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Instead of high filuting shit like art of war, go read about Clausewitz, Hannibal, and Napoleon's methods and thinking.

Instead of reading "the 48 laws of power" go read the dictators handbook and works by Shelle Rose Charvet

Instead of guns, germs, and steel, go read about cliodynamics.

Instead of 1984, go read Fahrenheit 451 and the camp of saints

Instead of "how to win friends and influence people" go read "Games people play" by eric berne.

Haven't read "thinking fast and slow", haven't read "think and grow rich", and I'm certainly not reading Sapiens by yuval harari, and my guess is none of these are worth it anyway.

This is all you need to know in terms of "this not that."
I would know. I've read around 400 ebooks, and at one point had over a thousand physical books, half of which I read and realized were worthless, and discarded by the side of the road under the sign "free kindling".

Most books aren't worth the ink and paper it took to print them.

Clauswitz will teach you the politics of war. Napoleon will teach you the tactics of war. Hannibal will teach you the difference between tactics and strategy (tactics is about what you do in a conflict, strategy is about how you prioritize and choose which battles to fight, and which to avoid, in order to maximize the odds of winning. Thats it, thats all you need to know about that, really.)

"Games people play" is about interpersonal dynamics, and gets down into the nitty gritty about all the shit we see. Identify a game someone is playing, and it tells you numerous things about who they are, and where they come from. I once was at a party, and noticed how the host interacted with his wife, and it fell under a particular pattern, and I turned to the host's sister-in-law and said "he was a real mamas boy wasn't he?" She looked at me startled, because this guy didn't seem the type, and she asked "how did you know?"
It's that predictive of people.

Charvet's work tells you how people communicate at a word-by-word and sentence by sentence level, and the psychology behind those. Remember those myers-briggs personality tests? If anyone has taken more than one for school or knows someone who has, they might have heard how someone's type 'changed'. Thats not the case at all. Those tests are static dogshit. In fact, the reason people's brigg's type seems to change is because people act different under different circumstances (the setting, the individual interaction, the social context, and a host of other variables). Charvet and her company discovered that there are fixed patterns, and key indicator words and styles of speech that exactly tell you what someone's pattern is in any given situation. She also learned that the advice to "restate someone's words in your own words to show you are paying attention" (or doing 'active listening') is basically bullshit, and if you don't know how to use her system, the best thing you can do is to reply (to someone you're trying to influence) by using their exact words. You can change the ordering, but the words themselves should be the same.

1984 was basically a love letter to totalitarianism, turned job-app for a would-be globalist propagandist. Its function was to pull the wool over people's eyes so when totalitarianism arrived at their doorstep, they wouldn't recognize it, sort of like how red dawn acts to program the right into misguidedly believing what a foreign takeover of the u.s. 'would' look like, and so when that all-out invasion never comes, people sit on their hands.