Reddit mentions of The Pillow Book (Penguin Classics)

Thank you, I'm flattered

that you could be impressed by five book that I hold dear to my heart. I have strong feelings about adding books to my collection, as it's far more important to me to know a book, that to simply be able to purchase it. I have far too many books that I confess I'm only acquainted with, and do not know deeply :( A good book owns me as much as I own it. I carry it with me in my thoughts.

>I would love to read more about that but I have this fear of not understanding their way of life, of respect, of loyalty to the monarch/ shogun.

Instead, please take my offering of a small library of five books on samurai aesthetics.

• Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo. This was written in the Shogunal period. Read this one.
  
• The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. This is written a little earlier, and concerns itself with swordsmanship.
  
• Bushido the Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe. This is a more recent work, written after the Meiji Restoration.
  
• The fourth book on this list should be on Kyudo (archery)- (such as found quoted by Emiya Shirou in F S/N.)
  
• Fifth book is a free choice: my personal pick is The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, from the Heian period, for poetry. The alternate contenders would be The Book of Tea, for Zen; or The Art of War, for Confucianism.
  
  I hope you are much more impress by the quality of the words written in these books, and what they might evoke in you, rather than their habitation in my life. I am but the humble reader.
  

If you're interested in sharp, witty historical female authors, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonogon is a masterpiece. She was a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu who wrote "The Tale of Genji" and kind of contemptuous of her for a lot of the reasons modern feminists would take issue with Genji's author.

Very much worth reading, it's in short vignettes and poems, mostly, so something that you can pick up spend as much or little time reading as you like.