As mentioned, I’ve been trying to be more discerning—yet less structured—in my reading, and spend more time putting ideas into actions. I didn’t read as many books this month as I typically do, but I ended up enjoying the experience a lot more. I dipped in and out of some old favorites, like David Sedaris’s Happy Go Lucky andWhen You Are Engulfed in Flames. I also read Lukas Gage’s memoirI Wrote This for Attention, which was a random choice for me but I LOVED it. I read How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr which was eye-opening. I’ve also been making my way throughThe Wisdom of Marcus Aurelius by Robin Waterfield, as well as—for the ninth time—A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy. I credit Tolstoy’s wisdom and teachings—Christian teachings, mind you—for turning me into such a flaming leftist. Oh, and if you haven’t heard, Anne Lamott and her husband, Neal Allen, released a new book in March:Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences. I’m only a few chapters in and it is fantastic.
One of the best books I read this month was1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How it Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Oh my goodness, it’s SO good. A 400+ page book about the Wall Street crash sounds like a remedy for insomnia, but it’s the opposite. I actually had a hard time going to sleep because I wanted to stay up and keep reading. The book follows the main players—the financiers, bankers, and government figures who helped fuel the speculation and then had to deal with the fallout—all from a fly-on-the-wall perspective. One especially fascinating thread is Carter Glass, who seems to have had a personal vendetta against National City Bank president Charles Mitchell. It’s all riveting. And Sorkin is such a fantastic writer that you often forget he’s the one doing the writing at all.
The Zorg by Siddharth Kara Wow. I’d never even heard of the Zorg before, let alone understood its role in sparking the abolitionist movement in England and the United States. In 1781, the crew crammed the ship with 442 enslaved people on a voyage to Jamaica. After a series of events—bad weather, navigational errors—the ship veered off course, and supplies began to dwindle. What happened next is almost impossible to comprehend. In an effort to “save lives,” they began throwing people overboard, starting with women and children. Shackled together, often in pairs, people were dragged to the edge of the ship, screaming and begging for their lives, and thrown into the ocean to drown. It was the systematic murder of 133 people. Why? Mostly money. The slaves had been so malnourished and mistreated that they would likely sell for far less than expected. And because they were insured “property,” they’d be worth more dead than alive. When news of the massacre spread, it forced people to confront the true brutality of slavery. True to form, pro-slavery activists used the Bible to defend it. Reverend Raymond Harris “asserted that, ‘the slave-trade . . . appears in perfect harmony with the principles and decisions of the word of God,’ and that Jesus ‘never once condemned, reproved, or even hinted the least disapprobation of the practices of slavery . . . not even in his divine Sermon on the Mount.’” Another slavery supporter, William Gregson, argued that financial catastrophe would occur if slavery was abolished. To which I wrote in the margins: then you be a slave. It’s a hard book to stomach. But the storytelling and historical detail make it readable and unforgettable.
Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In by Louis Zamperini My good friend recommended this, and I’m so glad she did. Most people know Louis Zamperini’s story on the surface: Olympic runner, World War II bombardier, prisoner of war. What he endured is almost incomprehensible. What I loved about this book—a collection of advice written near the end of his life—is how he remained cheerful through it all. He laments how you can’t watch sports today without seeing someone lose ungraciously. He talks about hatred and, like Etty Hillesum, believed hatred was a ruse. “You hate and hate and hate, and think you’re getting even by hating.” But you’re really just destroying yourself. That’s the trap. After everything he went through, maybe the hardest part wasn’t surviving. Maybe it was deciding what to do with it all: Carry it? Or put it down and free yourself? And maybe that’s what “not giving up” really means—not just surviving what happens to you, but like Etty—refusing to let it turn you into someone you don’t want to be. Refusing to let jerks turn you into a jerk. Really, really great book.
Football by Chuck Klosterman Oh my goodness, this book was so much fun. This guy is one of the weirdest, most interesting thinkers I’ve read. He overthinks everything in the most entertaining way. He takes football and uses it as a launching pad into bigger questions about time, culture, and what we choose to value. This isn’t really a book about football. It’s a book about how we think about football. And from there, how we think about everything else. This guy has thought about football in pretty much every context you can imagine. He even argues—convincingly—that Jim Thorpe was a greater football player than Tom Brady. And there’s not even video footage of Thorpe playing football!He said NFL football will continue to grow in the U.S. over the next 15–20 years, but eventually it will become too big. And when that happens, it will break. As obsessed as Americans are with football now, he suggests that in 50 years, it will probably be irrelevant. This sounds ridiculous at first, but he has valid points. And this got me thinking. If something as massive as football can eventually fade into irrelevance…what does that say about everything else we chase? Fame. Legacy. Being “the greatest” at the expense of our happiness. Not only will you not be able to enjoy your legend status because you’ll be, you know, dead, but the people who think of you as a legend will in turn be dead themselves. The next generations probably won’t even know your name, let alone what the thing was that you were great at. This is all to say: nobody cares what you do. So do things that are meaningful to you. Spend time with your parents. Take the vacation. Explore. People talk about hustling 24/7 like it’s a good thing. They hustle just to do more hustling! (Usually it’s because they don’t know what else to do with themselves.) It reminds me of something Marcus Aurelius wrote: “You’re afraid of death because you won’t be able to do this anymore?” In other words, what you do matters, but not nearly as much as how you live.
What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes This war memoir is epic. I couldn’t put it down. It’s so well-written that I had to order another book of his, Matterhorn. Marlantes warns about what war does to a person internally. He argues that we do a great job physically preparing soldiers for war, but a terrible job giving them the tools to survive mentally and spiritually. He talks about the guilt and anger and confusion of trying to reconcile being a “good person” with the atrocities the war enables one to commit. I just love how brutally honest he is. And while I didn’t agree with everything he said, I still think it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s raw, insightful, full of action, and reflective. I think you’ll love it too.
Moral Animal by Robert Wright I love evolutionary science, and this book deepened that love. It reinforced what I first learned in Wright’s other book Why Buddhism Is True: our genes don’t care about our happiness; they care about getting into the next generation. So many of our “choices” are driven by wiring we can’t see. It’s unsettling how unaware we are of the forces shaping us. But it’s hopeful too. Once we see our blind spots, we can question our impulses and make better choices.
C.S. Lewis and the Art of Writing by Corey Latta I loved this book. It builds on the advice collected in On Writing by C.S. Lewis but goes deeper. Latta doesn’t just share Lewis’s writing principles—he explores the conditions that made Lewis’s writing possible. What shaped him? What fueled that kind of output? How did he actually work? One of the biggest takeaways for me was how widely and deeply Lewis read. As a young boy, he devoured books in the attic of his family home, wandering through myth, history, poetry, and story. By adulthood, he was one of the most well-read writers of his generation. Like Bob Dylan, C.S. Lewis’s genius didn’t come out of nowhere. He read book after book… and then he extended the line.
Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia My good friend recommended this a while ago, and I’m finally reading it. Oh man, this book is so good. I’m only halfway through, but I’ve already made changes to my diet. I even stopped eating cupcakes and ice cream on the weekends (and me and cupcakes and ice cream were like this 🤞). When a reputable physician writes his magnum opus and page after page details the dangers of poor metabolic health—how it underlies nearly every major disease of aging—you sit up and take note. And you make changes. It’s only been a few weekends since I cut out my excessive sugar intake, and I’m determined to keep it up. This quote by Henri Amiel has been helping: “Every desire abates, and every vice grows after it is satisfied.” I’ve also been thinking about what Leo Tolstoy said—that all behavior stems from thoughts. So if you want to improve your behavior, first work to improve your thoughts. Please read this book. You really have to.
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis Corey Latta said this is Lewis’s best literary fiction, so of course I had to read it. It’s not my usual go-to genre, but I ended up really liking it. A favorite takeaway is the meaning behind the book’s title: we can’t expect God to meet us face to face “till we have faces.” Until we’re honest with ourselves. Until we get clear about who we are. Until we move past the tangle of thoughts and get to what’s truly in our heart. Becoming our real selves is uncomfortable, but it’s the prerequisite for transcending ourselves.
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis Okay. I knew C.S. Lewis was a genius, but I didn’t know he was a genius genius. This book blew my mind. (By page 68 I’d already written “Wow!” or “omg” 72 times.) I’m putting it in my top 10 favorite books of all time. I remember reading parts of this book as a teenager and loving it, but I never finished it. Thankfully, I picked it back up this month after learning, in C.S. Lewis and the Art of Writing, why Lewis wrote it. The premise is brilliant: a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior demon, to his nephew, advising him on how to subtly steer humans away from God/what’s best for them. The wisdom in this book surpasses almost any other book I’ve read. I’ve also ordered more of Lewis’s books, including Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, The Weight of Glory, and Surprised by Joy.
Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson Isaacson takes enormous people and ideas and turns them into swift, gripping narratives. Leonardo da Vinci and Elon Musk were fabulous. Code Breaker was no different. The subject alone—gene editing, curing disease, rewriting the very code of life—is insane, but what makes it such a pleasure to read are the stories behind the science. “The key to true curiosity is pausing to ponder the causes,” Isaacson writes. Why is the sky blue? Why does this molecule behave the way it does? For Jennifer Doudna, the book’s central character, it was not enough to get the answers—she needed to know how the answers could be of use to the world. Her breakthroughs came from a willingness to move into unfamiliar fields, to take intellectual risks, to ask questions that were bigger than she felt qualified to answer. Real discovery, Isaacson suggests, begins not with answers, but with the courage to linger inside a good question. To keep looking.
The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson The second sentence of the Declaration of Independence is, Isaacson says, “the greatest sentence ever crafted by human hand.”
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
In each chapter of this tiny book, Isaacson pauses over a single phrase or word. What did the founders mean by “self-evident”? What about “unalienable rights”? Where did these ideas come from? What should they mean to us now?
These shouldn’t be abstract questions. The Declaration of Independence was intended to be used in our lives and laws, written not to become a relic of history but to be questioned, returned to, and practiced. You couldn’t ask for a better starting point than this book.
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman My aunt-in-law started a family book club this year, and this book was the first on the list. I probably wouldn’t have read it on my own, so I’m glad it was forced on me. I really enjoyed it. The only thing I wasn’t prepared for was how sad it was: after the first night of reading I had to emotionally detach. (Once detached, I was fine. Mostly.) It reminded me of another fictional character named Babbitt, although Ove is much more endearing. Ove is rigid, rule-bound, and easily irritated. The obvious message is that you can’t judge a book by its cover: the gruff, inflexible exterior conceals a surprisingly tender heart (as depicted in the trailer of the 2022 movie adaptation, A Man Called Otto). But my biggest takeaway was how much time this guy wasted. How opinionated he was about stuff that wasn’t in his control (namely, other people’s behavior). It turned out to be the perfect book to begin the year with. My word for this year is focus. Namely: focus on what I do. Less time forming opinions about what everyone else is doing, and more time paying attention to what I do and what I think about. My own thoughts and actions. Those two things alone will give me more than enough work this year/the rest of my life.
The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough Imagine a dam 72 feet high and nearly 900 feet wide, sitting above a small Pennsylvania town. Imagine it holding back a lake more than two miles long, containing 20 million tons of water. Imagine the lake sitting on one of the most exclusive country clubs in America, owned by powerful, wealthy men such as Andrew Carnegie, Benjamin Ruff, and Henry Clay Frick.
Now imagine the dam breaking.
That’s what happened in 1889, when the South Fork Dam collapsed and sent a wall of water roaring downstream at forty miles an hour, flattening everything in its path. Entire neighborhoods vanished. Trains were lifted from their tracks. Houses, trees, animals, and people were swept together into a single moving mass. By the time the water finally stopped, more than 2,200 people were dead.
McCullough once said he wrote this book because he wanted to read a good account of the tragedy and couldn’t find one, so he decided to write the book he wanted to read. The result is both a gripping historical narrative of the event, and a sobering reminder that the people in charge definitely don’t always know what they’re doing. It’s also a reminder of how even the biggest catastrophe—the biggest anything, really—is eventually forgotten.
Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life by Daniel Klein The Art of Happiness by Epicurus and The Pocket Epicurean by John Sellars are two of my favorite philosophy books. And now I can add another Epicurean one to the list. Epicurus wasn’t a hedonist, as some people claim. Yes, he said the ultimate goal of life is pleasure. But pleasure from moderation, not excess. By keeping his tastes simple, bread and water were exquisite tasting. The best pleasures, he said, are the tranquil ones, not the wild ones. A clear conscience, good company, and a mind free from mental disturbances. It doesn’t get much better than that, he’d say.
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians by Ambrose Bierce Oh man, this book was FUN. It’s a collection of short stories by the philosopher and cynic Ambrose Bierce. The stories are dark and macabre, and set mostly during the Civil War. Each story has a twist at the end. And yet the stories are philosophical? It’s like guilty pleasure reading without the guilt.
What a beautiful gift—the abilityto read. To be rewarded so vastly for a few hours of your time and attention.
It almost isn’t fair how easy it is! Open a book, let your eyes move over the lines, and bam—the world’s wisdom is yours.
What a beautiful gift a good book is.
The pages… the sentences…
The words.
One after another they chip away at our ignorance—our discontentment—and return us at once to stillness. We breathe a sigh of relief.
The stories.
One after another they pile up, pushing us away from the center of the universe, expanding our world as we’re brought down to size. We’re humbled and empowered. We become fearless.
I read around 70 books this year, and many of them were among the best I’ve ever read. There were some that I couldn’t stop talking or thinking about, so I had to put them in a list and recommend them to you. These are the books that most changed the way I think, taught me something invaluable, and pushed me to be a better person. I have a feeling they’ll do the same for you.
Etty was a Dutch Jew living in Amsterdam when she began her diary—at her therapist’s urging—nine months after the Nazis took over the Netherlands. She was 27 years old. Two years later, at age 29, she would be murdered in Auschwitz, along with her family.
This book is made up of those diary entries and letters. Within them, we witness a startling personal transformation that unfolds over just two years.
In the early pages, we meet a young woman in emotional chaos: boy-crazy, prone to self-indulgent daydreaming, keenly aware that she spends too much time gazing at herself in the mirror. But as time passes, something remarkable happens. She begins to transform—spiritually, emotionally, philosophically—all in the face of unthinkable horror.
It’s as if the bleaker her circumstances became, the stronger her spirit grew.
While stationed with her family at Camp Westerbork, Etty describes walking beside the barbed-wire fences and feeling… joy. She wasn’t delusional. She understood what would likely happen to her. Yet that awareness did not lead her to despair. In fact, the opposite occurred: she fell more deeply in love with life.
And here’s the thing—she could have gone into hiding. She chose not to.
Defying her friends’ pleas, Etty refused to hide from her persecutors. “She didn’t want to desert her parents, but more than that,” Carol Lee Flinders writes, “it just felt morally wrong to her that anyone would concentrate on personal survival who could be reaching out lovingly to others instead.”
Friends even recall failed attempts to “kidnap” Etty and put her into hiding. Convinced she didn’t fully understand the danger she was in, Klaas Smelik—the writer to whom she would later entrust her diaries—once grabbed her in an attempt to pull her to safety. She wriggled free, stepped back, and said, “You don’t understand me.” When he admitted that he didn’t, she replied: “I want to share the destiny of my people.”
In that moment, he knew there was no hope of “rescuing” her. She would not allow it. Besides, she argued, what did it matter if she went—or if someone else did?
And this was a woman who had everything going for her! She had family and friends, a law degree, ambition, curiosity, and a full, vibrant inner life.
Yet she would not run and hide—not when there were so many people right in front of her she could help.
I could go on and on. Whenever someone asks me if I’ve read anything good lately, this is the book I talk about. Do yourself a favor and read it!
Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday Not only is this one of the best books I’ve read this year, it’s one of the best books I’ve read, period. It’s also my favorite book in his virtue series.
This book is about the most important kind of knowledge there is: knowing what’s what. What’s worth pursuing. What we should avoid. What we can ignore. What we should never ignore.
Lots of people are smart—but how many have wisdom? Lots of people know facts, but how many can think with nuance? How many people really know themselves? (Self-awareness, he argues, is the rarest thing in the world.)
“Think of the people,” he writes, “who […] miss out on life because they are chasing immortal fame.” They convince themselves that their job is so important they don’t have time for contemplation, or even an hour with a good book. They check their work emails well after they’ve logged off for the day. They do things that could have gone without doing.
“Wisdom is knowing that what you do is important…but that it’s not that important.”
In doing all this, they miss the whole point of life: happiness. Not pleasure or comfort, but the deeper happiness that comes from doing the right thing, for the right reasons, in the right way, at the right time. The happiness that comes from truly knowing what’s what.
And this kind of wisdom takes constant effort. Famed basketball coach George Raveling, Holiday writes, “wakes up each morning, sits on the side of the bed, and gives himself two choices. ‘George,’ he says to himself, ‘you can either be happy or you can be very happy.’”
“Wisdom is happiness. Happiness is wisdom,” Ryan writes. “This is not a tautology. No one would be happy not fulfilling their potential, and yet, can one flourish without joy and happiness?”
This is another book I could go on and on about. It’s that good. Do yourself another favor and read it.
Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman I didn’t think I would like this book. I assumed it would be another familiar argument about how we should stop chasing money and things and start caring more about making the world better.
And yes—it is that book. But it’s also so much more. It’s genuinely inspiring and eye-opening. Even my wife, Courtney—who typically blasts scream core while she cooks—turned the music off each evening so I could read it out loud until we finished it.
The thought experiment that made philosopher Peter Singer famous goes like this: suppose you’re on a walk and see a child drowning in a pond. You want to jump in and save the child, but then you remember you’re wearing a pair of brand-new, super expensive shoes. Jumping into the pond would ruin them. What do you do?
Obviously, you save the child. Pose this question to anyone and the answer is always the same. What kind of question is that, anyway?
But Singer argues we do the exact opposite all the time. The money we spend on things we don’t need could save so many children’s lives.
One of the stories I loved was that of businessman-turned-philanthropist Rob Mather. After finding the success of a corporate career deeply empty, he wanted to put his energy toward something that actually made a difference. But what? He wasn’t interested in a vague gesture or a symbolic cause—he wanted to take on a problem that was massive, yet solvable. He found malaria.
In 2005, malaria was killing 3,000 children every day. That’s the equivalent of seven jumbo jets full of children going down. It’s almost impossible to fathom. Could one person really do something about that?
As it turns out, malaria has a surprisingly simple and inexpensive solution: mosquito nets treated with insecticide. So Rob decided he would raise money to provide them.
But this raises an obvious question. If curbing such a deadly disease is really that straightforward, why hadn’t someone already done something about it?
That’s one of the many questions Bregman urges us to sit with. Even the tiniest effort on our part, he argues, can make an extraordinary difference. “You can be your average exec in your average company one day and then take the lead in fighting one of the world’s deadliest diseases the next.”
Mather went on to found the Against Malaria Foundation, which has now “raised more than 700 million dollars and distributed over 300 million mosquito nets to 600 million people.” Because of this, the daily death toll has dropped from the equivalent of seven jumbo jets to fewer than three.
In one village in Uganda’s West Nile region—where nearly half the population had suffered from malaria in the preceding months—Rob’s foundation distributed 50,000 mosquito nets. A man from the village later walked six miles to dictate a message through the Red Cross to Rob, letting him know that malaria no longer existed there. The disease had been completely eradicated in his village.
It’s such an inspiring and timely book. Courtney and I loved it.
More books that made this year of reading especially rich:
Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus I read this to better understand Charlie Kirk and his motives for saying the things he said. (By the way, this is another benefit of reading good books: so you can hear messages like Charlie’s and not think they’re normal.)
Epictetus: The Complete Works Robin Waterfield Literally incredible. It’s like a cleanser for your mind, washing away the mental weeds and tuning your thoughts to the sound of reason.
Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer I finished this recently and Oh. My. Gosh. It is so, so good.
Narrowing down the above list was tough, so here are other books I read this year and loved:
