Books to Read. Books to Think.

I have read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey more times than I have ever read any other books, with the possible exception of a slight book I was in love with when I was a boy called "Heaven's My Destination," by Thornton Wilder. More than anything else, I spent some years willing myself to write like Wilder. As I so often say about almost everything, "that didn't work out."

Of late, the world of Classics has been taken over by women. Women are popularizing the old stories. And women are leading departments at major English and amerikan universities. Oxbridge. Yale. Harvard.

Here's a small smattering of evidence for my broad claim:

Each of the authors of the books above, has written a lot. Each of these authors are taking stories and histories thousands of years old and looking at them with fresh eyes, from a perspective that wasn't considered when I started reading these stories fifty years ago and is seldom considered today.

As A.E. Stallings wrote in the review of "Penelope's Bones" in Friday's "Wall Street Journal," "The women 'written out' of Homer’s world, as Ms. Hauser sees it, also include relatively unsung women archaeologists and scholars."

The point of this post is not to encourage you to read the ancient stories that have, to a degree, helped define our species at least in what we call "the West." The point is how hard these new books are to read.

They take what I've always known and force me to question it. 

They take stories I've been reading for half-a-century and they have the courage to re-examine them. They have the courage to re-animate women who were left without voices. They have the courage to do what Adam Morgan in "Eating the Big Fish," (his hallmark book on Challenger Brands) lists as one of the principles of being a challenger brand.

Each of these books challenges the dominant complacency. 

They shoot arrows, investigate, examine, question prevailing wisdom.

You know, like you're supposed to do if someone says that something you're supposed to be advertising is exactly the same as everything else.

You're supposed to shoot arrows, investigate, examine, question prevailing wisdom.

In other words, they take things "everybody knows," and they say, "no, that's not right. I think this happened."

I've said for about 40 years now that I don't read books about business. I prefer reading books about life and seeing how they apply to business.

The books listed here, if those of us in advertising can read and think about them, help us become better at our jobs. 

Not because you need to know about Priam and Hector and Scylla and Charybdis (though it wouldn't hurt) but because they force you to do what any good thinker has to train themselves to do--even thinkers in advertising.

That is: re-think.

Don't accept something because everyone says so.

Turn things upside down.
Make the age-old new.

They train you to shoot arrows, investigate, examine, question prevailing wisdom.

I realize going to the Peloponnese is a long way to go for a blogpost on advertising.

But it's my blog. And how I work.

Thanks for reading.