I honestly don't read that much. Obviously I read chess books - in terms of favorites, Kasparov's 'My Great Predecessors' is pretty good.
What's really interesting about that is that a lot of these words that were incendiary in their time now seem almost harmless and laughable, because they have this archaic quality.
Accomplishment is socially judged by ill defined criteria so that one has to rely on others to find out how one is doing.