About This Site

What this is

The Nietzsche Bookshelf (book.themodel.be) is a book guide for people who have been defeated by philosophy books before. This English edition selects five titles currently available on amazon.com and presents them in a reading order that won't defeat you. A Japanese edition and a Korean edition are also maintained, along with a sister shop, The Schopenhauer Bookshelf.

The parent project is our sister archive The Philosophy of Nietzsche (in Japanese, formerly soqdoq.com/nietzsche): 80+ articles reading the primary texts fragment by fragment — The Gay Science (65 articles), The Birth of Tragedy (11), Thus Spoke Zarathustra and more. Every review and reading-order recommendation on this site rests on that first-hand reading.

How books are chosen and rated

• Judgements about the works themselves rest on the editorial room's first-hand reading of the primary texts. Star ratings are our own; no Amazon customer reviews are reproduced.
• Where a book is a memoir, a selection, or an illustrated guide, the review says exactly what it is and what role it can honestly play. A guide is scaffolding, not the building — and we say so.
• All descriptions are written by us; no publisher copy is reproduced.
• Quotations are our own glosses of the German originals with sources indicated — not reproductions of the translations under review.
• Cover images are jacket-style images of our own design and differ from the actual covers.
• Prices and availability change, so we do not print them; always check the Amazon product page.

Amazon link disclosure

As an Amazon Associate, this site (The Nietzsche Bookshelf) may earn from qualifying purchases.

Book links on this edition go to product pages on Amazon (amazon.com). If a purchase is made through them, this site may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Commissions never influence the ratings — recommending books you will actually finish, rather than books that merely sell, is in the end what serves readers best.

Privacy policy

This is a static site; no personal information is collected server-side. The browser's localStorage is used solely to count link clicks (to improve the ranking's accuracy); that data stays in your browser and is never transmitted. Once you follow a link to Amazon, Amazon.com's privacy policy applies.

Contact

For corrections and inquiries, please use the contact address on our sister site soqdoq.com/nietzsche.