Nietzsche is unusually sensitive to reading order because he rarely states a position and defends it. He writes aphorisms, polemic, and parody, and much of the meaning lies in tone. Read in the wrong sequence, that style makes him look either like a mystic or like a thug — and both misreadings are extremely common.
Begin with Beyond Good and Evil. It is organised in short numbered sections, so it survives being read in fragments, and it touches nearly every major theme: his attack on the assumption that opposite values must have opposite origins, his suspicion that philosophical systems are unconscious autobiography, his critique of the moral tradition. It also displays his method clearly — he is usually asking where a value came from and whose interests it served, rather than arguing that it is false.
Then On the Genealogy of Morality. This is his most sustained piece of argument and the best single book for understanding what he was actually doing. Three essays trace the historical emergence of moral concepts, and the central claim is genealogical: that our moral vocabulary has a history, that it emerged from particular conflicts, and that it therefore might have been otherwise. Whether historical origin has the critical force he wants is a fair question — but the method has been enormously influential across philosophy and the social sciences.
Then Twilight of the Idols, which is short, late, and compressed — useful as a summary once you have the background. After that, The Gay Science for the famous passages on the death of God and eternal recurrence, and Ecce Homo if you want the self-mythologising late voice, read with appropriate caution.
CautionsThe misreadings to avoid.
"God is dead" is not a celebration. It is a diagnosis of a cultural situation, and the passage treats it as catastrophic — the removal of the foundation on which European values had rested, with nothing yet in place of it. Nietzsche's concern is what happens next, not triumph.
The Übermensch is not a master race. Nietzsche was a fierce critic of German nationalism and antisemitism, and broke with Wagner partly over it. His sister Elisabeth, who did hold those views, controlled his papers after his collapse and assembled material to serve them. Scholars have long since separated the two, but the association persists and it is worth knowing where it came from.
"Will to power" is not simply domination. It is closer to a drive toward growth, mastery, and the overcoming of resistance — including resistance in oneself. Nietzsche's admiration goes to self-discipline far more than to force applied to others.
Read the notes with care. Material published posthumously as The Will to Power was assembled by editors from unpublished notebooks, not by Nietzsche. Prefer the books he chose to publish.