Good Books

Is The Prince a good book to send as a Christmas gift? Has anyone read it? I found out about it from 2pac lyrics.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=wsMs-DuGy1o
archive.org/details/AntiMachiavelFriedericktheGreat
twitter.com/AnonBabble

idk if bait but yeah, I have a copy sitting next to me rn but I havent finished it.

It's so weird how harry potter morals it into our everyday life

Not bait. My cousin is a bookworm and I already asked him if hes read any books by an Italian and he said no. So this might be a nice surprise?

i haven't read a book in several years, are there any books you nubs would recommend? I was thinking of trying out The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky but idk

I have some books from the dune series that are tucked away in my closet but i never got around to reading them

please don't rape me i swear it was an accident

To the right person, yes. I've read it cover to cover, it's fantastic.

hey you stole the trips

the prince is basically a manual of dirty politics written in 15th century italy - its pretty hard to understand as it is nuanced and allegorical - you'd need cliff notes…
also, as a christmas gift, it could be read the wrong way by someone who is iliar with machiavelli's work, as his name is synonymous with treachery and deceit…
if you want to impress him try something like the canterbury tales by chaucer, gravities rainbow by thomas pynchon, finnegans wake by james joice ect…

The Prince is a scientific treatise (social science, but science nonetheless). If he's more into literary fiction, then no, it's not a good choice. Try Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose instead. Philosophically it's pretty thick so if he's into hard literature he'd enjoy it.

(recommending bc Umberto Eco was Italian too)

foucaults pendulum is another good umberto eco novel
but if op is looking for prestigious, italian and old then may i suggest pic related?

Or The Decameron.

If you haven't read in a while, you will get bored fast if you go head first in these long books. Start with smaller ones

The Prince is required reading for politicians, military officers and anyone who wants power of any kind. The book explains that you must give people the illusion that you are wise, gentle and kind while using cold, ruthless methods to achieve your goals.
The BBC made an excellent documentary on Machiavelli and his book. It's now on Youtube.
youtube.com/watch?v=wsMs-DuGy1o

However, before you follow any of the advice in The Prince, you should also read Frederick The Great's Anti-Machiavel. It's a point-by-point refutation of The Prince written by the absolute monarch who turned Prussia from an obscure state into one of Europe's great powers.
You can download the ebook for free.
archive.org/details/AntiMachiavelFriedericktheGreat

coolkid.png

Confirmed hasn't read The Prince.

…confirmed still makes good suggestions though. WTF, user, go read The Prince if you've actually read Dante. Shit's legit, yo.

the prince is difficult to understand if you need to learn to read beforehand. ewerything written is straight-forward. no allegories or complicate statements.

if you dont see that in any given page, paragraph, sentence, he's talking about 5 different things at once then i suppose you and i have differing levels of comprehension… but whatever… read it in college, got my grade, moved on…

Was that a part of your Rick and Morty comprehension degree?

I think books about 2pac are better

I think he just wrote ti to get on the Medici's good side, I am not sure if it was his true belife, and this might explain how some think it is satire.

test

>>>/sudo/

Currently reading the Hobbit. It's fun but it drags sometimes. Hoping to read LOTR afterwards

LotR is worse. If you think The Hobbit has filler, wait until LotR where they spend ten chapters dicking around in each town while Tolkien autistically describes what they eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And don't even get me started on the Silmarillion, which has like five lines of dialogue in the whole thing because it wasn't even a book, just an extra long outline of the story.

Well that sucks. I enjoyed the films (not the Hobbit ones) and I already knew about Tom Bombadil and other pointless sequences in the books, but ffs Tolkien inspired GoT and visualized Catholicism

i would describe LOTR as "immersive" but as i've already seen in this thread, my assessments of books i've read seems to trigger people

Coming from someone who genuinely enjoys reading stuffy philosophy books: no. It's painfully and mind numbingly boring, and all of the advice in it can be boiled down to "just be a bigger cunt than anyone else." Read Meditations or Art of War if you want to shit out some intelligent-sounding quotes that may or may not be relevant to the situation at hand, or literally anything else if you want to read for fun.

I read The Prince and wrote a paper analyzing six chapters of it earlier this semester. It's not about politics in the modern sense, but rather about statecraft as it existed in the war-torn Italian principalities of the early 16th century.

It's a fantastic read for anyone who is interested in history or modern business/politics. It only takes two hours to read cover to cover as well, so no great attention span is required.


Although he wrote it with the intention of sending it to the Medici household, it is not a work of flattery. Many of the tactics employed by the Medici in their coup of Florence (such as relying on the armies of another nation) are openly criticized in the book. From what I know of Machiavelli's professional life and retirement, he wrote the Prince simply because he loved statecraft as an art.

Very quotable book as well. This is one of my favorites.

Confirmed book-bros.

He majored in political science in Uni.