Ten Book Club

A useful reading exercise and recent writing

Ten Book Club

One of the best pieces of advice that I received during graduate school was to read deeply in particular authors: don’t just read for breadth and a layman’s sense of the whole, pick a few people to think at length with.

Brad East had a recent post along these lines about authors whom he had read ten or more books by, including fiction writers. I’m not as convinced by the merits of this exercise on the fiction side, but I haven’t seen the same level of intellectual return there (that is, other than sheer enjoyment).¹

My nonfiction list would include John Calvin, C. S. Lewis, Oliver O’Donovan, “Stanley Hauerwas,” N. T. Wright, and Os Guinness—many of these for school or post-school writing projects (see links). This sort of thing was a lot easier when I could just pull the entire corpus of an author straight to my Senate desk from Library of Congress.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend these particular authors be on your list, nor that ten books is a super practical goal, but reading one or two more books by the same author is exceptionally clarifying (not just Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, but the virtue trilogy and Dependent Rational Animals). That said, I still have no idea what O’Donovan is ever going on about. Perhaps that would require more re-reading—something I ought to do much, much more of.

Recent Writing

• “The Institutional Roots of America’s Political Crisis” (Mere Orthodoxy)

  • “In writing his own ‘big book,’ John Steinbeck claimed that everything he had published before (including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Grapes of Wrath) was merely ‘an exercise, as practice for the one to come.’ Steinbeck wrote that the book—what would eventually become East of Eden—‘must contain all in the world I know and it must have everything in it of which I am capable—all styles, all techniques, all poetry.’ This is what Hunter has delivered in Democracy and Solidarity, weaving his life’s research into a multigenerational tale of America’s coming of age.”

  • You should read the rest of the symposium: Stiven Peter and Brad Littlejohn

• “Don’t Let Appeasement History Repeat in Ukraine” (National Review)

  • “Under the parameters of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Russia made a series of commitments to Ukraine: Russia would respect the sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine, refrain from threatening or using force against Ukraine, refrain from economic coercion, seek U.N. action in the event of aggression against Ukraine, and not use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Thirty years later, Russia has broken all of its promises to Ukraine save one.”

• “EGG Before ESG” (National Review)

  • “It’s true that voters consistently rank the economy as their No. 1 issue. But underneath all the aggregated data, voters care about issues besides their retirement portfolio’s performance. The average voter can put up with a lot, but when he starts struggling to put food on the table, all of these other grievances spill out into the open.”

  • Coverage: “Egg Prices Risk Donald Trump’s Downfall” (Newsweek)

• “Book Review: Brad Littlejohn’s Called to Freedom” (The Gospel Coalition)

  • “As a result of this anemic excuse for liberty, tens of millions of babies have been aborted, with countless other Americans struggling under various forms of spiritual bondage.”

Forthcoming

• Review of Covington, McGraw, Watson’s Hopeful Realism (Providence)

• Review of John Wilsey’s Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer (TGC)

1. I’m certainly not opposed to reading deep in fiction authors. I do it a lot, though my fiction list would be primarily fantasy: J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson (four times over!), J. K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman (yikes!), and Brian Jacques.