Relay Project: King of Unread Books Introduction! | Introducing books I haven't read: The world's oldest strategy book

An iPad mini about 1cm thick.
In the age of e-books, most of my library is stored inside this. The device, which neither changes in weight nor thickness no matter how many books I store, didn't just have good points.

Because, without realizing it, I had piled up as many as 50 books...!

Some of them I bought just because they were cheap on sale, though. This time, from those 50 books, I would like to introduce one book that is the King of Unread Books—one I've had piled up since the days of paper books, and even after digitizing it, it remains unread.
(I did dispose of a fair number of books before digitizing, so it's not that I don't have the intention to read them!)

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The planner for this wonderful theme is Wa-san, and I am the 4th runner in the baton relay!
Did I steal the baton from Wadi-san? (See the comment section)

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I actually thought about going with 3 books, but once I wrote about the first one and the recommended book, the word count was already quite high...

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Usa Usami's King of Unread Books
"Six Secret Teachings (Rikuto)" translated by Fujima Hayashi

It's a book that is highly likely to have been written over 2000 years ago, and I bought it because it was advertised as being so beloved by the famous Fujiwara no Kamatari that he memorized it. However, while glancing at Amazon and other sites to write this article, I saw that Minamoto no Yoshitsune and Zhuge Liang also read it, so if it were today, it would be a book that would have no trouble finding someone to write a blurb for it.

As for whether it's accessible to us modern people, the writing is extremely stiff, but depending on your generation, I think it's easy to read because the characters tend to be reimagined as characters from Weekly Shonen Jump.

The main characters are Hoshin Engi's Jiang Ziya and King Wen of Zhou (Ji Chang), the father of King Wu who founded the Zhou Dynasty.

And what is the content? Well, you know how there are dialogue blogs these days? To put it very simply, it has that kind of vibe.

I've only read the beginning, but it seems that strategy and politics are written in this style. (See Wikipedia "Six Secret Teachings")

In other words, Fujiwara no Kamatari was reading a strategy book written 2000 years ago in the style of a dialogue blog until the pages wore thin.

Then why have I been leaving this book unread?

The biggest strength and biggest weakness of this book is that it is composed of conversations of up to about 3 pages, and since each one is completed, no frustration remains even if you put it down halfway through.

Because there's no frustration, I even forget that I was in the middle of reading it.

And as for whether I want to read more, it's relatively monotonous (lol). So, it's a book that I repeat reading about 30 pages of, leaving it for over a year, and then starting from the beginning again. I had only been thinking about reading it from start to finish, but as I started writing this article, I thought maybe I should just read the parts I want to read from the table of contents, like following links on a blog. If you are someone who wants to read the same books that the sages of the past read, why not give it a try?

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Along with a recommended book.
To you, who have a stack of unread books

In the month or so I've been on note, I've mentioned the author I revere, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, many times. In what is likely his best-selling work, “The Black Swan”, the opening uses the example of author Umberto Eco's vast library of 30,000 books to write the following passage.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the real estate market allow. With age, your knowledge and books accumulate. Unread books also increase, looking down at you maliciously from the shelves. In fact, the more you know, the more unread books you have. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Humans treat knowledge like property, hoarding and protecting it. Knowledge is merely an ornament needed to climb the social ladder. (omitted)
Just as we flip the logic of a library, we flip the logic of knowledge itself. A black swan is born from misjudging how likely surprising events are—in other words, how many unread books there are. We take what we know a little too seriously.

I think this connects to Socrates' “knowledge of ignorance,” but for someone like him who statistically studies the occurrence of “unknown events,” the amount of knowledge in the books he has already read is nothing to boast about. What is more important is recognizing how much you do not know from the books you have not read. Because the “unknowns” that change your life, whether for better or worse, come from the parts you do not know.

It might not be a bad thing that you can't seem to reduce your stack of unread books; perhaps it's good to look at it from that perspective.

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■ Relay Rules!
◉ This project relay will be based on a “candidacy system”!
◉ If you think this project sounds interesting, please write your request to participate in the comments section of the contributor's article.
◉ The baton is basically first-come, first-served (or any method that avoids fighting, haha).
◉ Please state, “I am number X, and you are number Y.” I, the project organizer, am number 1.
Since this project is experimental, this time the “5th person will be the anchor”!
◉ Once you receive the baton, please post your article within 5 days. (That is, 5 days from the time you request and receive the baton.)
◉ As part of the relay flow, please include the article of the person who passed the baton to you. (It might be a hassle, but please do so.)
◉ Please use the hashtag “#Let'sReduceUnreadBooksWithWaSan”.

1st: Wa-san
2nd: Aoharu
3rd: Wadi
4th: Usa Usami ← Current position
5th: Nonaka Naoko

So, thank you for waiting! Next up is Nonaka Naoko-san!