The Infernal Tower:

A fast-paced summer read that feels like an 80s action movie sprinkled with intellectual heft. There’s a psychologically wounded hero pulling it together for his daughter, strong writing, fleshed-out villains, and lots of action throughout. Some minor improbabilities crop up, some of which are explained as the novel progresses, but they’re mixed with enough dramatic tension and strong characters that I was happy to overlook them. It’s clever and occasionally quite funny, and exactly what I was looking for.

Surviving Rome: Kim Bowes

I rarely review hyper-niche books, even if they’re good. But if your interests sit at the confluence of microeconomics, the lives of the nonelites, and the classical world, I recommend this one. Bowes paints a portrait of a hard-pressed underclass of entrepreneurial strivers, saving, deploying scarce capital, and immersed in markets in ways we never imagined 40 years ago.

Those farmers and city-based laborers? Awash in cheap mass-produced goods, though often hemmed in by a lack of nutrition and unaffordable land. The slaves? They worked alongside the free, and sometimes possessed a crucial wealth-building advantage their free peers envied. Their biggest economic hardship? Not crushing state taxation, as is often assumed. Bowes does a good job of disrupting assumptions with careful thinking and economic data scraped from unlikely and newly discovered sources. It’s a somewhat left-coded book with a few questionable turns of phrase that seem unbecoming for something with this much careful scholarship, but Bowes keeps it from becoming a heavy-handed manifesto.

One Corpse Too Many: Ellis Peters

There’s an extra corpse moldering among the fallen garrison of a stormed castle, and a local monk tries to solve the murder while everyone else is content to shrug it off as another casualty of war. Along the way we’re immersed in an English Civil War, get tricked about who the enemy is, meet two strong female characters with wills of their own, and generally enjoy a great story.

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Collected Stories: Rudyard Kipling

Often dismissed as a bigoted imperialist, I’m finding Kipling to be a nuanced writer capable of incredible range. His descriptions of life in the British Raj and the characters that inhabited it are vivid and unforgettable. He’s among England’s greatest short story writers. My favorite picks so far:

The Man Who Would Be King: Straight-up adventure story. Two vagabond tricksters set up a kingdom in remote Afghanistan, relying on guns and ancient underlying Masonic legends to win over the tribesmen, who are descendants of Alexander the Great’s army. But just as Alexander lost touch with reality and began to blunder, so too does our king.

A Bank Fraud: I thought this was a heist/revenge story until the very end when I realized I’d been had. It’s actually a moving tribute to virtue and how we should treat our enemies.

Baa Baa, Black Sheep: An autobiographical sketch of the horrible abuse Kipling endured under foster care when his parents sent him back to England. If there’s a reason why Kipling became obsessed with revenge and the darker things in life, this would explain it.

Thinking Sideways: Shahade

Jennifer Shahade is a chess champion and professional poker player, but this book merely orbits those games, using them to illustrate superior strategies for mental excellence and accomplishment. We hear about her mnemonic techniques, growth mindset, dealing with temptations, time management, and much more. It’s personal development for analytical thinkers. I’m not particularly interested in either game but found a lot of valuable ideas and examples here.

Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind: Richardson

I picked this one up because  recommended it, and if you’re familiar with his writing and read this book you’ll suspect that Thoreau could be Sam’s pacifistic-leaning, aboriginal-curious spirit animal. If only Thoreau had fig trees!

This is truly a life of Thoreau’s mind rather than his actual life. His relations fade to supporting intellectual scaffolding in this telling, only hinting at emotional bonds. But that mind — often frustrated at itself and prone to slipping into depressions— was truly amazing, and only started bearing intellectual fruit appreciated by others in the last decade of Thoreau’s 44-years. His bottomless curiosity is one great takeaway of the book, without which there would be no output, but also the Transcendentalist’s ability to co-mingle nature observations with history, science, plays, fiction, philosophy, and religious works from all corners of the globe. He stirred it all up and out popped fascinating nonsequitors. I often found myself pausing, blown away by the insight he could synthesize from what I would have passed over. A great read. I need to revisit Walden, which I haven’t read since high school.

Galahad and the Grail: Guite

I didn’t think a decent ballad-style retelling of the Arthurian Grail legend could be made today. No hint of Cynicism, political correctness, or modern ideology creeps in. The weird hybrid of Christianity and fae/magic is intact. It strategically uses Middle English words long out of fashion, and has a simple but effective rhyme scheme that Guite makes dance. The rhythmic lines make you feel the charging horses’ hooves hammering the ground. The poem sometimes hits Tolkien-like warmth and registers, and is beautifully packaged in a well-bound book with Medieval-style rubrication and illuminated initials. So let me start by saying that I’m glad I read it because it’s delightful.

But frankly, it was also a disappointment. God preordains the knight Galahad to be a flawless success. He never wrestles with failure, vices, and doubt. He doesn’t grow. The result is less drama and more theological explication. The same mistakes that made the newer Star Wars heroes insufferable bores also leak every hint of dramatic tension from this poem. It’s a failure of hero inversion. The older Medieval La Queste del Saint Graal and Mabinogion, concentrate on more flawed and interesting knights pursuing the grail, and make for better stories. Maybe Christians won’t mind, but I’d rather read psychologically rich and dramatically involving poems like Beowulf, or even Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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Catilina’s Riddle: Saylor

Saylor’s brilliance is weaving whodunnits into opaque historical conflicts. This one starts with headless corpses showing up on Gordinius the Finder’s Etruscan farm, where he’s retired after a career seeking truth in return for rich men’s coin. But what do the corpses have to do with Catallina, the firebrand playboy vying for the highest office in the Roman Republic, who the Roman Consul Cicero asks Gordinias to host? Just as the Romans must have been confused about who the real villain was in Catallina’s uprising, Saylor refuses to hand us easy answers. Cicero (the theoretical good guy) and Catallina, each saddled with vices and inscrutable goals, are taking the Republic down a dangerous path, and Gordinius must do his best to find the truth.

Colonel Roosevelt: Morris

In this finale of Morris’s excellent Roosevelt biographical trilogy, we learn that “Leave ‘em wanting more,” and “quit while you’re ahead,” are two ideas Theodore Roosevelt couldn’t stomach. After his presidency, failing to put his prodigious talents at the nation’s service seemed tantamount to moral failure, and so he involved himself in national affairs again, and again. Roosevelt criticized the presidents that followed him in apocalyptic terms, and became increasingly detached from realistic policy. Still, with hindsight, it’s clear that he was often pointing at truths others preferred to overlook. He was prophetic when not deluded.

By the end of this painful period, Roosevelt had achieved little and squandered a large part of the almost universal popularity he’d earned as president. In that sense this book is a downer, but it’s rich with lessons and has plenty of the daring-do and brilliance Roosevelt is famous for. We see him exploring modern art with an open mind, traipsing through Africa and the Amazon, cranking out bestsellers mixed in with flops, and generally being the stick of dynamite Roosevelt couldn’t help being. The last chapter’s eulogies are moving and sobering.

Since You’re Mortal: Romm

This tiny commonplace book is based on a massive ancient one by Stoebaeus, who collected excerpts from much older Greek playwrights, philosophers, politicians, and doctors to instruct his son in living the good life. Stoebaeus’s book survived the ages, but almost all his source material didn’t. It’s the only trace we have of countless brilliant thinkers from antiquity. James Romm selected “the best of the best,” from this collection and provides a great new translation, mostly from ancient playwrights. The excerpts show how much wisdom these ancient entertainments had woven in. There are some great quotes I enjoyed and probably wouldn’t have found otherwise.

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The Last Samurai: DeWitt

I’m normally disappointed by literary fiction. Not enough plot, too much nihilism, and navel-gazing ad nauseam. But this book is great. A savant-like child is raised by a cerebral single mother who, recognizing the absence of a father figure, turns to the ideology of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to guide him. Though denied his father’s identity by his mother, in true Kurosawa style, the boy sets out to test contenders until he finds one worthy of his genius.

Tusculan Disputations: Cicero

Cicero is the patron saint of skeptical wisdom we all need. In the Disputations, he slices and dices his way through competing philosophies in pursuit of peace and virtue. See my essays on the book for a detailed overview.

Shakespeare: The World as Stage: Bryson

A great short biography of Shakespeare. Shakespeare himself was an improbable figure, and an inscrutable one. We know almost nothing about him for sure, but scholars have used ingenious methods to piece together a “probable Shakespeare,” and Bryson entertainingly lays out him and his time. I wasn’t aware just how close we came to losing most of his plays in the years after his death.

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In Xandu: Dalrymple

This book blew me away. Where do I even start to praise it? How did a 22-year-old write this well and know this much? Where did he find the gall to try this while still in college? Dalrymple retraced Marco Polo’s journey from Jerusalem to the palace of Kubla Khan, defying communist bureaucrats, charming ardent Iranian revolutionaries, and generally enduring with the help of two companions. The book is funny, poignant, and redolent of the adventurous quests of old. The journey was made in 1986 with the help of some industrial-age transportation technology, but the places he passed through feel Medieval. I’ve long enjoyed the travelogues of the Victorian-era explorers like Burton and Livingston, and Dalrymple has their spunk. He has other books, and I intend to ration them out to myself.

Dark Renaissance: Greenblatt

Renaissance England was full of intrigue, occult experimentation, stultifying oppression, and jealous rivalries. Never was that more apparent than in Greenblatt’s new book about Christopher Marlowe, a Cobbler’s son who wrote the wildly popular play Dr. Faustus, spied for the crown, questioned dangerous certainties, and ended up dead before the age of 30. If he’d lived longer, perhaps we’d talk more about Marlowe than Shakespeare. It’s an entertaining book set during an intriguing era of English history, and I enjoyed it. Some of the supporting cast are fascinating in their own right. But I have two major hesitations:

• The book is built on conjecture and supposition. This is necessary because we’d have only a chapter’s worth of material without it. Greenblatt is excellent at this game — he’s built his career around making intriguing connections between scanty facts. But sometimes his suppositions are flights of fancy that fail to delineate clearly between fact and guess, making the story sound more certain than it is.

• Even as an amateur, I can spot several errors, and I doubt this book had a fact checker. For instance, he claims that Marlowe invented the soliloquy that Shakespeare later employed to such good effect. But anyone who’s read the opening scenes of Seneca’s Hercules Furens knows the introspective soliloquy is ancient. And who do we know read Seneca because he name-drops him? Shakespeare.

All that being said, this was a fun book that I recommend.

A Morbid Taste For Bones: Peters

A great whodunit set amid a Medieval quest to retrieve a saint’s bones from a Welsh village. You can really feel the Welshness of the characters and the setting. Great writing and interesting people. I will read more of this series.

Marriage: Ferrier

I’ve seen Susan Ferrier described as the Scottish Jane Austen, and Marriage follows her comedy of manners style. Ferrier is forgotten today, but in her era she outsold books that are now considered classics, including Austen’s. She’s a good plotter, and if you have the patience for her story to play out slowly over two generations, you’ll be rewarded. But while she may be the Scottish Jane Austen, she lacks her sense of keeping things within reasonable bounds. You need some ridiculous characters, but Ferrier satirizes hers until they’re parodies. She goes too far, and those scenes are hard to get through. Still, I’m glad I read this, but I don’t think I’ll be trying any of her other novels anytime soon.

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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: Douglass

Douglass’s story of indomitable spirit in enslavement, a brave flight to freedom, and becoming one of the greatest orators America has ever seen is a classic. I read this as part of our February read-along on Socratic State of Mind. See my explorations of Douglass’s life and philosophy in this series of articles.

The Life of Samuel Johnson: James Boswell

The life of the 18th-century British polymath who wrote the “canonical” dictionary, plays, philosophy, and commentaries on great writers and thinkers. He wowed his contemporaries, spoke entertainingly about seemingly any subject, and blew peoples’ minds with hot takes. Johsnon was in demand at every lord’s dinner party.

He wrote his English dictionary by himself in eight years. For comparison, the 40 scholars working on the French dictionary of the Academie Francaise took 40 years to finish. It boggles the mind.

I wouldn’t call the book a page turner, and Boswell can be a bit much, but Johnson is often funny in a dry British way I find enjoyable. Johnson hated Scotland, but lived during the Scottish Enlightenment when it produced many brilliant thinkers. This led to some great bickering.

In his dictionary, Johnson defined oats, the national food of the Scots: noun: a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

Lord Elibank, a Scottish economist, army officer, and lawyer, responded: “Yes, and where else will you see such horses and such men?”

The Two Towers: J.R.R Tolkien

I taught myself to read with this trilogy. It’s been over a dozen years since my last reread, and after tackling Fellowship of The Ring in November, I moved on to the middle book. It’s aged way better than I expected. Or maybe, at my core, I’m still the boy I was in third grade. This is a timeless story, and in many ways more morally realistic than the omnipresent nihilism we often see in modern fiction. It’s written not for children but to be legible to them, which gives it a kind of permanence. Plus, I enjoy giant trees going on the warpath and warhorns sounding the deep, what can I say?

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The Case of Charles Dexter Ward: Lovecraft

The descendant of a Salem occultist suddenly develops an irrepressible obsession with his ancestor and meddles in things best left alone. I thought I’d read all of Lovecraft’s books years ago, but this one slipped by me. I think it’s among his top three or four.

The English and Their History: Tombs

The best book on English history I’ve read, and interesting throughout. The Anglo-Saxon-Viking period was particularly interesting, as was the post-Norman-invasion, 13th-16th centuries, and the Victorian Era. The evolution of individual rights and democratic representation across centuries wasn’t what I was expecting, and had far deeper, nearly mythological roots. The monumental amount of money and manpower Britain threw into fighting slavery might be the most benevolent action a world power has undertaken — for no gain — in history.

Arms of Nemesis: Saylor

Gordianias the Finder is called to the Bay of Naples, playground of the Roman elite, to find out who staved in the skull of a rich man. Spartacus is rampaging not far away with his army of escaped slaves, and the assumption is that several household slaves did it before escaping. But Gordianias starts to suspect something else is going on, but if he can’t prove it within a few days the entire household of 99 salves will be killed, per ancient Roman custom.

Theodore Rex: Morris

A long but excellent biography of Roosevelt’s time as president. This book helped me better understand how American capitalism led to monopolies that were threatening to tear the country apart in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the surprisingly light touch Roosevelt used to defuse the tension.

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The Fellowship of The Ring: Tolkien

I taught myself to read with this book, but it’s been a dozen years since my last revist, and I’m delighted to report that 8-year-old Andrew had great taste. Compared to the moral grey of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy, it may appear an oversimplified black and white conflict. But in many ways, it’s more realistic. Instead of Martin’s psychopaths, who rarely bother to delude themselves into believing they're doing the right thing, Tolkien's focus is on corruption. The orcs are corrupted elves. Boromir — a fundamentally good man — takes the easy way out but ultimately redeems himself. Saruman could have been the savior of Middle-earth, but pride is his downfall. The “good” races are prickly, self-centered, and isolationist, and can barely hold their noses and unite against a common enemy. It’s up to a few of their exemplars to get the job done.

Good and evil are constantly entangled here, and even the best are flawed and falter on the path. Victory depends on mercy and understanding the moral complexity of the world rather than simple heroism. The writing was crisper than I remembered, and still a delight to read as the year grows dark and cold. If you haven’t read it in a while, consider a Christmas reread!

Against The Machine:

See my full review on Socratic State of Mind.

Roman Blood: Saylor

While Eco brings Sherlock Holmes to a medieval monastery as William of Baskerville, Saylor brings him to ancient Rome as Gordianius the Finder. He deploys his protagonist’s keen mind and empirical style in the service of Cicero to help him solve a patricide (which we know about from Cicero’s surviving defense speech, Pro Roscio). This book was published only 34 years ago, but I imagine it couldn’t get released because of the protagonist’s sexual relationship with his Egyptian slave, Bethesda. She’s depicted sympathetically and with agency, but I don’t think it would get past editors without anachronistic moral reframing.

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How to Have Willpower: Plutarch & Prudentius

The star of this tiny book is Plutarch’s essay On Dysopia, a Greek word that means “defeat at the hands of the shamelessly insistent.” Plutarch isn’t quite talking about bullying, though there are hints of that. It’s more about standing up to the manipulation of our desire to be good people. He’s targeting an excessive sense of shame, bashfulness, agreeableness, or modesty that leads to compliance with unreasonable demands, and gives several good pieces of advice. Also included is an eccentric Latin poem by Prudentius that involves a giant battle between vice and virtue. Willpower is only tangentially related.

A Course In Demonic Creativity:

The muses and the inner daimon — these ideas of “the other inside,” are ancient and tied to creativity and spirituality. Socrates — he of logic and virtue — followed the dictates of an entity inside him he called his daimon. Philosophers, poets, and playwrights have long tapped into something like it, viewing it as a wellspring of ideas that could take rapturous hold of them. But so too could this inspiration be lost. Cardin discusses the history of the daimon and different ways to tap into it. Whether you want to view it as supernatural or part of the unconscious mind, Cardin has some great ideas.

Sense and Sensibility: Jane Austen

One sister has an objective rational sense, the other…feels emotions very strongly and thinks the dictates of reason are an oppressive slavery. She will not let her actions and reactions be guided by any sentiment but her raw emotional state. So equipped, both sisters search for love amid the absurd Regency-era social mores with imperfect knowledge of their love interests’ motives and backgrounds. The setup would have seemed too on the nose if coming from most writers, but Austen lands it. Definitely a classic.

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Seneca is one of the greatest writers of all time that no one knows about.

His plays inspired Shakespeare; his philosophy inspired Montaigne; his political thought inspired Diderot — read him closely and he may inspire you.

But even if we put aside his powerful ideas, his style makes an impact. He’s famous for crafting striking phrases from material that’s dry as dust. He does this with the masterful application of rhetorical devices, and one of his favorite techniques is the echo.

The terms for this are anaphora, epistrophe, and symploce. You may not know these words, but you’ve definitely heard them in action.

Anaphora:

Anaphora means “carrying back.” It’s the repetition of words at the beginning of neighboring clauses or sentences.

With malice toward none;
with charity for all;
with firmness in the right...

— Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address

“…we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender.”

— Winston Churchill – “We Shall Fight” Speech

Seneca generally uses anaphora not for soaring rhetoric, but for making subtle philosophy more striking.

Wasting Our Irreplaceable Time:

Persuade tibi hoc sic esse, ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. Turpissima tamen est iactura, quae per neglegentiam fit.

Persuade yourself that what I write is true: some moments are lost without noticing, some are stolen, some slip through our fingers. But no loss is as shameful as the one that comes about through carelessness.

— Seneca, Letters, 1.1

On Molding Minds and Ideas

Si agricolam arbor ad fructum perducta delectat, si pastor ex fetu gregis sui capit voluptatem, si alumnum suum nemo aliter intuetur quam ut adulescentiam illius suam iudicet; quid evenire credis iis, qui ingenia educaverunt et quae tenera formaverunt adulta subito vident?

If the farmer is delighted when his tree bears fruit, if the shepherd takes pleasure in his growing flocks, if each man sees in his pupil his own early manhood — what, then, do you think are the feelings of those who’ve trained a mind and moulded a young idea when they see it suddenly grown to maturity?

— Seneca, Letters, 34.1

On Rhetoric’s Power:

…cum Attalum audirem in vitia, in errores, in mala vitae perorantem, saepe miseritus sum generis humani et illum sublimem altioremque humano fastigio credidi.

…when I used to hear Attalus speaking on vices, on errors, on everything bad in life, I often felt pity for the human race and thought that Attalus was an exalted being, above the pinnacle of human affairs.” — Seneca, Letters, 108.13

Epistrophe:

Epistrphe means “return”. It’s the repetition of words at the end of neighboring clauses or sentences. It’s Anaphora, flipped.

“…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”

— Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address

Hey Jude, don’t make it bad.
Take a sad song and make it better.
Remember to let her into your heart,
Then you can start to make it better.

— The Beatles, Hey Jude

Seneca uses epistrophe for many purposes.

What Torments Us:

Quaedam ergo nos magis torquent quam debent; quaedam ante torquent quam debent; quaedam torquent, cum omnino non debeant.

Some things, then, torment us more than they should, some sooner than they should; and some that should not do so at all:

— Seneca, Letters, 13.4

Verbal Sparing:

Jason: Ingrata uita est cuius acceptae pudet.
Medea: Retinenda non est cuius acceptae pudet.

“Jason: Life’s a worthless gift if one’s ashamed to take it.
Medea: There’s no point in living if one’s ashamed to take it.”

— Seneca, Medea, 504-505

On Being Busy:

“Occupati sunt occupati, negotiis suis occupati, voluptatibus suis occupati—nihil habent occupati.”

“The busy are busy, busy with their affairs, busy with their pleasures—the busy have nothing.”

— Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, 7

Symploce

Symploce means “interweaving,” and echoes words at both the beginning and end of a clause or sentence. It’s Anaphora and Epistrophe combined.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

— First They Came, Martin Niemöller

“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”

— Ted Kennedy’s Eulogy for Robert F. Kennedy

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…”

— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Less Can Be More:

Si vis Pythoclen locupletem, non adde divitiis, sed subtrahe cupiditatibus; si vis Pythoclem honestum, non adde honoribus, sed subtrahe cupiditatibus; si vis Pythoclem aetate plenam, non adde annis, sed subtrahe cupiditatibus.

If you wish to make Pythocles rich, do not add to his riches, but subtract from his desires; if you wish Pythocles to be honorable, do not add to his honors, but subtract from his desires; if you wish Pythocles to experience pleasure, do not add to his pleasures, but subtract from his desires.

— Seneca, Letters, 21.8

Philosophy Can Wake Us:

Solus philosophia nos excitare potest, solus nos ex profunda sopore excutere potest.

Only philosophy has the power to stir us, the only power that can shake off our deep slumber.

— Seneca, Letters, 53.8

Qui fugit a negotiis et ab hominibus, qui seclusus est infelicitate suae cupiditatis, qui non potest videre proximum suum felicorem se, qui metu se abdiderit, ut timidus et segnis animal, non sibi vivit, sed ventri suo, somno suo, libidini suae vivit.

Someone who flees from affairs and from men, who is banished to seclusion by the unhappiness which his desires have brought upon him, who cannot see his neighbour more happy than himself, who through fear conceals himself like a frightened and sluggish animal — this person is not living for himself; he is living for his belly, his sleep, and his lust.

— Seneca, Letters, 55.5

Polyptoton:

A near cousin: when a word repeats in a different tense or case.

“Quos amor verus tenuit, tenebit”

True love will hold on to those whom it has held”

— Seneca, Thyestes, 551

Try Your Own:

The trick is slipping these into your writing without coming off as overwrought, affected, or cute. But if you can land it, it really enlivens your work. Practice helps.

Try making an idea fit into an anaphora. Then redo it into an epistrophe.

When I was translating this one from Seneca, I saw that it was written as an anaphora, but I couldn’t find a way for it to flow in English, so I rewrote it as an epistrophe and it came out fine:

“Non mutat iudicium fortuna, non mutat iudicium tempus, non mutat iudicium dolor—semper idem est iudicium.”

“Fortune doesn’t change his judgment, time doesn’t change his judgment, pain doesn’t change his judgment — his judgment is always the same.”

— Seneca, Letters, 71.25

You can probably slip these in to almost anywhere if you get good at them, even for topics that aren’t prone to soaring rhetoric. Did you catch the one I put in paragraph two?

Let me know if you come up with any good ones, or if you’ve succeeded in adding any rhetorical devices to your writing. Has it worked?

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We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

In a future where individuality and freedom are crushed so a totalitarianism of uniformity, math, and reason can thrive, one man begins to wake up. Published in 1924 by a Soviet exile, We inspired Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, but isn’t just those ideas in embryonic form. The writing feels like much of the sci-fi from the pre-1970s era, which it may have picked up during its translation into English. I could have used 40% less of the main character describing his confusion, delirium, and love interests’ lips and eyes. But it was a thought-provoking read in our growing monoculture; it also seems untimely, since of the many types of totalitarianism we might imagine arising now, one of reason seems the least likely.

Marcus Aurelius and His Legacy by

Much has been written about Marcus Aurelius’s life and philosophical ideas, but Judith Stove tackles his downstream legacy — how his ideas and life affected the world from the Middle Ages to the present. I had no idea, for instance, that the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Francis Hutcheson (who heavily influenced the ideas of the US founding fathers) translated Meditations into English, and seems to have been influenced by Stoic ideas. An interesting read if this subject is up your alley.

Memory Craft by

An Australian senior memory champion and researcher of Aboriginal mnemonic traditions discusses some of her unusual techniques for dialing in a vast corpus of information. I’ve long used streets and outside locations as memory palaces, but her ideas for using them for fact-packed timelines are fascinating, and I intend to experiment with them.

Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning by Nigel Biggar

In a book that pissed off many people, Oxford Ethicist Nigel Biggar examines British colonialism and tests the consensus that the empire was driven primarily by greed and a lust to dominate. Were colonies vehicles for racism, slavery, economic exploitation, theft, genocide, and violent oppression? Biggar convincingly argues that they were not, while willingly admitting that bad things happened in British colonies, often despite the intentions of the British to do better. While Biggar’s attempt to correct the colonialism myth occasionally goes too far, his arguments are directionally correct. The British often gave more to their colonies than they got from them.

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The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

Laborers and slaves once thought books and the ways of thinking they contained could free them. Their employers, masters, clergy, and political leaders agreed and were deeply discomfited by the spread of literacy and book learning. This book contains the story of how the British proletariat fervently pursued books and ideas beginning in the 18th century. It covers their discussion groups, self-funded libraries, and the great efforts expended on self-education. My most striking takeaway is that this drive has largely vanished not only among “the masses,” but also among the “elite,” probably at great cost to both. I wonder if we’ll ever see it pursued with such fervor again.

The Splendid and the Vile by Larson

So many great leaders are thought strange by their contemporaries. They’re highly accomplished in some realms while butting against propriety in others. Winston Churchill was one such man. His speeches kept the British going as Nazis bombers leveled England. Yet he directed the war from his bathtub, strode about 10 Downing Street in a floral robe, chomping on cigars, and when visiting the White House, talked to Roosevelt naked.

This is the story of Churchill, his family, and his friends during the devastating Battle for Britain, when all seemed lost and only Churchill could articulate a way through.

How To Make Money by Pliny, et al

This short book consists of excerpts from Pliny and other ancient authors about making money in the ancient Roman world. It’s astonishing how many of our legal and commercial frameworks were already in place (though they needed to be reinvented during the Renaissance.) Ancient Romans had corporations, investors pooled risks to avoid ruinous disasters, insurance could be bought for a merchant ship, and everyone had to be on guard against swindlers.

The Hobbit by Tolkien

It’s been many years since I read The Hobbit, and I’d forgotten how enjoyably fairy-tale-like it is. The Lord of the Rings wouldn’t have been a huge hit if it were written like this, but as a light-hearted appetizer, it’s fantastic. I enjoyed how many of the heroes are a realistic mix of virtues and flaws. The dwarves are short-sighted and blinded by greed. Bard the Bowman is a brave and skilled leader, but foolishly triggers Thorin’s intransigence by pressing him too hard. Beorn the shapechanger has anger problems. And Frodo, for all his realistic and enjoyable slow growth into agency, is always battling against comfort-seeking and sloth.

I’d rather give this book to a child than any Disney story.

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The Swerve

How the Renaissance Latinist Poggio Bracciolini rescued the last moldering copy of Lucretius’s Roman-era Epicurean swansong, “On The Nature of Things,” from a German monastery and spread copies across Europe. In the process, he changed the modern world by reintroducing ideas that had faded into oblivion. I’m no Epicurean, but I deeply appreciate Lucretius because he combined three things that rarely go together — practical philosophy, great art, and cutting-edge science. It’s a nearly impossible balancing act that few have pulled off. Greenblatt is a fantastic writer, and the book deserves the Pulitzer it received.

This Is How You Lose the Time War

A fun, short sci-fi story about two agents on opposite sides of a time war who’ve fallen in love and write letters to each other. As they slip through parallel realities, wreaking havoc, they begin to weary of the deadlock and strife.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World

Hume, Smith, Hutchinson, and so many others — I guess I knew there were tons of Scotsmen doing and thinking incredible things in the 16th-19th centuries, but I never put the pieces together until I read this book. The Scottish Enlightenment seems unlikely if you weren’t aware of other golden ages popping up in unlikely, impoverished places. But the Scotts got all the necessary ingredients together and changed the world with the cake they baked.

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Conversations With Beethoven by Sanford Friedman

One of the less-classifiable novels I’ve come across, but brilliant. It consists of “conversation books” filled with what people wrote to Beethoven after he’d gone deaf in 1818. More than 400 of these books survived in real life, but Friedman fictionalizes them to highlight a brilliant yet insecure genius clashing with the world, particularly his troubled playboy nephew and ward, Karl. Beethoven can speak, so rarely writes replies, leaving our take on him to be filtered through the biased lens of others. A short book, and worth a read, but filled with flawed, frustrating people usually trying to do “better” as their biases judge it. This book is much like our world in that sense, and much like the world, sometimes frustrating to endure.

The Roman Republic of Letters by Katharina Volk

The Roman Republic’s elite weren’t the first “gentlemen scholars,” but in terms of marshaling impressive intellectual and creative verve while wielding most of the wealth and power, few civilizations can match them. You may have heard of the stars of this book — Cicero, Caesar, Varro, and Brutus. The strange story of this book is as they went for each others’ throats and the republic fell apart, they found time to not only pen creative and original works, but keep up a polite, appreciative scholarly correspondence. They led armies against each other on the battlefield, but on the page? It was a different sort of competition entirely.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

This 800-odd-page behemoth won the Pulitzer, and it’s a page-turner. On several nights I lost track of time and read later than intended. That’s because Morris is a great writer and Roosevelt’s life has a natural story arc, with all the usual obstacles to overcome. There’s love, loss, financial disasters, villains, and an alcoholic philandering brother. Roosevelt’s life included all the quirky characters you’d find in a classic 19th-century Dickens novel, with Roosevelt being the most quirky of all.

Roosevelt is a fascinating man — an extroverted polymath scholar with a firm moral compass and rhetorical flair. But my main takeaway is how skewed today’s talk of corruption and political incompetence are. Our worst politicians have nothing on the machine politics of the 19th and 20th centuries, and it’s interesting to see how the principled Roosevelt navigated his corrupt world. It reminds me of how Truman navigated the mob’s attempt to control him and found the lesser evil.

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The True Believer: by Eric Hoffer

said this was one of his quake books, and in terms of the sit-up-and-take-notice sentences per page, I’d put it at the top of my list. Hoffer writes in an aphoristic style, laying out why mass movements happen. He describes the human archetypes that give rise to them, sustain them, and make them stick. Any critical reader will find flaws in his arguments and many exceptions to the rules he suggests. Why does he seem reluctant to give more than a cursory glance to “good” mass movements? But Hoffer himself admits he’s trying to be maximalist in his assertions. It’s one of those books you should come prepared to wrestle with. Very worth a read.

The Witch King by Martha Welles

If you’re tired of elves, Welles has penned an original fantasy world where borders between the infernal and “normal” realms are fluid, mortals and those below lend their talents — and blood lines — to each others’ wars, and the main character starts off the book dead and locked in a demonic holding cell.

On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt

I’ve sometimes wondered what stood opposite the greatness of “truth” Plato holds up for our appreciation. “Lies”, seems like the obvious answer. “Sophistry,” Plato sometimes suggests. But I think Frankurt’s tiny book offers the best opposite — “bullshit”, in all its erosive power. Bullshit can be spewed off the cuff opportunistically, but it’s also become a place — bullshit mountain, if you will — where devotees spend their lives. Pairs extremely well with another tiny book, “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity,” which also begs a question about opposites.

The Study by Andrew Hui

Hui glorifies the study, but makes it clear that it’s a state of mind as much as a room. A few chapters meander — I could have used 70% less on the weird Renaissance delusion of the Virgin Mary being a scholar. But can’t we all use a mental and physical space for self-cultivation? As our world spews more and more of Frankfurt’s “bullshit”, being able to retreat somewhere with an antitode looks more and more tempting.

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Young people can barely read, is what I’m hearing, and there’s much hand-wringing over the 54% of Americans who read below a 6th-grade level.

I’m sure the way reading is taught is important. Maybe critically so.

But we can’t get around this: reading is a volume game.

Linguistics and second language acquisition research show we need to read 3-6 million words before we can comfortably read advanced texts (nontechnical).

If we fail to jump that chasm, reading forever remains effortful, unpleasant, and willpower draining. If you’ve been reading for decades, it’s easy to forget how challenging it was at the beginning, and how much work it took.

I’d guess I read 1-2 million words through official assignments in K-12. Not enough, but something.

Talking to teachers, it’s clear fewer books are being assigned, and more short excerpts. In other words, reading volume is declining.

But whether you’re talking a 1990s American suburban school or whatever post-literary vacuum we’ve fallen into, the situation is the same — students probably won’t hit 3-6 million words in school. And because college reading also fell off a cliff, more people never jump the chasm between reading being hard and reading being effortless (and potentially enjoyable and self-reinforcing).

I feel this truth viscerally because I’ve been forced to learn it twice.

Too Dumb To Read English:

I was diagnosed as “learning disabled” at age eight. Teachers told my parents I was still reading at a kindergarten level, and I was shunted into special ed classes. They handed out drill sheets. They retaught reading techniques. They made me practice on remedial texts.

None of it worked. I still struggled to read the grade-level material.

It wasn’t until I found The Lord of the Rings in the library, became intrigued, and started grinding my way through it that something shifted. More books followed. By sixth grade my parents were informed — much to their surprise — that I’d somehow become the best reader in the class.

The grammar drills didn’t matter. The extra help didn’t matter. The remedial reading was counterproductive and dispiriting. In the end, it was only my eagerness to grind through volume that moved the needle and helped me jump the chasm.

Too Dumb For Latin:

I came close to flunking my only semester of high school Latin. I signed up because I loved reading about the classical world in English, and Latin intrigued me.

But class was only theoretically about reading Latin. It was actually about translating Latin, which requires grammar lessons and drills. None of it stuck. I struggled, came close to flunking every test, and assumed I was too dumb to learn.

Twenty-three years later I tried again. The advice hadn’t changed — do these grammar drills. Memorize declensions. Translate these sentences. In other words, keep ramming your head against the wall. I wasted a year and made no progress.

Then I switched my approach. I threw aside grammar and turned it into a volume game.

I start off with very easy texts, concentrating on works where I could understand 70% of the material or more, and used the dictionary only enough to bring me up to 70% understanding. In other words, I sought to use the same approach I used with The Lord of the Rings and the other books I read in elementary school. They were a slog, but they intrigued me enough to persevere.

I only average 10-15 minutes of Latin reading four days a week, but this approach has let me grind through 84,000 words. Slowly, more and more material is becoming legible. My vocabulary is expanding, my reading speed is increasing, and the simpler material I read 15 months ago now feels nearly effortless. All this without understanding the grammar at a theoretical level.

I estimate it will take me another 3-4 years (at 15-minute x 4 days a week) to fluently read the masterworks of Latin literature and philosophy I want to read. I wish I had more time for study, but I have a busy life and other obligations, so my pace will necessarily be slower than what a student could achieve.

The Big Picture

I’d love to tell you about one quick fix to get everyone reading more. And I’m all for teachers improving reading pedagogy. But I’ll say this: any approach that doesn’t center students imbibing 3-6 million words will fail them and society.

And you’ll rightly note: there’s no way kids will read that many words in school. And smartphones, algorithms, and dopamine hacking have become huge obstacles to them putting uninterupted focus on anything — all true.

Kids should be spending most of their time in internet voids, just like adults, and until they do it’s hard to imagine them rising above this era’s problems.

But let’s be real — educators were failing students long before the 2013ish emergence of algorithmic social media. They mostly failed me. Maybe the best we can say is that they failed fewer people when they didn’t have to compete with the internet.

Our education system’s greatest flaw may be concentrating on how instead of why, in using force instead of intrigue.

The human brain is an amazing thing. If you intrigue it, if you make it curious, it will become an information-seeking, word-devouring machine.

Once that switch was thrown in me, my school became irrelevant as a driver of reading proficiency. I easily read 50 books for pleasure in K-12, outside of official assignments. Most were trash, of course, but that hardly matters. It’s a volume game, and that’s probably 5 million words right there.

So maybe we need to stop our single-minded devotion to better teaching pedagogy and spend more time thinking about how we to make more kids curious. How do we throw that switch in their brains?

Until we do, nothing will change.

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You May Also Like: The books that Made Me at Socratic State of Mind — the reading that shaped who I am today.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Eighteen years after my first reading, I’d forgotten all but a sketch of the plot — jilted lover gives it another go eight years after his first marriage proposal was rebuffed. Austen is one of the greatest writers of all time, but I always forget how incredibly funny she is. I laughed out loud multiple times.

It’s subtle English humor, often playing off the pomposity of entitled English windbags, but no one’s done it better. And as someone annoyed at the predictability of “plot twists” in modern stories, it’s refreshing that I couldn’t tell how the intertwining relationships play out by the halfway point. This is surely one of the greatest novels ever written.

How To Innovate by Aristotle & Armand D’Angour

Theater, philosophical systems, rational medicine, competitive athletics, proto-industrialism, mathematical proofs, and so much more — you probably don’t need me to tell you that the ancient Greeks were first-rate innovators and inventors. This book outlines some of their showier accomplishments, such as a shockingly large early cruise ship, siege engines, and innovative battle tactics. It also includes some innovative/science theory from Aristotle.

But this small book of excerpts can’t begin to tackle what I regard as the more important question — why could the Greeks innovate like this? So I think it needs to be paired with two other books:

• The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece explains how this innovation occurred in an unheard of period of economic expansion and rising living standards (which the Diadochi/Romans destroyed). Which bought space for…

• The Greek Way explains the idea culture that took root in this economic bubble and ultimately led to the innovations that still wow us today.

Pronoun Trouble: By John McWhorter

I thought this might be filled with finger wagging and scolding. I was happy to find it descriptive rather than prescriptive (mostly). McWhorter is a sometimes funny and and always erudite tour guide of the English language. Whatever you think of the “pronoun revolution,” we’re going through, it’s probably worthwhile to be grounded in the grammatical history of the subject before you decide on a position.

Best of all, I think both sides of the debate will dislike elements of the book. One side will rebel against the suggestion that history can inform best practices in the present. The other will cry that McWhorter doesn’t understand the value of standardized grammar in effective communication. And so it goes.

Augustus by John Williams

An epistolary novel following the first Roman emperor Augustus’s rise, reign, and decline. The writing is great, and philosophical/thought-provoking. Williams makes the characters plausibly complex and conflicted in a way you won’t find in a dry readings of history. There’s a wide cast of historical characters that you’ve heard of if you’re interested in ancient Rome, but probably never fully understood in context. I didn’t realize how close Horace’s patron, Maecenas, was to Augustus’s inner circle, for instance, or the major role Mark Anthony’s son played in the downfall and exile of Augustus’s daughter.

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The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Maybe you love Sherlock Holmes, or literary culture and libraries, or Latin, or mysteries and puzzles, or philosophy and metaphysics, or the Middle Ages and its great conflicts — this book has it all. Eco is a consummate scholar who also happens to be a great novelist.

There’s been a murder in a wealthy Italian monastery, and brother William of Baskerville is recruited to sort it out before the feuding heads of a violent theological dispute arrive to hash out a compromise.

There are half a dozen scenes where Eco becomes self-indulgent with dream sequences and thought chains sprawling for pages, but the plot keeps moving through this thick manuscript, and the characters’ alien medieval minds are always interesting to watch and compare with today’s minds. This is a new favorite for me.

Brunelleschi's Dome by Ross King

I was entranced by the dome of Florence's Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral when I visited a few years back. It towers over the medieval city, and as you round a winding street corner it rears up and seems to slap you across the face.

Brunelleschi modeled his dome on older Roman designs, but took it further by solving problems that bedeviled architects for a thousand years. But as this book documents, we’re not entirely sure how he solved them. For instance, Brunelleschi insisted he wrapped the dome in internal tension chains to counteract the powerful horizontal thrust the dome should exert, but modern scans find few signs of them in the walls. So how exactly does it resist this thrust? Why is it still standing?

This book makes it clear that Brunelleschi was one of those ubiquitous Renaissance polymaths who somehow shoved civilization forward by centuries over the span of a few decades. Modern science may eventually solve the mysteries of his dome, but I suspect we will never entirely understand the mystery of his mind.

The Art of Memory by Francis Yates

I’ve been writing about memory, and a reader recommended this book. It’s the best scholarly treatment of the ars memoriae that I’ve come across, but it’s also strange. Yates makes it clear that though she spent years of her life studying the mnemonic arts, she never tried any of the techniques she writes about. And so she goes on for pages and pages musing about how they might work theoretically. But she could have solved all these uncertainties with a few hours of testing. Still, if you’re interested in a scholarly overview of the evolution of artificial means for having a great memory, this is probably the book for you. I particularly enjoyed the section on Augustine, who I didn’t know utilized these techniques.

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Thunderstruck by Erik Larson

When you pity the murderer more than his victim, you know the historian is good. That Larson manages to weave in the dramatic rise and scientific achievement of Guglielmo Marconi — the obsessed Italian inventor of the wireless telegraph — is even more impressive. Everything wraps up with a high-stakes oceanic chase to catch the murderer before he escapes into the vastness of North America. Good history well told.

The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi by James Hankins

Machiavelli pulled a fast one on us. He’s probably the only commonly-discussed Renaissance political philosopher, and his ideas, while insightful, are, well…Machiavellian.

The long-forgotten Francesco Patrizi is his equal in depth of thought and innovative political structures, but no one’s heard of him. In several sprawling books, Patrizi outlines how virtuous republics and principalities might be created and maintained. I’m going through them with my limited Latin ability and find them an interesting but laborious slog. Hankins’s book offers a useful summary and translation of Patrizi’s thought, but this isn’t a page-turner.

Patrizi’s republics are built on a number of pillars: promoting meritocracy while offering broad democratic representation, limiting warmongering, preventing institutional capture by cliques, educating everyone, promoting virtue, and allowing economic development.

This setup seems like the best of what was considered before the United State’s Constitution, and I suspect Patrizi’s ideas could offer us some important correctives to today’s malaise.

The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul

I’ve long been fascinated by how our mind “colonizes” the physical world to cognitively upgrade itself, like computers improved with added RAM. Notebooks, group thinking (philosophy style), GPS devices, and many other examples abound, making our cognition far more powerful than it would be if confined to our grey matter. This is an interesting exploration of the phenomenon, one of our species's most important tools

Dictator: A Novel by Robert Harris

The finale of Harris’s Cicero trilogy (the start) shows us Cicero trying to make up for his past mistakes and take a stand for what matters. His enemy Julius Caesar has triumphed and seized control of Rome, but when the dictator is unexpectedly assassinated Cicero has one last chance to revive his beloved Republic. He’s an old man with no swords and soldiers, and saddled with self-interested men who’ve forgotten their ancestors’ values. But Cicero has his voice and cunning, and he puts them to masterful use.

This novel does a great job highlighting just how close Cicero and his allies were to jumpstarting the moribund Republic and taming the would-be emperor, Augustus. Had fate taken a slightly different turn, Cicero would be known as the man who saved the Republic not once, but twice.

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The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen

I think writing is powerful and a glorious achievement of mankind, which biased me toward this book before picking it up.

It’s great, touching on several of my interests. But its most exciting idea was expanding a connection I was aware of but had never explored: how the “Extended Mind,” theory of Andy Clark and David Chalmers plays into writing.

The theory holds that our minds aren’t limited to our skulls and grey matter. Rather, our mind has the superpower of reaching into the world and integrating external cognitive aids, like new ram plugged into an old motherboard.

Writing allows us to do math that would be impossible in our heads. To remember what we’re likely to forget. To solve problems and perform self-therapy via journaling. I plan to write about this at Socratic State of Mind when I’ve thought it through more.

Ya, read this book if you’re a geek like me. But maybe just start keeping a notebook instead?

The Killing Floor by Lee Child

The Reacher Netflix show was one of the best I’ve seen for several years, so I thought I’d pick up the book that inspired season 1. It was good, and I enjoyed reading it, but it was one of the rare books that was not quite as good as the show it inspired.

The book Reacher seemed less altruistic and, while extremely capable, has a less savant-like mastery of many fields. Maybe this is more realistic, but I liked him the less for it.

Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language: by Nicola Gardini

I’m engaged in the useless activity of slowly and laboriously teaching myself Latin, and one would think inclined to arguments for its utility.

Gardini is a brilliant Latin scholar and writes well in English. He has great things to say about the amazingness of Latin thinkers and I enjoyed much of the book. But I’m not convinced by many of his arguments for why people should study the Latin language. I propose these:

1. It is incredibly useful and confidence-building to teach yourself through experience that you can make yourself do hard things you’re not naturally talented at.

2. Latin is beautiful (subjective)

3. Some of the most useful, interesting, and enlightening things ever written have been written in Latin (subjective)

4. Given the limitations of all translations, you miss 5-10% of what an author meant by relying on them. In art and areas like philosophy, 5-10% might be important.

5. Less confidence: reading and listening to Latin is far more cognitively demanding than English because its nested structure is like a programming language. If you read any of Cicero's page-long sentences and nested clauses you'll understand. I think Latin demands that you think at a higher, more nuanced, more complex level. I wish there were studies investigating Latin's brain effects, and I wonder if ancient/Renaissance/Enlightenment peoples observed a "leveling up" effect of anyone studying Latin. Perhaps, when I adjust, I will no longer find it demanding.

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