New Course: 100 Great Books (Book 2: Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov)
The Brothers Karamazov (1880): Fyodor Dostoevsky
Thanks for the encouraging response to the launch of this course. You can read the first book (The Little Prince) summary here.
Today, we make our way through Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov. We have adopted a simple framework to select books for this course:
Lindy Effect: The books must have survived the test of time. We occasionally relish bestsellers about fitness, relationships, and wealth, but this course is not designed for short-term wins. If done well, it will position you to be a better CEO, writer, parent, friend, and connoisseur of life.
Inclusivity: There will be books and ideas from different cultures, but we won’t be able to achieve perfect inclusivity. For instance, there won’t be a quota for the number of books per country.
The Invisible Audience: Who is this designed for? Who exactly? It is for the intellectually curious reader, the kind of person who picked up Peter Thiel’s Zero to One and noticed that it opens with a line from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”). They may have vaguely heard of Tolstoy but never actually read him, yet they want to know what the reference means.
It is also for the kind of person who reads The Economist, stumbles across a term like “orientalist,” recognizes that it carries weight, but can’t quite pin down what it really means.
In other words, it’s for the curious generalist, people who sense that the ideas and references shaping business, politics, and culture draw from a deeper well of literature, history, and philosophy, and who want a thoughtful, accessible way into that world.
Editorial Preference: The selection of works reflects what the writer knows and cares about. It is by no means exhaustive or definitive. But if you are reading this, I hope you trust the writer enough to follow their judgment.
The Brothers Karamazov