BookShelf
I don't have a favorite book but I do have a favorite bookshop, The Hermitage, an antiquarian bookshop in Denver. If you're inclined to add any of these to your own bookshelf try your local sellers or discover what The Head and the Heart call 'library magic'.
Space Trilogy · 1
Out of the Silent Planet
You've never read anything like it. Pay attention to his language: it's a philologist's novel.
Space Trilogy · 2
Perelandra
Buckle up for pages of description, but the pay-off is a heady world that is both a lullaby and a riot.
Space Trilogy · 3
That Hideous Strength
Lewis writes one thing multiple ways across all his books — and it's all here. A conviction and a convocation. I shut it at points because of the raw, clinical observations of human nature.
The Hyperion Cantos · 1
Hyperion
Recommended by my co-founder at The Hart & The Cur. Read it if you want to understand what AI and the world might look like in a hundred years.
The Hyperion Cantos · 2
The Fall of Hyperion
Frankly, not as good as Hyperion, but a must read if you want to tie up the loose ends from Book 1.
The Roosevelt Trilogy · 1
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Funnily enough, the things that I remember from this book are the oddities: TR reading on one leg, stuffing animals in Egypt, and ranching out West.
The Roosevelt Trilogy · 2
Theodore Rex
I don't think a man ever enjoyed being President as much as him.
The Roosevelt Trilogy · 3
Colonel Roosevelt
Most men coast after the presidency. Roosevelt went to Africa, nearly died in the Amazon, and ran again in 1912 — and lost. Morris makes you feel every mile of it.
A Separate Peace
Inspired my original, inexplicable love for New England. The friendship between Phineas and Gene haunts me to this day.
Bored and Brilliant
I read this in 2017 and immediately changed my habits: less music, fewer podcasts filling the silence, more boredom. If boredom helps produce brilliance, then what is our society when filled with distraction and noise?
Co-Intelligence
This is the book I recommend as the entry point to anyone unfamiliar with AI and where to begin.
Creativity, Inc.
Do you know the story behind Pixar? Most leadership books are worthless, clichéd, or 3x as long as they need to be. This is the exception. Wonderful narrative with meaningful advice interwoven from one of the founders of one of America's most iconic companies.
Deep Work
Newport's second best (to So Good They Can't Ignore You). Helped me build a system for consistent writing early in my post-military career.
Mania
Shriver's satire on intelligence works equally well as a stand-in for a dozen other themes that have fallen prey to cancel culture in the past decade—she shows what happens when mob mentality goes unchecked.
Modernity and the Holocaust
The Holocaust, argues Bauman, was a feature of bureaucracy, not a bug. Thoughtfully he shows how modernity produced the conditions and tools to enable one of humanity's darkest hours.
Reclaiming Conversation
Our anxiety about the impact of digital technology on our relationships is not severe enough. Turkle shows exactly what we're losing. Published in 2016. More relevant now, not less.
The Comfort Crisis
This book started me on an annual misogi. There's only two rules: one, there must be at least a 50% chance of failure; and two, you can't die.
The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory
Required reading for any introspective Evangelical in America today. Alberta helped me make sense of something I'd felt since high school — the slow drift in the Evangelical world I was raised in from real Christianity toward the worship of power.
The Kite Runner
Pay attention to what makes you cry. For me, it's sacrificial love. On the bus from Tokyo to Gotemba I cried so much the snot ran down my nose and onto my shirt, scandalizing my fellow Japanese passengers.
Waiting on a Train
I read this on the Amtrak from Chicago to Denver, comparing every quirky touch of McCommons' journey to my own. I think rail would solve several of the country's problems. A paean to a nearly dead system.
A Perfect Spy
I don't often read spy novels, but I read an essay in The Atlantic and I couldn't help myself. As a result, it broke open the genre for me.
Casino Royale
Notes from the Underground
Persuasion
Vanity Fair
We don't write enough satire these days; Thackeray gives a masterclass. Plus, I learned one of my favorite words in English: gimcrack.
A Little Life
Harold Stein is my hero of fiction — the picture of selflessness and self-scrutiny to which I aspire. I cried puddles into my own chest in a Swiss hotel room reading about his relationship with Jude.
A Jane Austen Education
I've given this book as a gift four or five times. Necessary for any modern man.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
I first encountered this play in Dead Poet's Society, starring Robin Williams. Just as good in ballet form: Mendelssohn + Shakespeare? Fire.
A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell
A one-armed Civil War veteran maps the Colorado River and the unknown southwest territories — almost single-handedly. One of the most important Americans you've never heard of.
A Swim in the Pond in the Rain
Honestly, just a ton of fun. And I learned a few things from America's premier short storyist.
All My Road Before Me
This is the book that made me respect (and therefore actually read) Lewis. His diary covering five years, 1922–1927, showed me his foibles, his sins, his genius.
American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
Jackson, like Jefferson, I find impossible: he kickstarted some of the most brutal and ignominious periods in American History, yet at the same time displayed extreme charity, even fostering a Native American son. A reminder that people are incredibly complicated.
American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
The character of Jefferson is elusive: I find myself struggling with the question "Should I despise or respect the man?" Ellis convincingly shows how Jefferson was a master of eluding understanding...even understanding himself.
Anna Karenina
Introduced me to Konstantin Levin — a man who, as Tolstoy puts it, lived well and thought badly — and helped me recognize the same inversion in myself.
At the Existentialist Café
I decided in my early 20s that I was an Existentialist. And, by God, I decided I needed to learn something about Existentialism if so.
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
I can't help loving Franklin — tradesman, philosopher, inventor, diplomat. Isaacson makes it feel more like a novel than a biography.
East of Eden
I still can't decide — Samuel or Lee? A devastating, multi-generational epic full of characters, and always, finally, about character.
In Defense of Sanity
This is my travel book, an anthology of Chesterton's best essays: witty, moving, delightful. Favorites include On Certain Modern Writers, The Romantic in the Rain, and The Drift from Domesticity.
James Madison: A Biography
A man who was without children becomes the Father of the Constitution. The best part of this book is Madison's preparation for and framing of the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention.
John Adams
The great dark horse of American presidents. His flaw was self-martyrdom — had he been slightly more self-promoting (ahem, Jefferson) he'd be lauded among the gods rather than pilloried in the Lin-Manuel Miranda press.
Lincoln in the Bardo
I read this in a single Denver spring day without stopping. (Takes a few chapters to catch on though!)
Martin Van Buren
A useful intro for understanding the period that kicked off the "long gray line" of Presidents between Jackson and Lincoln, and for understanding how our modern elections came into being.
Matterhorn
One of the five books every Marine second lieutenant should read. A war novel that should be canonized.
Memorabilia
Xenophon was the man-in-the-middle, the Gentleman — neither philosopher nor plebe — and his Socrates is all the more trustworthy for it. Chock full of good anecdotes.
Orthodoxy
Chesterton unlocks Christianity for me — it can only be understood through paradox. Plus, it's a romp of a read.
Sonnets
While in the Marine Corps, I kept 4x6 index cards in my breast pocket with a Shakespeare sonnet. In the inevitable hum-drum of military life, I would linger over these words.
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
A biography that reads like a novel and an intimate portrait of the man. What he displayed most was virtue, paired with shrewdness, disguised under a homespun exterior of folksiness.
The Brothers Karamazov
Read this underway in the Pacific on the 31st MEU, a time when I was at my most depressed. I would retreat to an officers' wardroom, drown out the world with headphones, and dive in. Less an escape, and more a psycho-spiritual reckoning.
The Grapes of Wrath
The Idiot
A moving book that made me contemplate the question: What would I do if I met Christ? If the book is any indication, I would stamp him out, like all of his other contemporaries. For all the great Russian novels I recommend the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations.
The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation's Call to Greatness
Taught me the importance of political parties: the election of 1824 was fraught because there were no parties to check the egos of ambitious men.
Travels with Charley
Inspired my own dog-borne road trip — and convinced me America hasn't changed much in fifty years.
Twelfth Night
Ulysses
It is dense, arcane, verbose, and, at times, as Judge Woolsey points out, the effect on the reader is emetic. The judge could have added soporific to his legal description and been perfectly within his legal bounds. I inadvertently used it as a nightcap on many evenings.
Undaunted Courage
A description of one of the most heroic explorations in American history, traversing a continent...in 1804. Lewis and Clark lost only one man on the trip. A book about leadership and camaraderie and incredible fortitude.
Washington: A Life
The moment that stands out most: Washington at the Battle of Kip's Bay. The Revolutionary War has barely started...and is already looking over. Washington has a rare emotional breakdown and nearly commits battlefield suicide.
War and Peace
The character I find most compelling is Pierre. He goes through such a transformation — or series of transformations — in the book, and I found myself identifying with several of them.