This year, I wrote out monthly updates for what I was reading. You can find the full list at the end of this post. In this post, I shout out the highlights and add my reading for December.
📖 The Inevitability of Tragedy by Barry Gewen
A book worth revisiting perhaps, given that Kissinger died this year. Kissinger was a kind of Satan for many on the left and right. There’s justice in both points of view. In a better world, he would have never made it as far as he did. We don’t live in that world. This book is useful for those who would rather understand than weep. Several chapters almost entirely ignore Kissinger, instead focusing on Hans Morgenthau, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss.
A hilarious line I stumbled across while reading Nixon’s chapter on Zhou Enlai in Leaders:
On his return, he [Kissinger] reported to me that he would rank Zhou equally with de Gaulle as “the most impressive” foreign statesman he had ever met.
Though given to occasional hyperbole, as we all are, Kissinger is seldom that lavish in his praise of people who are out of earshot.
📖 The Dream Hoarders by Richard Reeves
I can’t do better than Charles Haywood’s opening lines in his review:
This isn’t a great book, but it’s a starting point for discussions that are worth having. Richard Reeves gently flogs his own class for their sins, an act he thinks is very daring, though he uses a thin, silken cord and doesn’t put any muscle into it.
The key idea is that the true elite of America is the top 20% of society. Reeves may not know what to do with this insight, but he shines a light on it and for that reason alone, deserves a few claps.
📖 Mukiwa by Peter Godwin
This is the best memoir I know of about life in Rhodesia. His When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is another fine book, even if it didn’t strike me as much. My mother left Rhodesia when she was a teenager. The tragedy of Zimbabwe is too familiar.
📖 A Philosopher Looks at Religion by Zena Hitz
This book captures one religious impulse – the sense that there must be more – well. It then follows it to its wonderful and terrifying conclusion: there’s a transcendent reality worth abandoning ourselves to. I found the account of Takashi Nagai particularly striking.
Nagasaki was the Catholic center of Japan; the faith had been practiced since the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth century and their converts underwent persecutions of overwhelming cruelty. As far as Nagai was concerned, it was the prayers and the suffering of the dead faithful that ended the war. Nagai’s prayer was that the sacrifice would suffice that an atomic weapon would never fall on the earth again.
📚 Thomas Szasz
I read a lot of Szasz earlier this year. Although he writes about mental disorders, his work is fundamentally libertarian. Respect for human freedom and autonomy is the first key theme in his work. The concept of mental illness is used to excuse others for using their liberty poorly (he couldn’t help it) or justify the curtailments of liberty (he isn’t in control of himself). Instead of forcing others to accept what is good for them or letting them off the hook, we must hold them responsible and work through our conflicts. But we don’t want to do that.
People have diverse, mutually incompatible desires—for liberty and equality, adventure and security, autonomy and intimacy.
The second theme is that life is tragic. We are internally and externally conflicted. So many of our stories are just lies to hide those conflicts.
The phenomena we now call “mental illnesses” are complex combinations of tragedy and troublemaking, displayed as diseases or so interpreted by others.
Unfortunately, this truth suggests that Szasz’s morality of autonomy, respect, and responsibility won’t be adopted wholesale by any human society soon. Not only that, it may be too rigid and doctrinaire. Directionally, however, it seems correct. Start with The Untamed Tongue or Words to the Wise.
📖 Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis
A Christian re-reading of the myth Psyche and Eros. I love that myth – one of the few with a happy ending (for Psyche and Eros). Lewis’s version is not how I’d retell the story – or even how I see it – but this is done wonderfully.
It includes both admiration and criticisms of Stoicism. One of the characters is explicitly Stoic.
📖 Learning to Live Naturally by Chris Gill
A scholarly tract on Stoic ethics. Gill correctly argues that Stoic ethics does not depend on other parts of the philosophy, though it may be enhanced by logic and physics. Gill explains and defends Stoic ethics ably in a way that preempts and addresses confusion from other scholars.
📖 Analects by Confucius
The kind of book that one can spend a life puzzling over.
📚 Mario Vargas Llosa
The War of the End of The World was recommended to me by Dana Gioia. It’s probably the best book I read this year. Religion, war, poverty, politics, delusion. Heavy. Sublime historical fiction about The War of Canudos.
📖 The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante
I imagine some other critic has already made this connection, but as I think about the Quartet more it seems to me like:
Michel Houellebecq = men
Elena Ferrante = women
Which is to say that both capture unseemly truths about life for their respective sex in the modern world. Both are too cynical. Perhaps there’s more insight into the dynamics of human relationships in Ferrante and more philosophy in Houellebecq. Stereotype accuracy strikes again.
I actually abandoned The Neapolitan Quartet in book 3, but I’ve thought about it often which is some indication its quality.
📖 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Many people say this is one of the best novels ever written and I can see why. I’ve been leafing through this all December and haven’t finished it.
📚 Ernst Jünger
An intriguing character. If you subtract the nationalism and 20th century German philosophy, you’re left with a powerful thinker. As a historical document, Storm of Steel is amazing. It’s arguably close to a Stoic take on war:
He was scarce up when a shot fired from the sap got him in the skull and laid him dead on the floor of the trench. He was married and had four children. His comrades lay in wait a long while behind the parapet to take vengeance. They sobbed with rage. It is remarkable how little they grasp the war as an objective thing. They seem to regard the Englishman who fired the fatal shot as a personal enemy. I can understand.
His work is detached and visual. Approaches, his memoir, is at once brilliant and tedious. I don’t think I’ve fully digested it.
📖 Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang
Mao was one of the worst rulers of the 20th century, if not in all of history. This book effectively argues for that case.
That's the most important thing about this book, and given that that fact isn't as widely acknowledged as it should be, speaks well of it.
If you're familiar with the regime and want a more objective picture, Mao: The Unknown Story is one piece of the puzzle, but its narrative force sometimes obscures and overlooks important details. Most of the stories appear correct, but the motivation of various characters and the particulars of several events are more contested than come off here. So, in that sense, it's not as objective as one would like.
Nonetheless, it shouldn't be overlooked. In addition to arguing that Mao was vicious, it does the same for CCP figures who get better treatment in the West, who also come across as sociopaths and thugs.
I reread several excellent books: The Great Divorce by CS Lewis, Lectures and Sayings by Musonius Rufus, and Robin Waterfield’s new translation of Epictetus’s Discourses and Handbook.
As always, feel free to share what you read or offer suggestions in the comments. Happy new year.
Junger's war journals are well worth a read.