Twelve essays on the Nicomachean Ethics — on how character is built, why the right amount is different for everyone, what happens between deciding and doing, and why the last question cannot be answered yet.
These essays take the working psychology out of a fourth-century BC treatise: how a capacity gets built, why a standard instruction cannot be right for everyone, what sits between deciding and doing, what self-control actually costs, and what a relationship rests on. They are read alongside modern research, with the evidence stated at the size it is rather than the size the claim wants.
The text itself is very probably lecture material, compiled and edited rather than written for readers, which is part of why it reads the way it does.
And Aristotle wrote for free adult male citizens of a Greek city. He defended natural slavery at length, and argued that women possess the deliberative faculty without authority. These exclusions are argued for rather than assumed, which makes them harder to detach, not easier: they run through the account of friendship, through who can possess practical wisdom, and through the portrait in the eleventh essay. This collection says so where it matters instead of quietly updating him, and the last essay makes the accounting in full.
Every essay carries a section headed The case against, in the body rather than at the end, because it is part of the argument. Three of them — on habituation, on the ranking of self-control, and on activity as the measure of a life — contain objections that matter more than the practice they accompany.
Read them in order, or take whichever title describes your week.