
Since it's holiday season, I'll give a more comprehensive answer with a literature recommendation: Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull. I'm pretty sure you'll like it if you haven't read it yet. Also relevant would be Gottfried Keller's Kleider machen Leute (clothes make the man), a beautiful love story. Unfortunately it apparently has never been translated into English.
Individual responses included:
-- The Bible
-- Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics; Politics; Rhetoric
-- Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
-- Eugen Herrigel - Zen in the Art of Archery
-- The Way of a Pilgrim
-- Pirkei Avot (transl. "Ethics of Our Fathers" or "Fundamental Principles")
-- Lev Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Ilyich
-- George Eliot - Middlemarch
-- Roland Huntford - Shackleton
-- Paul M. Angle (editor) - The Lincoln Reader
-- Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
-- Plato - Republic
-- Thomas Mann - Confessions of Felix Krull
Justifications for the picks are present in the article.
