The best of human knowledge in one fat volume?

A book review

I want to tell you about this book I’ve been reading lately, because I think its mission statement is so rad: Take the 100 books from human history that, combined, will give the reader the broadest and most essential knowledge, and condense each of those books’ main takeaways into roughly six pages apiece. Then present those condensed versions in sequence, such that their learnings appear to be in conversation with one another.

It’s a brilliant concept, especially for the world we’re living in right now, and I think the execution works.

Unfortunately for the English-speaking world, this book is currently only available in Japanese. Its absurdly-long title is 世界のエリートが学んでいる教養書必読100冊を1冊にまとめてみた, or, roughly translated, 100 Volumes of Cultural Edification that the World’s Elites are Studying, Condensed into One Volume. It was published by Kodansha in October 2023.

Yes! We can and should problematize the idea of “the world’s elites,” but let’s leave that discussion for another day.

My copy, photographed at the Meitetsu Inn Nagoya Kanayama Annex, with its nice lighting.

In the book’s introduction, author Takahisa Nagai suggests that people may be less able or willing to retain important information, currently and in the coming years, because everything you could ever need to know is just a search engine query away.

Frankly that strikes me as a terrifying notion, but it’s also completely relatable.

So, Nagai asks, why is it valuable to internalize a certain amount of knowledge, and retain it in your own brain? Because the skills of logical thinking, and bullshit detection, and information synthesis, will never stop being valuable. And may in fact even become more valuable, if fewer people are devoting mental energy to cultivating them. That’s what inspired him to put this book together.

I love this concept.

Of course, the execution of this kind of project is always going to involve a certain amount of subjectivity.

Why 100 volumes, exactly?

Who is choosing those volumes, and why?

What kind of diversity of thought is collected here? (My answer: not enough.)

What happens when each of these volumes is presented in the context of Japanese language and worldview?

These questions are all worthy of consideration, but taken in total, I think Nagai does a good job of presenting his selections in a fair way, inviting readers to read them either in page-number sequence, or in the order in which they most appeal to the reader. Satisfy your curiosity first, says Nagai. He invites readers to disagree with his selections and the inferences made in his summaries.

Nagai is also very upfront about the fact that none of these summaries should take the place of reading the actual work being summarized. But he’s realistic about how impossible it would be for the average person to realistically sit down and read even a fraction of these works in their entirety. He does encourage us to at least entertain the notion, though, and that ain’t nothing.

The book is divided into six sections, each representing a broad category of human knowledge. In order, the sections are:

1. Western Philosophy, beginning with Plato’s Apology of Socrates

2. Politics, Economics, and Sociology, beginning with Aristotle’s Politics

3. Eastern Philosophy, beginning with The Analects by Confucius

4. History, Art, Literature, beginning with E.H. Carr’s What is History?

5. Science, beginning with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species

6. Math and Engineering, beginning with 数学序説, or, Introduction to Mathematics by Yoshida Yoichi and Seki Setsuya, originally published in 2013. (Interesting choice!)

Nagai writes with a casual and conversational tone, like the guy from work you respect and would actually enjoy having lunch with. Makes sense, given his impressive background as a Keio University engineering grad who worked for IBM for many years before leaving to found his own company and work as an author and lecturer.

Each chapter uses infographics to help visualize key concepts, like the one pictured below.

Big bestseller books like this one, bursting with knowledge, are actually relatively common in Japan, which I think is really neat! They’re always advertised on trains, and positioned prominently in bookstores. Nagai himself has written a few, including a couple of books like this one which are specifically tailored to cover the contents of a typical MBA program.

What I think makes this particular book so exciting, though, is the moment at which it arrives in history.

Take me, for example. I’m over here constantly hollering about how we need to get off our phones all the god damn time, but that begs a couple of questions. Like, okay, so what are we supposed to do instead? And also, what about all the fun things my phone gives me? Some of them are objectively awesome.

The bad and unhelpful answer to these questions is: Uh, try reading a book, idiot.

A better answer is: Specifically, look at this book! It’s fun to hang out with! It feels expressly designed to capture the attention-economy-ravaged brains of today! I know, because I have one, and reading this book feels like a salve.

It reads like the transcript of a really great podcast. It can take you down rabbit holes like the best Wikipedia binge. And best of all, it makes you realize that you really don’t understand some pretty fundamental concepts as well as you thought you did, and then genuinely helps you understand them better.

Okay that last one might only apply to yours truly, but hey, that’s good enough for me.