The Abolition of Man
C.S. Lewis · Moderate
A sharp argument about education, moral imagination, and trained sentiment.
Reading
Books that told us the truth first
Nine, by kind, with how hard each is to read. No links to a store: find them where you find books.
Culture
Faith
Orthodoxy
G.K. Chesterton · Moderate
Joyful, funny, and stranger than expected from a defense of ancient belief.
Confessions
Augustine · Challenging
Memory, desire, conversion, and the long road from self-protection to truth.
Fiction
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy · Accessible
A brutal story about success, denial, mortality, and seeing clearly before the end.
History
The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · Challenging
A monumental record of repression, courage, complicity, and truth.
Letters
The Habit of Being
Flannery O'Connor · Moderate
Letters full of wit, severity, faith, illness, craft, and a refusal to make truth cute.
Personal Growth
The Road to Character
David Brooks · Accessible
Résumé virtues, eulogy virtues, and the cost of optimizing for the wrong ones.
Philosophy
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl · Accessible
A book that refuses self-pity and somehow leaves gratitude in its place.
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius · Moderate
Private notes on how not to be ruled by your own reactions.