This book has been on my Currently Reading shelf for a couple days short of thirteen years now. It wasn't just the bulk of the book that was blocking me from getting through it, since I have made it through bigger ones in a small fraction of that time. It is the style of scattered anecdotes meant to illuminate the forty-eight precepts in one way or another, not meant to cohere in any kind of simple whole. Maybe it's because power really is so slipper to gain and tough to keep that there have to be so many strategies to prop it up. My own preference as a person is not to dominate, not to crush opposition, nor to build a glorious power base so even if these rules really are applicable I was never going to find them practical for my own life. I am, however, interested in the psychology of those people who crave the top position in society, partly just to be able to protect the rest of us from their trickery. Also, some of the historical vignettes contained here are clever in ways many of us never knew or have forgotten. (Others, I think, were included to make the author seem smart.) But there is a lot of padding around the exciting bits and I would have been happier if the list could have been truncated at twelve pithy essays. So I am sticking with my middling rating of this, posted on that other book rating platform in 2016. To hate it on moral grounds I would also need to hate Machiavelli's writing, which I do not. I just feel it gained a bigger profile than it merited.