The Books Worth Reading newsletter is built to deliver a concentrated dose of literature to our readers each week. If you are a writer, thinker, entrepreneur, pastor, teacher or free citizen of a republic, you need to read great books. The problem is finding the time and attention!
Books Worth Reading is an email digest that allows busy people to connect with great minds - without wading through thousands of pages to do so. I’ll recommend at least three books a week, as well as highlighting a poem or two, some quotes and articles, and perhaps some discussion of great literary figures or movements.
BWR isn’t meant to take the place of reading, but it is designed to carve out a space for literature in your distracted 21st-century brain. I promise you that after reading BWR for just one month, you’ll be smarter, suaver, and more attractive. (results may vary)
Reader submissions are welcomed - connect with me via Twitter or Instagram and I just may feature your comment! Now, let’s get to the books!
Books Worth Reading This Week
All three of this week’s books are short - two of them are under 100 pages!
1) The Pearl by John Steinbeck, 90 pages
The Pearl is the story of a poor fisherman who finds the pearl of a lifetime - and what happens next. It’s a technical masterpiece - every word is poignant, true, and spare. It’s Steinbeck making his best attempt to dethrone Hemingway, and it comes dangerously close to doing so.
Quotes: “For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more. And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have.”
Why is it worth it? This is one of the greatest short novels of all time. It’s up there with Hemingway’s Old Man And The Sea, and Steinbeck’s other masterwork, Of Mice and Men. That alone makes it worthwhile. But it also has a special moral strength that makes it a powerful building block for argumentative thought. The Pearl is saying something about a universal topic (greed) without preaching. (Rare for JS, whose novels are corrupted by endless left-wing soapboxing) Whether you agree or not your intellectual understanding of human nature, greed, money, and family will be enriched by reading this.
2) The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom, 208 pages
Harold Bloom was perhaps the last of the great literary critics and a long-time professor at Yale, where he championed the “Western Canon.” He’s a cult figure among conservatives for merely asserting that great literature exists, but he certainly wasn’t conservative in any other way. Still, his classic work “The Anxiety of Influence” is an important look at “strong poets” and what makes them.
Quotes: “Milton is the central problem in any theory and history of poetic influence in English; perhaps even more so than Wordsworth…"One discovers quickly who among them ranks as the great Inhibitor, the Spinx who strangles even strong imaginations in their cradles, Milton."
Why is it worth it? I don’t buy Bloom’s thesis, or his Freudian mumbo-jumbo about the complexes of “strong poets” and “weak poets.” But Bloom’s intimate acquaintance with all the greats of poetry - Milton, Wordsworth, Blake, Emerson, Whitman, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and on and on - is easy, fluid, eloquent. Reading Bloom, you learn how the great poets battled with and idolized each other. You get a sense of what matters in poetry. This is valuable knowledge that doesn’t come naturally to 21st-century minds.
I, along with most moderns, know less about poetry than the average 19th-century coachman. But there is a mystical power and tradition in poetry that was* essential to the life of the mind for millennia, and we’re missing out on it. (*I suspect that it’s still essential and we’re just too ignorant to know what we’re missing) But I still have a problem liking poetry in a vacuum.
Bloom’s book was helpful in providing points of reference for me to take hold of the poetic tradition.
3) The World And The West by Arnold Toynbee
Arnold Toynbee was a British historian, geopolitical expert, and professor of philosophy, who was one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the 1950’s. Toynbee has a reputation as a sort of prophet, mostly for seeing beyond the obvious Soviet menace and identifying other rising threats to the West, like Islam and Maoist China.
Quotes: “It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it is the world that has been hit and hit hard- by the West.”
“Different though the non-Western peoples of the world may be from one another in race, language, civilization, and religion, if any Western inquirer asks them their opinion of the West, he will hear them all giving him the same answer: Russians, Muslims, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, and all the rest. The West, they will tell him, has been the arch-aggressor of modern times, and each will have their own experience of Western aggression to bring up against him.”
Why is it worth it? In “The World and The West” Toynbee propounds an original (at the time) thesis that essentially boils down to “the whole world agrees that the west is the bad guy, and honestly, they may be right.” That argument may have been original in 1950, but it’s boilerplate pablum at every university nowadays. So why is “The World and The West” worthwhile reading?
As I’ve argued before, to achieve great things, nations must tell heroic stories about themselves. A corollary of this principle is that when nations begin to identify themselves as the villains of the tale, their enemies may grasp onto this narrative as a weapon. The West wasn’t always self-hating - as late as WWII, our academics viewed western history as a glorious march toward human freedom. That changed after the war, and Toynbee was at the vanguard.
Our current geopolitical enemies are the same as in Toynbee’s day - China, Russia, the Islamic states. And they’re using Toynbee’s rhetorical playbook. Need an example? Read Vladimir Putin’s 2023 speech to the Federation Assembly. It reads like Toynbee. At no point does Putin admit that he is an aggressor in the Ukraine conflict - in fact, he frames the conflict as one that sprang fully formed from the genetic predisposition to aggression inherent in the philosophy of the West. Putin is nobody’s fool - he is using our self-hatred against us. Reading Toynbee is a valuable way to trace the origins of that self-hatred.
Poem of the Week: “The Sun Rising” by John Donne
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time …
This poem slyly captures the magic of two lovers (generally believed to be Donne and his secretly-married wife Anne) lounging in bed late. These are just the opening lines of the poem - you can read the rest here.
Advice From Old Books
On the breakup of a friendship: “Our first object, then, should be to prevent a breach; our second, to secure that, if it does occur, our friendship should seem to have died a natural rather than a violent death. Next, we should take care that friendship is not converted into active hostility, from which flow personal quarrels, abusive language, and angry recriminations.” - Cicero, On Friendship
On how to travel: “Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.” - Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Look at the books!
Notable links
James Matthew Wilson writes about T.S. Eliot in the New Criterion: “Few major poetic reputations could rest on fewer major poems than Eliot’s.”
Is there a case for trash-talking dead authors? “The enemy has never been people who read a book and hate it. It’s often people who don’t read books at all.”
Why Christians should study classical languages: Jacob Allee has recommendations on a less dry way to learn Latin or Greek.
The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair, by Nathaniel Hawthorne: This is a charming collection of tales from early Puritan New England. For readers who have only read the Scarlett Letter, Hawthorne is worth exploring!
Poetic Outlaws has 15 Henry Miller quotes to revive the artist in you: “They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts.”
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for next week’s newsletter!