Western writers recommended in Japanese collections

When I was in Japan I discovered, in a Japanese book, a very interesting list of Western writers. I hadn’t known about Chesterton in particular and I was delighted to read his work for the first time. Here are those writers, recommended in Nishibe Susumu’s Heroes of Thought (思想の英雄たち):

Edmond Burke, Søren Kierkegaard, Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacob Burckhardt, Gustave Le Bon, G.K. Chesterton, Oswald Spengler, Johan Huizinga, José Ortega y Gasset, Karl Jaspers, T.S. Eliot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Hayek, Michael Oakeshott

Now I recently found another interesting list. Here are the books recommended by Shōichi Watanabe’s Reading World History Through Classic Texts (名著で読む世界史)

History of Herodotus (HTML, Gutenberg, Kindle)
History of Thucydides (Gutenberg, Kindle)
Caesar, De Bello Gallico (HTML, Kindle)
Tacitus, “Germania”
Nanami Shiono, “The Story of the Roman People”
Christopher Dawson, “The Making of Europe”
Machiavelli, “The Prince”
Carl von Clausewitz, “On War”
Shōichi Watanabe, “The German General Staff” [Yes, Watanabe describes his own book as a classic…]
Oswald Spengler, “Twilight in the West”
Cecil Chesterton, A History of the United States (JPG, Gutenberg, Kindle)
Baron Macaulay, “The History of England from the Accession of James II”
Hilaire Belloc, The Jews (JPG, Kindle, used)

edit: I downloaded Macaulay’s book and I am enjoying it quite a lot. I edited this post to provide more reading options for people.

Posted: May 16th, 2014 | Books