This may be a bad question but here it is: how do I become smart? what books do I read to become smart? I am currently reading the Count of Monte Cristo and I am around 2/3 complete (no spoilers please) and what I really like about the book is that their is a sense of transformation when the main character transforms becoming the pinnacle of Parisian society. I am a 15 year old male and I want to become smart and be like the Count of Monte Cristo so what books do I read to accomplish this
by phoboy99
4 Comments
Dude, reading making you smart. But reading of good literature, take any classic author (Dumas is one of them), and you’ll become smarter.
All of them. The thing about being well read is that it involves reading a lot of different books, on a lot of different topics. There’s no one book that will do this for you. Read some classics – like *The Count of Monte Cristo*, and some Dickens. Whoever you like. Then read some modern fiction. It can be anything that sounds interesting. Doesn’t matter what it is. Then think of some things you’re interested in, and read non-fiction books about those things. Read articles and websites about things you want to know. It’s not all about books.
Learn about politics and art, science and philosophy, nature and music. It’s all valuable. Machiavelli, Marx, Renoir, Aristotle, Hawking, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Epicurus, Churchill, Washington, Ghandi, Mandela. There are many books written about all the most influential people to have lived. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with them or not – just read and learn.
Be curious. That’s the best advice I can give you. Curiosity is the number one factor in absorbing knowledge. An engaged person will learn valuable information from seemingly empty material, while the person who pretends to know everything already will learn nothing from the most informative of books.
Also, I should mention, you’re fifteen. You won’t be “well read” by the time you’re 16, 17, 18. It’s a journey, and you add bits and pieces of knowledge as you walk along life’s road. Remember that. Be patient. If you have an end goal, you’ll never reach it. Just keep learning, and keep enjoying the act of learning.
Goal oriented, not image oriented approach is better, imho. Obsessing over smartness is a very slippery slope. It’s egomaniacal and narcissistic in nature and won’t get you in any wholesome place. Been there. It’s like bodybuilding mania, best case scenario worthless, worst case scenario – severe complications for your health, in this instance mental health, but also physical, since it’s psychosomatic – somatopsychic axis.
There are a lot of interventions that supposedly can augment your thinking. Like n-back training, Relatinonal Reasoning Training, Image Streaming. You can learn about them in discord servers like “Brain training & Intelligence” and “Mind Building” (if you’ll find them). But it won’t really help you without a proper goal – not to become great for the sake of greatness, but rather to achieve something first of all valuable to you, second beneficial for world and third – measurble.
*The dawn of everything* by Davids Graeber and Wengrow
*Braiding sweetgrass* by Robin Wall Kimmerer
*Black Marxism* by Cedric Robinson
*Astrobiology* by Plaxco and Gross
*How infrastructure works* by Deb Chachra
I’d consider all of these wide-ranging intellectual reads that make you work a bit for a lot of payoff, each in different ways.