They Never Learn

Layne Fargo

I read the novel as research for a writing project. Its protagonist is an English professor who kills men who got away with sexual assault. There’s also a concurrent plot line about a freshman on the same campus who feels rage when her roommate gets assaulted. You discover that the two characters are the same person halfway through the book. The book makes you see the world through first-person narration, so you’re inside these characters’ heads. It’s not a pleasant place to be. The book features twists and turns that rely on a twisted kind of ethics. Men who hurt women deserve judgment. But the book isn’t interested in anything other than personal vengeance. There’s no God in this world, and the book is more a diagnosis of the world Carl R. Trueman explains in his book (see RISE AND TRIUMPH review) than it knows.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Henry Fielding

I use Karen Swallow Prior’s On Reading Well in my Intro to Lit class. Prior uses a different novel to exemplify each Christian virtue. She uses Tom Jones for prudence, the art of discerning the best good and achieving it by the best means. Jones is an 850+ page novel about an estimable aristocrat named Squire Allworthy who raises an orphaned boy named Tom Jones as his own. Tom is intelligent, amiable, and handsome, but gets into various scrapes with women that eventually lead to him being kicked out of the house. However, he eventually discovers his true parentage (his mother is Squire Allworthy’s sister) and wins the heart of the virtuous Sophia Weston. The novel is divided into 18 books and features a delightfully ironic narrator, although the story tends to flag when Jones is not present. It contains hilariously satirical elements, including a critique of churchmen and philosophers. It’s also quite bawdy and is known for its bawdy content. It’s suggested to approach the book as a television season, reading each book like an episode. The first 300 pages are particularly strong, with a strong balance of humor and insight.

Takeaway: Humans gain wisdom through experience.

Winning Arguments

Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish earned his bones as a literary critic, perhaps the most influential reader of John Milton in the last seventy-five years. Consequently, when he turns his eyes to domestic arguments in this book, he presents a close reading of Adam and Eve’s argument (as presented by Milton) in the Garden of Eden. Fish switched to legal studies around 2000 and has since become a public intellectual, writing op-eds for The New York Times and books like this one. If you’re looking for rules on how to win arguments, you’re out of luck. Fish says there are no such rules. Whether in an argument with a spouse, political opponent, legal adversary, or school teacher, we have to negotiate the context of the moment. In one early anecdote, Fish gets bested by his six-year-old daughter. There is no rhetorical move that works all the time. However, there are different expectations in the court, classroom, or home. Fish unpacks those expectations with enough witty allusions and incisive throwaways (a comparison between Trump and Montaigne, for instance) that the book was worth its short read time.

Takeaway: Don’t make emotions and logic opponents. Tie them together.

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

This novel has been a favorite of mine since my first year of college. I gained a new respect for it in graduate school when I listened to Alexander Scourby read it. I’ve probably read it a dozen times. This time though, I listened to Scourby again and noted four things. One: the plot mirrors the Gatsby/Daisy relationship in that the set-up is much more enjoyable than the execution. I don’t think this is a fault of Fitzgerald’s. Adultery is awful, and Fitzgerald is right to pin it to a descending emotion in the reader in the book’s second half. I’m almost ashamed that I’ve read this book this many times without noticing this clear break. The day things fall apart takes up at least a third of the book’s action, its space in pages grossly exaggerated compared to the rest of the novel’s action. It’s hellish; try as Nick Carraway might, there’s no redemption. Two: the reason the first half is so good is that Nick is so funny. It takes a great narrator like Scourby to unearth all the buried jokes in Fitzgerald’s prose. It’s understated. Sometimes I read G.K. Chesterton and get the sense that every paragraph of fifteen sentences is fifteen aphorisms jammed together to form a paragraph. Fitzgerald makes every sentence feel quotable without giving you the feeling that they’ve been written in a vacuum. Each sentence is a stone that builds the story’s bridge but can be read individually as jewels (not just rocks). Three: the book is slender, and the flowery language (I think) reflects a kind of plant with showy fruit but shallow roots. That’s the thematic sense I got, anyway. All Gatsby has is himself, and that’s not enough in the end. Four: I like to imagine Nick headed west after this novel and became the narrator of my following selection.

Takeaway: Be careful what you wish for lest you get it.

Rookies: Squeeze Play

Mark Freeman

I taught a Children’s Literature course this fall and was reminded of a series of books that I enjoyed in third grade. Despite not remembering the name of the series or the author, I was able to track down the books through a thorough online search. Written by Mark Freeman, the series consists of six books about three high school baseball players who go on to become MLB superstars. Eager to reread the books, I obtained the second book in the series, which follows David “DT” Green, Glen “Scrapper” Mitchell, and Roberto “Magic” Ramirez through their first minor league season. I remembered why they enjoyed these books as a child – the characters’ exceptional performances on the field and their close friendships were incredibly appealing. The books also provide a sense of wish fulfillment as the characters overcome various obstacles and succeed in their baseball careers. While the characterization may be geared toward a younger audience, I enjoyed revisiting the books. I was even inspired to get in touch with an old friend with whom I read the series in elementary school. Good times!

Takeaway: It helps to have good friends.

The Case of the Lucky Legs

Erle Stanley Gardner

One of Gardner’s first Perry mason novels (1934). I read it because it became a Season 3 episode of Perry Mason. The premise: a small-town California girl wins a Lucky Legs contest, comes to Hollywood and gets her hope dashed. The guy who’s sweet on her comes to LA and asks Mason to find her and bring the guy who duped the girl to justice. The con man ends up dead, and Mason has to fight the guy who initially hired him as much as the cops. The interesting thing? We never get to court. Perry handles the whole thing on his own without gracing a courtroom. This one is super-pulpy and reads much differently than the novel below, which was written twenty-five years later. I wish the TV episodes made Mason a little more like this. Mason has to take the case because if he doesn’t, he’ll be implicated. It’s a cheesy conceit to build into the first fifteen novels, but it gave the cases real stakes.

Takeaway:The Mason character was created in the Depression when Prohibition was still in effect, and pulp fiction was the dominant genre.

The Case of the Mythical Monkeys

Erle Stanley Gardner

This book came out the same year it was turned into a TV episode: 1959. The plot is the same. The secretary for a famous novelist gets involved in a murder. The novelist, an attractive woman named Mauvis Meade, happens to be connected to the mob. For the Perry-ophile, the book offers two treats. One: Gardner gets to meditate on the popularity of fiction writers. Meade says she’s figured out how to sell a novel. Female authors should write a book filled with romance that makes the author seem more worldly than she is. Women will dig the romance angle. Men will like speculating about the kind of woman who could write such a book. BTW – Gardner takes his own medicine by implying a romance between the defendant and a key witness, who turns out to be a government agent. Two: Gardner considers what would happen if a domestic murder got mixed up with a federal undercover investigation. A large part of the exciting trial work comes in the judge’s quarters because the government doesn’t want a key agent’s cover blown.

Takeaway: The three mythical monkeys stand for the admonitions “Hear no evil,” “See no evil,” and “Speak no evil.”

The Case of the Singing Skirt

Erle Stanley Gardner

Mason thinks his client is scamming him, but he’s the one who ends up in hot water when he swaps hot guns. You’ll be surprised at the case’s murderer if you’ve watched the television episode. Gardener always pursues some more significant subject that the television adapters drop. In this one, Gardner dwells on how a wife can manage a husband’s roving eye. Given the buildup for the defendant, it’s disappointing she gets no resolution. It’s not her dilemma that motivates the conclusion; it’s Perry’s.

Takeaway: Beware of men who hang out at gambling joints.

The Case of the Velvet Claws

Erle Stanley Gardner

The first novel in the Perry Mason series features a client, a traditional femme fatale, who hires Perry to help her escape blackmail. It turns out that her husband owns the blackmail rag, but he ends up dead, and Perry’s client becomes the prime suspect. She is particularly duplicitous and even implicates Perry in the crime. After Perry get her to confess (she thinks she’s guilty), he proves her innocent. The novel reveals Mason’s commitment to his clients and his view of the law, as he states, “I use everything I can in order to get an acquittal. It’s like two teams playing football. One of them tries to go in one direction just as hard as it can, and the other tries to go in the other direction just as hard as it can.” The novel also demonstrates the influence of other hard-boiled writers like Hammett and Chandler, but ultimately establishes Mason as a singular literary character.

Takeaway: Good lawyers believe in their clients more than those clients believe in themselves.

Weapons of Mass Instruction

John Taylor Gatto

Gatto taught in New York City public schools for thirty years, winning numerous awards. He grew increasingly frustrated with the school system and spent the last thirty years of his life demonstrating the system’s corrupt roots and rotten fruits. The public education system is broken, Gatto acknowledges, but it was broken from its nineteenth-century inception. The book’s best parts demonstrate how Gatto made a difference in students’ lives despite the system.

Takeaway: Let students know that real education is about spiritual, not just political, freedom.

The Practice

Seth Godin

I took on my first copywriting gig this month, and I needed some inspiration each morning before sitting down to do a kind of writing that was new to me. More than that, I was not used to having speedy responses to my writing. I had feedback within the day about whether or not what I had written worked, and I had a lot of work to do: something in the realm of 15,000 website-ready words over a couple of weeks. So this book from Seth Godin, which I had read before, was a welcome dose of practical advice. Its mantra comes from sculptor Elizabeth King: “Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.” This is a profoundly spiritual sentiment (I was reminded of Paul’s comment, “We walk by faith, not by sight”). I agreed with Godin’s reflections on making art to the extent that his insights were accurate about following Jesus, not just producing writing. Godin is Buddhist, so at the root of his approach to art and life are tenets about the groundlessness of being and the need for self-reliance that ultimately oppose Christianity. Those tenets are many times opposed to his conclusions! His artistic process (deeply indebted to a “take up your cross daily” process) saves him from the poverty of his intentions (no doubt, a secular Buddhist grounding for artistic work). Here’s a small Godin insight that gives you a sense of what the book illuminates. Do you want to learn how to juggle? Practice throwing, not catching. If you get the throwing part down (practice for fifteen minutes and let the balls drop to the ground), you’ll be in a better position than if you start with the idea that you’ll catch everything first. Application for me: show up and write 100 words. Do they have to be good? Not yet. That’s catching. Guess what? I’m better positioned to have worthwhile words if I show up and write 100 words every day than if I wait for the words I write to be perfect. Spiritual application? Read the Bible and pray every day. Will the fire of Pentecost fall on my head every day? Will I be struck like the men on the road to Emmaus at the profundity of the scriptures? Not every day. But suppose I make these spiritual practices a habit. In that case, God will meet me…and prayer and Bible reading are undoubtedly the best ways to encounter him that are available to me.

Takeaway: The Practice is a process of faith that we engage in daily with the full belief that God is faithful to complete the work He began in us.

This Is Marketing

Seth Godin

Godin took his online Masterclass and turned it into a book. Each chapter reads like a series of short riffs or blog posts. The case studies are great. This book is a provocation to think about marketing less as advertising and more as the promise you offer and fulfill for your customer.

Takeaway:I will keep returning to his marketing formula…1) what change do you want to make? 2) who are you trying to change? 3) what promise are you making them?

Real Artists Don’t Starve

Jeff Goins

Goins confronts myths that too many artists believe, mostly involving money. Goins wants creatives to see their work as valuable. I believe the thesis, but I didn’t find any single bit of evidence especially memorable or compelling.

Takeaway: Money isn’t evil. It makes more art possible.

Marathon Man

William Goldman

My favorite genre novel in some time. The man who wrote The Princess Bride (and the screenplays for All the Preisdent’s Men and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) manages to write a fantastic thriller. It’s better than the excellent movie it spawned. Goldman writes action sequences like the best kind of sportswriter, and his narrative style captures J.D. Salinger’s colloquial intelligence without the narcissism.

Becoming Your Future Self Now

Benjamin Hardy

Hardy is a positive psychologist, and this book’s premise is simple: you can transform through contemplating and acting on who you want to be.

Takeaway:Tell a better story about where you’re headed.

Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks

Chris Herring

Herring covers the Knicks from Pat Riley’s arrival in 1990 to the Knicks’ improbable 1999 Finals run. I learned lots of things I didn’t know: how Riley got to the Knicks (it was dependent on Patrick Ewing), how Riley left the Knicks (it involved Miami Heat tampering), Don Nelson’s short tenure as Riley’s successor (he installed an offense that was 15 years ahead of its time), and Patrick Ewing’s crippling injuries (a broken wrist and a strained Achilles heel). I learned more about Anthony Mason and John Starks too. The Knicks were always an antagonist to the teams I followed, so getting an inside look at the team from a more generous perspective was nice. The team was a mass of contradictions, and Riley summed up that cognitive dissonance: a great coach who got in his way (question: why didn’t he bench Starks in Game 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals?).

Takeaway:When someone like Pat Riley asks for reimbursement, you better pay him back.

A Raisin in the Sun

Lorraine Hansberry

The first Pulitzer prize-winning play by an African-American author, this play captures a family at a point of transition: the purchase of a home. The title alludes to Langston Hughes’s poem about what happens to a dream deferred. The mother, a Christian, is the play’s most crucial character, and her redemptive love brings her son back from the brink of despair. I listened to the original Broadway cast (including Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee) perform the play. Impeccable.

Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work That Lasts

Ryan Holiday

Holiday walks through creating and marketing work that lasts. The examples are primarily art, but Holiday wants us to apply his advice to businesses and other projects.

Takeaway: Know the people you are making your work for.

Stillness Is the Key

Ryan Holiday

Holiday encourages his readers to cultivate calm minds, hearts, and bodies. You start by monitoring what you let in, then live tranqually. The book offers negative examples (Tiger Woods) and positive examples (Winston Churchill).

Takeaway:Make time each day for silent reflection.

The Obstacle Is the Way

Ryan Holiday

Holiday breaks down the Stoic response to difficulties into three steps: look at the problem objectively, act unselfishly, and accept your fate willingly. Holiday doesn’t mention Genesis 50:20 or Romans 8:28, but he could have.

Takeaway: Ask how God can use the problem I encountered today for my good.

The Ultimate Sales Machine

Chet Holmes

Derek Sivers and Noah Kagan recommended this book, so I gave it a shot. Holmes offers a book version of his sales seminar, a soup-to-nuts guide on time management through customer follow-through. The guy’s got a million stories, and you get lots of snippets from his sales scripts, strategy, and tactics. There’s too much here to act on at once, but the ideas throughout are generative. I had at least five content ideas for my work while listening to the middle chapters on educational marketing.

Takeaway: Serve your customer. Start with education.

From Cover to Cover

Kathleen Horning

Horning prepares her readers to review children’s books. Her chapters on everything from information to picture books show how diverse the field is. The only thing missing is model reviews.

Takeaway: Good reviewers of children’s literature are rarer than good children’s literature—evaluation matters. Spread the word about what’s good.

Free to Focus

Michael Hyatt

I want to like Hyatt, but I haven’t clicked with any books of his that I’ve read. I agree with the book’s thesis: make time to do the work you do that matters most. As for the tactics Hyatt offers? They weren’t compelling and haven’t stuck.

Marketing: A Love Story

Bernadette Jiwa

Jiwa collects her blog posts to help people connect their emotions and storytelling with the goods and services they offer customers. She contends that you will only matter to your customers if you market your good or service with love.

Takeaway: Come back to the set of thirty questions she provides for entrepreneurs starting a new project.

Bearwallow

Jeremy Jones

This month, I read several books by people I know. All of the other ones were either self-published or still in manuscript form. Jeremy’s a friend from my first professor gig, and this book was NOT self-published. It’s an award-winning memoir about Jeremy’s family and the North Carolina mountain his family has called home since the 1800s. Jeremy presents an alternative narrative about the Appalachia portrayed in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Jones is trying to figure out if he’s mountain folk. He negotiates that identity in sections where he’s in Honduras and spending time in the town as an ESL teacher at a local elementary school. I probably liked the book more because I know Jeremy, but it was still excellent.

Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World

James Jordan

Jordan offers a primer to the Bible’s symbols (e.g., heavens, animals, angels) and types/patterns (e.g., the world of Noah, the world of the Exile and Restoration). I’ve read this book twice before and read it twice more this month. It’s like drinking from a firehose. Early in the book, Jordan writes that if he had taken the time to develop and defend each point fully, the book would have been 30,000 pages. I don’t doubt it. Jordan’s most significant point is a keeper: reality is symbolic, and “General cultural renewal is impossible apart from recovering the symbolic worldview of the Bible.” If you want to understand that worldview, this book is the place to start.

Takeaway:The world is diverse because it symbolizes the infinite diversity of God.

Ulysses

James Joyce

Here’s the concept: Joyce reworks Homer’s The Odyssey by giving us a day in the life of an Irishman named Leopold Bloom. In 1998, The Modern Library named it the best twentieth-century novel written in English. The book’s eighteen episodes roughly follow The Odyssey. You get more out of the book’s stylistic quirks if you know that Joyce is riffing on an epic poem. I read the book an episode at a time and followed each section up with a lecture from The Great Courses series. Why did I read it? The book turns 100 this year, and June 16 (known as “Bloomsday”) is the day on which the novel is set. This book was a slog. Joyce had an extraordinary intellect, but it would take more than one reading to get what this book wanted me to get. The reading process was not rewarding enough for me to do it anytime soon. The best chapter in the book is the last one, a punctuationless monologue from Bloom’s wife, Molly.

Takeaway:The book’s reputation has been bolstered by the fact that you feel like you’ve accomplished something if you finish it (though it wasn’t pleasant). Moreover, because you remember the last part of the book best and the end is the book’s high point, you remember the experience of reading the book more positively than you should.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

Kahneman traces the distinctions between System 1 and System 2 (intuition vs. deliberation), Econs and Humans (the respective actors in rational vs. behavioral economics) and the Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self. The best you can hope to do is set the alarm for instances where more deliberate thought is necessary. System 2 is lazy and follows your intuition’s lead. System 1 makes systematic errors (biases) that require more deliberate thought. If you believe in the strictly rational model of economic analysis, you will constantly battle a gap between how things work out on paper versus real life. Finally, you should not confuse your experience of a particular event with your memory of the event. The two rarely match because of how our brain warps time (remembering only the valleys, peaks, and endings of particular experiences). The experiencing self needs the remembering self as a safeguard against presentism. The remembering self needs the experiencing self to safeguard against the erasure of experience.

Takeaway: You can’t unthink certain cognitive biases. You have to know that your gut reaction is a System 1 error and deliberate long enough for System 2 to offset it.

Killing Yourself to Live

Chuck Klosterman

Klosterman goes on a cross-country tour where he visits the places famous rock n’ roll stars died while negotiating three romantic relationships. Klosterman’s books are about how we understand ourselves better because of culture and how the culture we love tells us stories about ourselves. Do you want to see a flawed approach to death and the afterlife? Look at the way our culture discusses dead rock stars.

Takeaway: Begin with the end in mind (Principle #2 from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People). Also, don’t go on a road trip with Klosterman.

Fargo Rock City

Chuck Klosterman

Klosterman grew up on a North Dakota farm. His primary interaction with pop culture was 1980s heavy metal music. Each chapter takes an essential date from 80s and 90s rock history and uses it as an exploration of some topic, cultural or personal. Frequently, he does both. You learn what metal albums Klosterman thinks are best, why metalheads hate keyboards, and how metal music helped him think about how the world worked. Heavy Metal music wasn’t “authentic.” It succeeded for precisely the opposite reason. Its world was wholly artificial and unattainable. That was its appeal for a young man growing up in rural North Dakota. In one of the book’s blurbs, Jonathan Lethem comments that the book succeeds because it gives you an appreciation for metal music without once making you want to listen to it. Metal music isn’t my thing, either. Klosterman is, though; this was the book that made his reputation.

Takeaway: Axl Rose was a “redneck intellectual.”

The Nineties: A Book

Chuck Klosterman

Klosterman writes cultural criticism. His reputation-making first book, Fargo Rock City, examined what 80s heavy metal sounded like to a North Dakota farm kid. In 2022, Klosterman has worked at ESPN, Esquire, Spin, and the New York Times. He’s written books of fiction and non-fiction. He’s earned the right to analyze the decade dominated by his Generation, the much-discussed Generation X. Klosterman talks about the topics you’d think he would: movies (like Clerks and Pulp Fiction), television (like Seinfeld and Friends), and music (like Nirvana and Tupac). But he also talks about general culture (the internet) and politics (Ross Perot and Bill Clinton get separate chapters). You get a fresh take on what’s vital about Michael Jordan trying to become a baseball player and what is retroactively so strange about the Gore / Bush 2000 presidential campaign that ended the decade. This is a book primarily about REPRESENTATION, the celebrities we use as avatars for ourselves and the politicians we elected as our politicians. Implicitly, it’s also about SUCCESSION, the assessment of the past and what parts of it live on in the present.

Small Teaching

James Lang

Lang’s title comes from an analogy to “small ball,” the approach to baseball that focuses on things like walks and stolen bases as opposed to home runs. In nine chapters, Lang details small teaching activities that only take 10-15 minutes but make a substantive difference in how students learn. Lang has read all the cognitive science articles for you, so every method recommended here has been experimentally validated. More than that, Lang provides examples from the classroom to demonstrate how a particular concept would work in the real world, not just in the lab. The techniques I found most intriguing were prediction, interleaving, and self-explanation. The first of these asks you to get students to make guesses about crucial questions in your discipline, preparing their minds for actively absorbing that unit’s material. Interleaving reminds you that learning units shouldn’t be self-contained. Revisit earlier concepts to ensure students can see how the current unit builds upon and incorporates elements of a previous unit. I will use the techniques recommended in this book for the rest of my career.

Takeaway: Small changes make a big difference. Think about the first or last five minutes of class. Intervene in that time using one of the techniques recommended here.

The Advantage

Patrick Lencioni

My new boss recommended this book to me. Its thesis is that organizations don’t fail because of poor smarts. They fail because of poor health. How does Lencioni define health? Clarity, cohesion, and effective communication. You keep good people. You repel everybody else. You can recover from setbacks and make progress on exciting goals. The book is a book-length version of a seminar I’m sure this guy works through with the businesses he consults with for his day job. For a short book (less than four hours in audio), it’s got a lot of exercises that wore me out pretty quickly. My question: does our group have to do all this to get healthy? The answer, from what I can gather, is yes. It testifies to how difficult it is to get an organization in the proper condition. If you managed to get through everything suggested in this book, you would have an advantage.

Takeaway: My university needs to pay more attention to organizational health than getting new experts.

Out of the Silent Planet

C.S. Lewis

The first novel in Lewis’s Ransom trilogy, this sci-fi story centers on Oxford philologist named Elwin Ransom. After a physicist and an enterprising politician kidnap Ransom and send him to Mars, he encounters extraterrestrial beings and has his understanding of the cosmos changed. Lewis wrote the book in response to H.G. Wells’s novel, First Men in the Moon, and its representation of interplanetary travel reflects Lewis’s belief in a medieval cosmos. For a more straightforward exposition of that cosmology, consult Lewis’s lectures in The Discarded Image.

Takeaway: Don’t call it “space”: call it “the heavens.” That, in a nutshell, is the difference between a modernist and medieval cosmology.

That Hideous Strength

C.S. Lewis

When I first read this book shortly after graduating from graduate school, I saw it as a cautionary tale about the temptation to compromise my values in pursuit of academic success. However, upon rereading the book, I saw it as a story about the spiritual battles we all face, regardless of our circumstances. The book’s virtuous characters are a rag-tag group but are able to triumph over a group of scientists who have willingly allied themselves with diabolical forces. This serves as a reminder that, with God’s help, we are capable of overcoming any obstacle and standing firm in our faith.

Takeaway: We’re not battling people. We fight cosmic powers. Without God, we’re lost.

The Screwtape Letters

C.S. Lewis

An uncle devil named Screwtape writes letters to his nephew, Wormwood, on how to corrupt a recently converted English Christian on the eve of World War II. The letters also provide a plot for the convert’s journey, including his faith journey, romantic history, and experiences during the war. As the reader observes Screwtape’s contempt for God and humanity, it is not surprising when uncle devil ultimately turns against his nephew. The letters offer insight into ordinary Christians’ temptations and the satanic reasoning behind them.

Takeaway: Recognizing the devil’s lies and relying on God’s power to overcome them are two different things.

The Power of Full Engagement

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

Two business coaches work through ways to always be at your peak. I was looking for stuff about sleep. Nothing specific caught my attention. The book simply underscores how important our bodies are to ensuring we can do our best work.

Takeaway: Our mind shouldn’t work separately from our emotions and bodies. Plan accordingly.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Malcolm X with Alex Haley

I listened to Laurence Fishburne read this book and finished it in two days. The thing that struck me most was X’s astonishing intelligence. He was a powerhouse. As you read, it’s dangerous to take any statement X makes as definitive; he gets lost in telling his own story so that statements that embody the way he once felt are expressed in the present tense. He’s liable to contradict himself as his thought develops. He concludes that the solution to race relations is ultimately spiritual. Truth. Now, as for Islam offering that truth…

Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel

Mantel tells the story of King Henry VIII’s divorce from his first wife, Katharine of Aragon, from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, a lawyer and advisor to Cardinal Wolsey and the king. Cromwell is skilled in languages and political maneuvering, and the reader witnesses the transformation of England through Cromwell’s eyes and mind. Cromwell is not portrayed as a Christian hero. He is neither ideological like Sir Thomas More nor purely Machiavellian, but rather a new type of man who embodies the Early Modern Era. I plan to write about this book and its two sequels with my brother.

Takeaway: Language matters, especially in translation.

The Road

Cormac McCarthy

An unknown world catastrophe has left nearly everyone on earth dead and the world a brutal wasteland. The book recounts a father and son’s attempt to survive. While the book does not reflect a Christian worldview, McCarthy acknowledges that the relationship between father and child has a spiritual resonance. McCarthy’s prose is sparse and evocative. I’ve been walking around the past few weeks, seeing the beauty around me even as I see what the world might look like after a Road-like event.

Christianity and Liberalism

J. Gresham Machen

Machen distinguishes orthodox Christianity from liberal Christianity. Machen’s strength is Christian doctrine, and he defends orthodoxy against relativism re: scripture, Christ, and the church’s work. Consider it a Protestant companion to Chesterton’s Heretics.

Takeaway: The story and doctrines of Christianity are inseparable.

Essentialism

Greg McKeown

I revisited this book after reading Hyatt’s book (above) and feeling like Hyatt was attempting to give tactics for McKeown’s thesis. I’ve read McKeown’s book twice before and wanted to see if there was anything I’d missed. McKeown outlines the philosophy of essentialism more effectively than Hyatt. Find what’s most essential and cut the rest. Just one thing: essentialism is not minimalism. I still agree with McKeown’s thesis. How to do it: that’s the rub.

The Crucible

Arthur Miller

I listened to this right after A Raisin in the Sun. It’s set in witch-crazy Salem, a clear allegory for McCarthyism. Shockingly, the play was powerful to me. I expected it to be a period piece. Given our current Cancel Culture, it now reads like a general play about conscience and conviction.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story

Donald Miller

Miller wrote a best-selling memoir (Blue Like Jazz) and wanted to turn it into a movie. That process taught him about stories: how God works in our stories and what makes a life story worth living and telling. I loved this book. It was intelligent, funny, theological, and practical. I ran out and got Miller’s storybrand book right after finishing it.

Takeaway: We love a great story. We hate the work it takes to make such a story.

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Your Customers Will Listen

Donald Miller

Miller offers seven beats for marketers to hit as they take their customers through a sales story. Marketers are guides, not heroes. By encouraging us to focus on customer transformation, Miller offers a redemptive spin on marketing and sales.

Takeaway: My students are the hero of my classes, not me.

Enjoying the Bible

Matthew Mullins

Mullins argues that we often use the Bible more than we enjoy it. He argues that the key to enjoying the Bible more is to read it like literature, specifically poetry. The book offers an introduction to reading poetry and meditating on scripture. The book’s most helpful feature is exercises that help the reader apply each chapter’s concepts.

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

Lesslie Newbigin

Newbigin was an Anglican missionary to India for 40 years. He wrote this book after being back in England and seeing how contemporary Christian missions had turned their attention from cross-cultural conversion to dialogue. Given the contemporaries he quotes, Newbigin was conservative. He believes we must tell the story of the Christian gospel, and Christ’s power is exclusive. Yet, I’m sure you can find conservatives who read the book and found it too liberal, either because Newbigin talks about the gospel transforming systemic injustice or because he won’t say that whoever hasn’t heard the gospel is headed to hell. Newbigin sent me back to Chesterton and Machen.

Takeaway: Tell the gospel story: Christ died, was buried, and rose again.

Loss and Gain

Cardinal John Henry Newman

This novel was the first book Newman wrote after converting to Catholicism. He released it anonymously, and the book went through thirteen editions. Most interesting was that this book was an obvious precursor for Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Yes, the book presents an honest representation of a Catholic convert, but Newman offers some potent satire of religious extremism and Anglican mediocrity.

Takeaway: Loss IS gain.

Deep Work

Cal Newport

At the semester’s end, I felt drained and unable to engage in deep, sustained work. To regain my focus and motivation, I turned to Cal Newport’s book Deep Work, which explores the importance of deep work and provides strategies for achieving it. I spent more time reading the second half of the book, which focuses on the practical steps one can take to engage in deep work. I found Newport’s writing clear and persuasive and decided to put many of the book’s suggestions into practice. As a result, I have felt more focused and clearheaded despite having a lot of work to do. The book helped me remember the value of deep work and how to prioritize it in my daily routine.

Takeaway: Get comfortable with boredom. Without it, you won’t have the patience to go deep.

The Courage to Teach

Parker Palmer

Palmer addresses the spiritual component of teaching. His chief concern is integrity, a teacher’s internal and external consistency. He insists that teachers can only do this in community. I read it after having multiple Christian educators recommend the book. I understand what they see in it, but I think the book is ultimately more of a provocation to good works (ala Dreher) than an illumination of an unseen path. I don’t know that you get a path from Palmer’s book. You mainly get the assurance that what you’re doing matters and that it’s okay to approach your subject in a way that honors it, the students learning it, and yourself. In comparison to secular pedagogy, Palmer is spiritually attuned. A true Christian educator would start with God and glorifying him. Covenantally, the book is about REPRESENTATION (all teaching involves a hierarchical relationship) and ETHICS.

What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars

Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan.

A fascinating inversion of the “Here’s how you make a lot of money in the market” book. In part one, Paul recounts how he made and lost a fortune at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. In part two, he argues that while experts disagree about making money, they agree on how to lose money. Moynihan helps him codify these rules to prevent loss.

To Sell Is Human

Daniel Pink

Pink breaks his book into three parts. First, he demonstrates that we’re all in sales because most of us try to persuade others. Second, he replaces the old ABCs of selling (Always. Be. Closing.) with new ones that stand for Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity.

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

Daniel Pink

Each day, we experience three things: a peak, a trough, and a rebound. Pink wants us to figure out how best to take advantage of our internal clocks to flourish as individually and socially.

Takeaway: Drink a glass of water every morning, and drink a cup of coffee before a nap.

Radical

David Platt

Platt reminds us how Christ’s gospel mission contrasts with the goals and lifestyles of many American Christians. He issues a challenge to spend one year dedicated to Christ through five concrete activities: constantly praying for global missions, reading through the Bible in a year, sacrificially giving resources to help others, devoting time (at least a week) to ministering in a place outside your comfort zone, and spending your time in a disciple-making community.

Takeaway: Spend the next year dedicated to Christ in a way that matches Platt’s call.

Everything Belongs

Richard Rohr

I read the book because David Foster Wallace loved it and its message of being aware. Critics have debated whether or not DFW’s religious impulses are Christian or Buddhist. You will know why this book appealed to him if you know that. Though Rohr is a Franciscan priest, his description of contemplation will sound like meditation to Buddhists and prayer to Christians. Some details will give you a sense of whether or not the book would drive you up the wall. He provides epigraphs from sources like a Muslim mystic and Brothers Karamazov. He uses phrases like “One Absolute,” way more scripture citations from the gospels and NT epistles than you would think. He criticizes American culture and the American church, as well as tolerance and open-mindedness. Covenantally, the book is about TRANSCENDENCE and what it means to live in the presence of God.

Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban

J.K. Rowling

My daughter listened to the third Harry Potter book, so I read it as she went through it. I was struck at how much more complex it is than the first two books in the series (though the second book had a very dark ending). Rowling is building her world a piece at a time, and strings that she left untied in the first two books get entwined in this one. My daughter is beginning to identify more and more with Hermione, the precocious scholar-friend of Harry, and I could see why when this one was through. Whereas Ron finished the last novel with Harry while Hermione was petrified, Hermione joined Harry for the final part of this novel. In rereading it, I realized how much of it I had forgotten and how well constructed the plot was. I was better able to answer the questions that troubled my daughter (“How did Peter chop off his own finger?”) as well as deal more ably with more important questions that don’t have an easy answer (e.g., Will Sirius Black ever get cleared?). My daughter liked the book so much that she started listening to it the day she finished it. I will not be rereading it that quickly, but the book held up my second time through it for sure.

Takeaway: The series is worth rereading.

How to Read the Bible as Literature…and Get More Out of It

Leland Ryken

In the Bible, God communicated through specific forms. Many are literary. Ryken urges us to read scripture in a “literary” way, not just an “expository” way because such an approach echoes scripture’s content. The book offers a primer for that approach.

Salinger

Shane Salerno and David Shields

This companion to the 2013 documentary of the same name presents an oral history-style biography of J.D. Salinger. While Salinger only published four slim volumes of work, he was an enormously important twentieth-century American writer. Salerno and Shields argue that the critical moments in Salinger’s life came in World War II. Salinger endured the Utah Beach landing at D-Day and was one of the first Americans to see the Dachau camp after the war’s end. Salinger experienced PTSD, and his art transformed that trauma before finally engulfing him. Salinger got enormously famous and famously reclusive in the decade following the war. He didn’t publish anything for the last forty-five years of his life, though he continued to write every day. You get more than you would want to know about Salinger’s brokenness as a husband, father, and lover and exactly how he thought Vedanta Hinduism was the answer to his spiritual plight. The factual material is impressive. The interpretation of Salinger’s works in light of those facts is often disappointing. The book ends by claiming that at least five unpublished novels exist and await publication. We haven’t seen them yet, though a 2019 interview with Salinger’s son confirmed that Salinger’s trust does plan to release unpublished work.

Franny and Zooey

J.D. Salinger

Watch Salinger go from fiction-writing to fiction-preaching in the span of these two stories. In the former, a college-aged Glass girl undergoes a spiritual crisis. In the latter, the girl’s older brother lectures her about Vedanta Hinduism. The former originally came out in 1955 and the latter in 1957. When the pair was published in 1961, the book was a massive bestseller as Salinger was already in recluse mode. The story “Franny” was my favorite of his from when I read it as a senior in high school. I see what I was responding to in it still: someone who sees the academic world as shallow and religion as offering life’s actual answers.

Nine Stories

J.D. Salinger

These stories made Salinger’s literary reputation before The Catcher in the Rye made him a public celebrity. The stories feature adults, teenagers, and children who are broken in various ways. The typical story occurs in real-time: a morning at a hotel, an evening at a friend’s house, or in an afternoon in France during a break from World War II. While adults reflect how life in general and the war have left them broken, children offer hope of redemption.

Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

J.D. Salinger

The last book Salinger published consisted of two stories Salinger published in The New Yorker in 1955 and 1959. “Raise High…” features an adult Salinger first-person narrator, a rarity. It feels like the next stage of Salinger’s development. Buddy Glass tells about the day his brother Seymour Glass eloped. “Seymour” offers a scrambled, rambly anatomy of its title character, again from Buddy. Seymour was a prophet, Buddy tells us. It’s a seventy-page Zen parable and for completists only.

The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger

The book on which Salinger’s reputation rests. A teenager has mental breakdown after three days in New York City. The novel is less about what happens to Holden Caulfield then how he tells the story. The voice Salinger created struck me as powerful when I read it at seventeen and is still compelling. Caulfield is broken like his author (see the Salerno and Shields biography). His language reflects a desire to communicate and a vocabulary that reflects the phony world he despises.

Oedipus Rex

Sophocles

This infamous Greek tragedy retains its power because Oedipus is a great character, a man who is both blessed and cursed with a desire to know. This is a pagan analog to Genesis 3.

The 1590 Faerie Queene

Edmund Spenser

Spenser made his money by serving as secretary to the Lord Protector of Ireland. Still, he made his lasting reputation with this allegorical epic. The first three books of his planned twelve-book poem came out in 1590. They recounted allegorical stories of three virtues: holiness, temperance, and chastity. The title character never appears but is, apparently, a poetic rendering of Spenser’s queen, Elizabeth I. The allegories get progressively stranger and more labyrinthine. Each one has a separate knight that represents the specific virtue. However, Prince Arthur appears in each book and is supposed to embody the combination of all the virtues. The Book of Holiness is the most explicitly Christian and Protestant. The Book of Temperance is spiritual but not specifically Christian. The Book of Chastity is somehow pagan and Christian. Spenser says in a letter to Walter Raleigh that he wanted the poem to help fashion a Christian gentleman. Spend some time in the poem, and you’ll see what a radical desire that is.

Takeaway: If people had difficulty interpreting Jesus’ parables, I have no idea what they would do with this poem.

Antifragile

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The most crucial volume in Taleb’s Incerto series because it offers a positive program. Many things break easily (fragile) or can sustain shock (robust). What Taleb seeks are things that get better when confronted with disorder. In examples ranging from finance to medicine to law, Taleb examines what antifragility looks like.

Takeaway: Don’t look for security. Look for a way to benefit from adversity.

Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The book that hooked me on Taleb and the first book in his Incerto series. The thesis: we think we know more than we do. Most success is attributable to forces outside our control. Beware of taking credit for things for which you were largely unresponsible. Most of Taleb’s examples are financial, but the book’s central insight applies to the social sciences in general.

Takeaway: Learn how to name your own ignorance.

Skin in the Game

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You must have “skin in the game” when you take risks. Such behavior encourages antifragility. Reinforce your words with actions. Don’t give advice you are not yourself taking. Adopt the negative way. Too many current social policies are attempts to help the patient in ways that harm. So, yes: love your neighbor as yourself. But also: do not do to your neighbor what you would not have done to yourself.

Takeaway: you should stand to lose or gain something from the predictions you make.

The Bed of Procrustes

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A book of aphorisms on philosophy, the arts, and economics. For the NNT completist, but not essential.

The Black Swan

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This book develops an idea that took up one chapter in Fooled by Randomness. The name comes from the one outlier that disproves an inductive thesis: all swans are white. It only takes the existence of one black swan to disprove that hypothesis, even if you’ve empirically recorded millions of white swans without seeing a single black one. The black swan has three criteria: it’s unexpected, has a massive effect, and retrospectively appears predictable. The modern world (which Taleb dubs Extremistan) is filled with black swans. Losses and gains in this world are not symmetrical. Let the expert beware.

The Fellowship of the Ring

J.R.R. Tolkien

The first entry in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the novel follows the hobbit Frodo Baggins as he takes possession of a magical ring and begins his journey to dispose of it. The novel has two books. The first is primarily pastoral and is set in the hobbit’s Shire and various forests. The second features an Elves-heavy council, a battle with a disturbingly evil force, and the fellowship’s dissolution.

Takeaway: Get a flow-chart to keep all the names straight.

The Hobbit

J.R.R. Tolkien

I tried to read the book a couple of times but failed. The audiobook did the trick. It’s a good children’s story. A shy character gets called to join a bold group mission. He gets a chance to develop an identity and be part of a group. The quest’s challenges are physical, moral, and intellectual, and he returns home forever changed.

Takeaway: No single day of the journey represents the entire journey.

The Defense of the Faith

Cornelius Van Til

Van Til lays the theological foundations for presuppositional apologetics. He then systematically compares and contrasts it with Thomistic Arminian apologetics.

Takeaway: Your apologetics ends where it begins. Begin with the God of the Bible.