men worth remembering.
Paul F. Kennedy's 'The Rise and Fall of Great Powers,' and to a lesser extent his works regarding naval power, are fantastic books to get started with geopolitics. They are well-researched, the author focuses on an impartial (completely untainted by identity politics) analysis of the material capabilities of great powers & their dominance or decline, starting from the Hapsburgs and ending with musings on US power in a multipolar world. Most importantly, each chapter offers enough depth for you to springboard into more serious analyses of certain time periods or nations - so you can better understand why Britain dominated the world one day and collapsed in the next, why Nazi Germany opted for war against the USSR instead of keeping a stalemate, why the US continues to intervene in the affairs of foreign nations at great cost to itself.
I can think of more recommendations depending on what your interests primarily are (self-improvement, history, philosophy, literature, economics e.t.c.). Some more general recommendations are: If you can get your hands on some old (1960s and below) encyclopedias & history books, you usually can't go wrong. The newer they are, the more likely they are to be revisionist histories, but again you can't always judge a book by its cover. It's also worthwhile seeing if you can get your hands on a Priest's Companion (Orthodox, Anglican, Roman Catholic e.t.c.), even if you are irreligious, they usually come full of practical and mindful lessons. If you're really at a loss, start going through the ancient epics all the way to the early modern epics - the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Beowulf, Mahabharata, Divine Comedy e.t.c., just be careful with translations. I once read a translation of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms which craftily left out statements which didn't fit in with modern progressive ideology, like statements regarding the interchangeability of women versus the irreplaceable quality of good brothers. Mistranslations will inevitably pervert the style & substance of a text, just as much as getting a poor translation of Adolf will
