One of the things I love about working at Cosimo is that I’m constantly discovering wonderful (and sometimes wonderfully weird!) old books that I’ve never even heard of before, as well as getting regular reminders of great classics that I either haven’t read since school or have never read at all (and should). But even more surprising is that the more I look through books published 50, 100, 150, even 200 years ago, the more I see that the topics that fascinate readers today are, in many instances, the same ones that booklovers were gobbling up decades and centuries ago.

Every Monday, I’ll take a look at the current New York Times best-seller lists and point out a few Cosimo Classics that connect to today’s hottest books. Cuz all true readers know that too much of a good thing is never enough.

Brad Meltzer’s political thriller The Book of Fate — currently No. 4 on the Times hardcover fiction list — is about the Masonic secrets behind a murder in the highest corridors of power in Washington, D.C. If you’re enjoying Meltzer’s book, check out The Ancient Mysteries and Modern Masonry, a 1909 work by Rev. Charles H. Vail. Though the author cannot, alas, “lift the veil from the secrets of the Order,” Vail, a 32nd-degree Freemason, endeavors to lead the curious toward a more complete understanding of the ancient knowledge of the eternal truth of the universe of which the Masons are the keepers. From the great antiquity of Masonic symbols and traditions to the formation of the organization with their perpetuation as its goal, this is an intriguing glimpse inside one of the most enigmatic fraternities in existence. It is required reading for those fascinated by arcane wisdom and secret societies.

The Times hardcover nonfiction list includes two books criticizing Christianity, and in particular the harm organized and widespread religion has done to the modern world: Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation is at No. 6 on the list, and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion is at No. 8. For more about the roots of modern Christian criticism, you’ll want to read Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s timeless masterpiece The Anti-christ. In this scathing critique, Nietzsche writes:

The Christian concept of a god — the god as the patron of the sick, the god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit — is one of the most corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world… In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy.

His works have been by turns vilified, lauded, and subjected to numerous contradictory interpretations, and yet Nietzsche remains a figure of profound import, and this insightful and entertaining book in particular is vital to any meaningful understanding of the roots of contemporary religious criticism.

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