Note: The following is an excerpt from The Technique of Getting Things Done (1947) by Donald Laird. 

The right reading — often accidental — wakes up slumberers and gives needed goals to those who still have none. The right book or article has started many on the main road and off the detours. 

Enrich Weiss wanted to act in a circus, so this nine-year-old practiced in a shed behind his home in Appleton, Wisconsin until he could hang by his knees from a trapeze and pick needles from the floor with his eyelids. At twelve he ran away from home. 

In a secondhand book store, when he was sixteen, he picked up a book on magic by Robert Houdin that was to change his life. He paid a dime for the book, started to read it after supper. He could not leave it. He thought about magic tricks while cutting neckties, while running in amateur races. He got more secondhand books on magic, worked up a few tricks of his own, and changed his name to Houdini. 

He was a lifelong habitué of secondhand book stores, gathered more than 5,000 volumes on magic and spiritualism which are now in the Library of Congress.

In Abilene, Kansas, a tallish high-school boy from across the tracks wondered what to do when he graduated. He was tired of working in the creamery. He visited the weekly-newspaper office; famed editor J. W. Howe loaned him a book that had just come in. The book told the story of that amazing military leader, Hannibal. Young Dwight Eisenhower was fascinated. It was the turning point in his life. Reading the right book started “Ike” Eisenhower on the way to West Point Military Academy to become Allied Supreme Commander in history’s greatest war. 

Robert E. Peary, a dreamy boy from Cresson, Pennsylvania, was inspired by Elisha Kane’s book Arctic Explorations (a dreary tome, if you ask me). Robert’s dreamy eyes narrowed; he could already see visions of the frozen Northlands. “I will help the world understand the mysteries of those places,” he decided. 

That book gave him a goal. At thirty he made his first voyage of exploration to Greenland. At forty-seven he tried to reach the North Pole and failed. But he still had his goal, born of boyhood reading. 

Heroically, he tried again and six years later did reach the Pole, the first person to capture this goal which men had been trying to reach for four hundred years. Scientific societies and governments the world over honored the boy who had gotten his start from reading, reading that gave him a wrought-iron determination.

Keep a supply of worthwhile books around where children can see them. Select books that cover a variety of subjects. Expose young people to the stimulation of reading. There is no telling where it may lead.

John Masefield ran away to sea at fourteen, was assistant bartender in New York for a while. At eighteen he read Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls. That decided him; he would be a poet. And in fifteen years his poetry had won everlasting fame. He became Poet Laureate. 

A librarian, your boss, a book dealer, a teacher can help you pick the reading that will count.

Often we just stumble across the right reading; that’s why it is wise to read many things. I accidentally stumbled into psychology. I was halfway through college, majoring in chemistry, and an assistant in the physics laboratory. Then one Christmas vacation I started to read a four-volume manual on experimental psychology by E. B. Titchener. At the end of the vacation I knew I was changing my vocation. My chemistry professor was disgusted. But the halfhearted chemistry student became an enthusiastic psychology student. 

Great Lives Remind Us 

Do you have a hero? “Tell me whom you admire,” said Sainte-Beuve, “and I will tell you what you are.” 

The lives of great men have aroused sleeping abilities in thousands of people who were once stumbling along. Reading such lives has given many an irresistible determination to get more things done.

Rudyard Kipling went to Bombay at seventeen wearing real whiskers. In the heat and sickness he toiled on a newspaper, apparently his lifework. Alone in the house one hot evening he picked up a book by Walter Besant, All in a Garden Fair. The book told the story of a young man who wanted to write and who did in spite of great obstacles. 

That selfsame evening Kipling resolved that he, too, would write, whatever the obstacles. He started at last to save money. At twenty-four he returned to England with his savings, settled in a room over a sausage shop, and began the writing that was to make his name world-famous.

F. B. Morse was one of eleven children. He was ten when he read Plutarch’s famous Lives of Illustrious Men [another title for Parallel Lives], those stories of ancient Greek leaders and noble Romans. The book fired the young man; he, too, was going to accomplish something. Within a quarter-century he won recognition as a portrait painter, and a short time later invented the telegraph. 

Plutarch’s Lives started him on the road to the American Hall of Fame. 

Plutarch’s work has given many young men the stimulus to get things done. Napoleon carried a copy of it for twenty years. Oliver Hazard Perry, hero of the War of 1812, read and re-read Plutarch, starting in his youth. So did Robert Brookings, who established the famous Brookings Institute in Washington. 

Benjamin Franklin attributed his zeal for getting things done to reading Essays to Do Good, by Cotton Mather. He was about sixteen, working in his brother’s print shop, when he seriously began to read to improve himself. He says in his autobiography: 

I then proposed to my brother that if he would give me, weekly, half the money he paid for my board, I would board myself. He instantly agreed to it, and I presently found that I could save half what he paid me. This was an additional fund for buying books. 

But I had another advantage in it. My brother and the rest going from the printing-house to their meals, I remained there alone, and, dispatching presently my light repast, had the rest of the time till their return for study.

Loyola was thirty and a common Spanish soldier when he was laid low with a leg wound. While convalescing he read The Lives of the Saints, which inspired him to become a religious worker. He founded the Jesuit order, was consecrated a saint by Pope Gregory XV. 

“Study a great man,” said Louis Pasteur. 

Great men who have done things, who are still doing things, can become our inspiring lifetime friends through their biographies and autobiographies. Get a hero — and get better acquainted with him by reading about him. 

Some rich man who wanted to make the world hum could put more books about people who have done things within reach of the minds of the generation which is yet to do things. 

Everyone can find new friends who count by reading books about people who count. Try reading a biography a month for several months.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

If you’ve been following AoM long enough, you know I like philosophy. I’ve written about philosophy on the site and talked to lots of philosophers on the podcast. 

Philosophy isn’t some esoteric practice for me. It’s practical. I turn to philosophy to figure out how to live a good and meaningful life. 

But it’s also just fun. For me, at least. I enjoy seeing how humans from thousands of years ago tried to get their bearings in the world compared to humans living today. When you read, study, and talk about philosophy, you’re taking part in a conversation that’s been going on for millennia. And conversation is fun. I love a good conversation. 

To take part in any conversation, especially the millennia-long great conversation that’s been going on between philosophers, you need to have a basic understanding of what’s been talked about prior to you joining the chat. It’s no fun to be in a conversation where people make inside jokes or drop references that go over your head. The latter (and, actually, sometimes the former!) happens a lot in philosophy. Philosophers are always referencing other philosophers who came before them.

While you can and should read the primary texts of great philosophical works, many of these primary texts can be confusing and overwhelming. Sometimes it helps to have a guide to break things down for you a bit and help you get a handle on an idea. 

I ran into this issue a few years ago. I was reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics and was having trouble wrapping my head around forms and substance and actualities and whatnot. I read some supplementary books by professors on the topic but didn’t find them particularly clarifying. They were pretty muddled and dense. I was talking to a college professor friend of mine about my wrestle with Aristotle, and he told me he had a book that might help. 

The next time I saw him, he lent me his copy of a textbook called The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy by Norman Melchert. He bookmarked the section about Aristotle’s Metaphysics. 

I read it and immediately saw the light. No joke. 

The way Professor Melchert laid things out allowed me to finally get a better grasp of the relation between forms and substance. I was able to turn back to Metaphysics and read the text with greater understanding. Even those secondary source books I had originally turned to for guidance started to make more sense. 

I gave my friend his book back and immediately bought a copy for myself.

It’s a textbook, so it’s expensive. I paid $80 on Amazon for a used edition. 

But man, totally worth the investment. 

The Great Conversation is the most approachable yet comprehensive book on philosophy I’ve come across. Melchert does a fantastic job summarizing the big ideas in history’s different schools of thinking, but does so without dumbing things down. He also covers pretty much everything, ranging from the pre-Socratics and going all the way up to the postmodernists. And he effectively shows how all of these schools of philosophy built on the previous ones. You’re able to get a birds-eye view of the great conversation of humanity.

I’ve found myself cracking open The Great Conversation again and again over the past few years. For example, I’ve been on a Kierkegaard kick this past year. The Danish philosopher is notoriously difficult to understand sometimes. When I’ve gotten stuck on some parts in The Sickness Unto Death, I go to the section on Kierkegaard in The Great Conversation and get some much-needed clarification. 

Several months ago, a book group I belong to was reading some Heidegger — another notoriously hard-to-understand philosopher. 

“Being is always the Being of an entity.” 

What in the heck does that mean?!

Well, in his chapter about Heidegger, Professor Melchert offers a rough idea that will get you going in the right direction, so you can better grapple with that statement. 

Heck, when I’m bored, I’ll open the book and read a random section. I’ve even taken it to the bathroom to read during my daily constitutional. Pooping and philosophizing. I think Galen would approve.

Having a copy of this book is like having access to a really smart, friendly, non-condescending philosophy professor in your home.

If you enjoy philosophy or would like to know more about it, I can’t recommend The Great Conversation enough. One of the best book investments I’ve made. 

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in May 2022.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s, if my dad wasn’t watching In the Heat of the Night on our wood-paneled television, he was sitting in his recliner with a book in his hand. But not just any book. Popular, mass-market paperbacks. Thick ones, with embossed covers and those pages with that distinct mass-market paperback smell. I love that smell.

Back then, a lot of fathers were reading these paperbacks, which I’ve taken to calling “90s Dad Novels.”

90s Dad Novels were written by a handful of guys who, between them, basically owned the bestseller list for a decade. I’m talking Grisham, Crichton, King, and Clancy. 90s Dad Novels weren’t high-brow literary fiction. Nobody was winning a Pulitzer for these yarns. But their authors were masters at what they did. They knew how to write exciting, engaging, entertaining stories. The 90s Dad Novel was, and remains, the perfect vacation read.

A lot of 90s Dad Novels got turned into blockbuster movies. You’ve probably seen a bunch of them.

I’ve been doing a lot of heavy reading lately and needed a break. So I decided to go back and revisit some of these 90s Dad Novels (I read a few of them when I was in middle school and high school) and also pick up a few I’d never gotten around to. And let me tell you: 90s Dad Novels hold up.

Here’s a list of 10 to check out. Pick up a few for your summer reading. What’s nice about 90s Dad Novels is you can get them cheap at a used bookstore. Mine were $1.50 each.

When you’re done, enjoy watching the generally quite good films these books were turned into, while wearing a polo shirt, pleated khaki shorts, and white New Balance sneakers. (If you happen to own a 1996 Buick Roadmaster like we do, all the better.)

It’s going to be a fun, chill 90s Dad summer.

90s Dad Novels to Check Out

The Firm by John Grisham (1991)

This is the novel that started the Grisham juggernaut. Mitch McDeere is a hungry young Harvard Law grad who gets recruited by a small, mysterious Memphis firm. The money seems too good to be true. And, of course, it is. There’s a reason the firm is so generous with its recruits, and once Mitch figures out what it is, he’s in a race for his life. I was able to knock this page-turner out in a few evenings.

The movie adaptation starring Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, and Jeanne Tripplehorn is also a great flick.

The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy (1984)

Yes, this book was published in 1984, but we’re calling it a 90s Dad Novel because 90s dads were still reading this thing a decade later. This is the book that introduced Jack Ryan, a literary character about whom books and shows are still being made. A Soviet submarine commander named Marko Ramius has gone rogue . . . or so it appears. He’s taken the USSR’s most advanced nuclear sub, the Red October, and is heading toward the American coast. CIA analyst Jack Ryan has 24 hours to convince the brass that Ramius is trying to defect, not attack.

The 1990 Sean Connery film is one of the better book-to-movie adaptations of the era.

Ten-year-old Brett enjoyed the video game version of the movie based on the book, too.

The Green Mile by Stephen King (1996)

In the 80s and 90s, Stephen King pumped out one bestselling 90s Dad Horror Novel after another. The Green Mile was something a bit different. Originally published as six slim paperback installments (King’s experiment in old-school serialized fiction), the novel is set on death row at a Southern prison in 1932. Paul Edgecombe is the block supervisor. John Coffey is the enormous, gentle man who arrives convicted of a crime you’re not sure he committed, and who turns out to have abilities nobody can explain.

The 1999 film adaptation starring Tom Hanks is one of the all-time best film adaptations of a book and spawned a great meme in the 2010s that you can use when you’re really, really tired.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987)

Bonfire of the Vanities is a bit different from the other books on this list. Wolfe was a literary heavyweight, and Bonfire is more highbrow than your typical 90s Dad Novel. But 90s Dads were definitely into it, and it’s incredibly readable and a lot of fun. I love Wolfe’s writing style.

Sherman McCoy is a Wall Street bond trader who considers himself a “Master of the Universe.” He’s pulling down a million bucks a year, lives in a Park Avenue co-op, and has a wife, a daughter, and a mistress. One night, he picks up his mistress at JFK, takes a wrong turn off the expressway, and ends up in the Bronx, where things go very, very wrong for Sherman. What follows is Sherman’s slow-motion unraveling as the incident gets picked up by a washed-up tabloid reporter, an ambitious Bronx DA, and a publicity-hungry reverend, each of whom sees an angle to work.

Wolfe’s satire of 1980s New York — Wall Street greed, tabloid journalism, racial politics, social climbing — is sharp, funny, and surprisingly still relevant in 2026.

The 1990 film adaptation starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, and Melanie Griffith is famously one of the biggest Hollywood flops of the era. But I watched it, and if you go into the movie expecting it to not be as good as the book, I think you can enjoy it.

The Pelican Brief by John Grisham (1992)

Another blockbuster entry in the Grisham canon. Two Supreme Court justices are assassinated on the same night. A Tulane law student named Darby Shaw writes a speculative brief connecting the murders to a Louisiana oil tycoon with friends in high places. She shares it with her professor/boyfriend, who then shares it with the wrong person, and suddenly Darby becomes a target of people in high places. The pacing is fast, fast, fast. A lesson from this book is if you ever get a manila envelope that says “Pelican Brief” on it, throw it away immediately so you don’t die.

When you’re done with the book, check out the 1993 film, starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (1990)

The 90s Dad Novel that launched a multi-billion-dollar franchise. Welcome to Jurassic Park!

A billionaire builds a theme park full of cloned dinosaurs on a Costa Rican island. A chaos theorist, a paleontologist, and a couple of kids are among the first visitors. Things go wrong. Very wrong. Even though you’ve probably seen the movie and know the plot, you gotta read the book. It’s darker and weirder.

The 1993 Spielberg film is a classic. Never gets old. Our kids loved it. It should be added to the list of movies every millennial dad should introduce his kids to.

Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy (1989)

Jack Ryan gets pulled into a covert American military operation against the Colombian drug cartels after the President quietly authorizes a war nobody is supposed to know about. When things go sideways, the soldiers on the ground get abandoned by the politicians who sent them there, and Ryan has to figure out how to bring them home. This was a quick read. I really enjoyed it.

The 1994 Harrison Ford film is entertaining. It also guts about two-thirds of what makes the book interesting.

The Last Heroes by W.E.B. Griffin (1985)

Griffin is the outlier on this list in that he’s not as well-known as the other 90s Dad Novel authors, but he had a devoted following among dads who were into military history.

The first book in Griffin’s Men at War series, The Last Heroes is set during the early days of WWII and the birth of the OSS. A group of wealthy, well-connected Americans is recruited to run covert operations before the government has any real infrastructure for that kind of thing. One of those missions was tied to securing uranium for the top-secret development of the atomic bomb.

If you like this one, you’re in luck! Griffin wrote about a hundred more.

Needful Things by Stephen King (1991)

A mysterious shop opens in Castle Rock, Maine. The proprietor, Leland Gaunt, sells people exactly what they most want, and for extremely cheap. The catch is a small favor — pulling a cruel prank on a neighbor. The pranks escalate. The town tears itself apart.

King called this his farewell to Castle Rock, which he’d been using as a setting since The Dead Zone in 1979. The place goes out with a bang.

Sphere by Michael Crichton (1987)

A team of scientists gets deployed to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to investigate a spacecraft that’s been sitting on the seafloor for 300 years. Inside the spacecraft, they find a perfect golden sphere. Things get weird: the subconscious of each crew member begins to manifest into reality. And we’re not talking the manifesting that the girlies are doing on TikTok.

High-school Brett enjoyed this novel. The 1998 movie adaptation starring Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Capital One spokesman Samuel L. Jackson is fun.

Bonus: My American Journey by Colin Powell (1995)

Not a novel, but this list wouldn’t be complete without it. Colin Powell’s autobiography was the dad gift of 1995. It was the gift dads got because no one knew what to get Dad, and you randomly saw it on Christmas Eve on the front table at Waldenbooks at the mall after visiting KB Toys.

Turns out it’s actually a great book. Powell’s life is a genuinely remarkable American story, and he tells it plainly and without a lot of self-congratulation.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Polar exploration stories have a way of both terrifying and inspiring the soul. The combination of physical discomfort and psychological strain strips life, and leadership, down to its utter essentials: resilience, skill, competence, and determination.

What’s especially striking about these stories is that most of them emerged from a relatively short, concentrated period, from the late 19th century through the early decades of the 20th, when large portions of the Arctic and Antarctic remained unmapped and poorly understood. In that brief golden age of polar exploration, men ventured to the ends of the earth, relying on human muscle and crude equipment, with little margin for error and no real assurance of success.

Ice-locked ships, months of total darkness, failed hypotheses, stubborn leaders, and men pushed far beyond what they thought possible — polar exploration books offer some of the most gripping narratives in the adventure genre, while also serving as indelible case studies in leadership, resilience, and the limits of human endurance. If you’re looking for page-turners that are both bracing and deeply instructive, look no further. Below I highlight the eight best polar exploration books.

Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World by Andrea Pitzer

Andrea Pitzer’s Icebound tells the story of William Barents, a 16th-century Dutch explorer whose Arctic expeditions laid the groundwork for all the journeys that followed. At the time, polar travel was motivated by economics (finding a faster trade route to Asia) and clouded by wildly incorrect theories, including the idea that a warm, open sea might exist near the North Pole. Barents’ third expedition ended with his crew trapped in the ice and forced to overwinter in a driftwood hut while fending off polar bears, scurvy, and starvation. What makes Icebound especially compelling isn’t just the suffering, but the shift it represents: Barents was celebrated not for conquest or profit, but for his endurance and leadership. This book is both a riveting survival tale and a polar adventure origin story.

In the Kingdom of Ice by Hampton Sides

Hampton Sides’ In the Kingdom of Ice recounts the doomed 1879 USS Jeannette expedition, which attempted to reach the North Pole via that theorized warm sea channel. Trapped in the ice for nearly two years before the ship was crushed, the crew was forced into an epic, thousand-mile trek across the Arctic via both land and sea. Sides excels at combining cinematic storytelling with meticulous research, bringing to life not only the expedition’s leader, George Washington De Long, but also the men who followed him and those at home who were waiting on his return. The result is a powerful reminder that courage and determination are not always enough, especially when leadership is guided more by theory and pride than by reality. It’s a gripping, tragic tale that underscores how unforgiving the polar world can be.

Alone on the Ice by David Roberts

Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic expedition should have been remembered as a triumph of scientific exploration. Instead, it became one of the most harrowing solo survival stories ever recorded. In Alone on the Ice, David Roberts recounts how Mawson lost both of his companions during a sledging journey — one who perished instantly into a hidden crevasse (with most of their supplies) and one who slowly succumbed to madness.

What followed was a nearly unimaginable solo trek across Antarctica, as Mawson battled starvation, frostbite, and harrowing ice fields. His survival defies belief. Roberts’ account captures the sheer brutality of the environment and the extraordinary resilience required to survive it, making this one of the most intense and unforgettable polar narratives ever written.

Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton

Trapped in ice, the Belgica expedition of 1897 unexpectedly became the first to spend an entire winter in Antarctica, and Julian Sancton’s Madhouse at the End of the Earth makes clear just how unprepared its crew was for that ordeal. Plunged into months of grinding cold and total darkness, the men suffered severe physical and psychological deterioration. Among the crew were two figures who would become legendary for very different reasons: Roald Amundsen, who thrived amidst the hardship and would go on to conquer both poles, and Frederick Cook, a brilliant man whose later claims of polar conquest would make him a deeply controversial figure. With the expedition’s commander, Adrien de Gerlache, paralyzed by illness and indecision, Amundsen and Cook stepped into the breach and pushed their crewmates to near-impossible feats of endurance. Part survival narrative, part leadership cautionary tale, Madhouse shows how quickly morale and sanity can collapse, and how essential decisive leadership becomes when retreat isn’t an option.

Realm of Ice and Sky by Buddy Levy

Most polar exploration books focus on ships and sledges, but Buddy Levy’s Realm of Ice and Sky captures a brief, daring period when explorers took to the air in their attempts to conquer the North Pole. In the early 20th century, shifting sea ice made surface travel dangerously slow and unreliable, prompting figures like Walter Wellman, Roald Amundsen, and Umberto Nobile to experiment with airplanes and dirigibles instead.

Levy weaves together these semi-connected journeys into a cohesive narrative, chronicling both the promise and peril of aerial exploration in the Arctic. Amundsen, in particular, looms large — his austere competence and Nordic stoicism make him one of the most compelling figures in exploration history. Distinct from most polar narratives yet firmly rooted in the same themes of risk, ingenuity, and endurance, Realm of Ice and Sky shows how even technological advances couldn’t eliminate the dangers of pushing into the world’s most unforgiving environments. It’s worth noting that all of Buddy Levy’s polar histories make for excellent, captivating reads.  

Alone by Richard E. Byrd

Unlike most polar tales that center on the exploration of physical space and involve a multi-man crew, Alone chronicles the exploration of one man’s psyche and soul. In 1934, Admiral Richard Byrd voluntarily spent five months alone at a weather station in Antarctica, becoming the first man in history to experience the polar night in complete solitude. Alone is his riveting account of that experiment — a psychological and physical trial by cold, isolation, and eventually, carbon-monoxide-induced madness.

What makes Alone stand out isn’t just the hardships Byrd endured, but his reflective, often poetic writing. He contemplates the strange beauty of the aurora, the rhythms of solitude, and the battle between discipline and despair. Alone is less a tale of action than of endurance in stillness, and it offers a singular contribution to the polar canon: a portrait of man not just versus nature, but versus himself.

The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Often cited as one of the most harrowing exploration books ever written, The Worst Journey in the World is Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s firsthand account of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica from 1910 to 1913. Cherry-Garrard was part of a smaller team given a nerve-racking task: a midwinter journey to retrieve emperor penguin eggs (in the name of science), undertaken in total darkness, with temperatures plunging far below zero and winds so fierce they made travel barely possible.

The title of this book is no exaggeration — their years on the ice tested the limits of human endurance more than perhaps any other polar trek. Unlike the triumphant survival narrative of the next book on this list, The Worst Journey in the World is marked not just by suffering, but by miscalculation and regret. Unchecked ambition and flawed leadership can exact a cost no matter the environment, but its consequences are magnified tenfold in a place like Antarctica. Written years later with painful clarity, it’s less a celebration of heroism than a meditation on failure, responsibility, and that thin line between bravery and folly. Cherry-Garrard’s book is an essential entry in the polar canon.

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing

If there is a single book that defines the polar exploration genre, it’s Alfred Lansing’s Endurance. Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 Antarctic expedition went catastrophically wrong almost from the start; when his ship became trapped and eventually crushed by ice, its 28-man crew was left stranded at the bottom of the world. What followed was a two-year ordeal of drifting ice floes, open-boat voyages through some of the roughest seas on earth, and an almost unbelievable rescue mission. Most incredible, every man survived.

Lansing tells the story with a restrained, journalistic style that lets the facts speak for themselves, making the courage and sheer resolve of the men — especially Shackleton — all the more striking. More than a survival story, Endurance is a masterclass in leadership under pressure and the gold standard against which all other polar books are measured.

If you read only one book about exploration at the ends of the earth, make it this one.

For more polar-related content, check out these Art of Manliness articles and podcast episodes:

• Podcast #872: Leadership Lessons From a Disastrous Arctic Expedition
• What the Race to the South Pole Can Teach You About How to Achieve Your Goals
• Alone: Lessons on Solitude From an Antarctic Explorer
• What They Left and What They Kept: What an Antarctic Expedition Can Teach You About What’s Truly Valuable
• Podcast #966: Chasing Shackleton — Re-creating the World’s Greatest Journey of Survival

Keep up with all of my book reviews and reading lists by subscribing to my newsletter at readmorebooks.co.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Books are everywhere. They’re so common, they’re easy to take for granted. But my guest argues that they’re worth fully appreciating — because the book isn’t just a container for content; it’s a revolutionary technology for shaping culture and thought.

Joel Miller is a former publishing executive, an editor, a book reviewer, and the author of The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future. Today on the show, Joel argues that to appreciate the power of the book, you have to look at its design: how it’s constructed, how we interact with it, and how its evolution transformed the way we think, learn, and communicate. He walks us through a fascinating history of the book as a physical object, from Augustine reading under a fig tree, to medieval monks introducing word spacing and punctuation, to the printing press’s world-altering explosion of information. We also explore how novels changed our emotional and social intelligence, how silent reading birthed individual interpretation, and why, even in an age of video and AI, books still matter.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM book-related archives
• Dying Breed Article: Why I Hate Making (and Watching) Online Videos
• AoM Article: Why Men Should Read More Fiction
• AoM Article: Fiction for Men as Suggested by Art of Manliness Readers
• AoM Podcast #1,057: The Power of the Notebook — The History and Practice of Thinking on Paper

Connect With Joel Miller

• Miller’s Book Review

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Books are everywhere. They’re so common, they’re easy to take for granted, but my guest argues that they’re worth fully appreciating because the book isn’t just a container for content. It’s a revolutionary technology for shaping culture and thought. Joel Miller’s a former publishing executive and editor, a book reviewer and the author of The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future. 

Today on the show, Joel argues that to appreciate the power of the book, you have to look at its design, how it’s constructed, how we interact with it, and how its evolution transformed the way we think, learn, and communicate. He walks us through a fascinating history of the book as a physical object from Augustine reading under a fig tree to medieval monks, introducing word spacing and punctuation to the printing press’s world, altering the explosion of information. We also explore how novels changed our emotional and social intelligence, how silent reading, birthed individual interpretation, and why even in an age of video and AI books still matter. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/books.

All right, Joel Miller, welcome to the show.

Joel Miller:

Yes, thank you so much for having me.

Brett McKay:

So you got a new book out called The Idea Machine, and this is a book about books, and you argue that books are idea machines, and that to truly appreciate them and think about how amazing they are, you have to understand books as hardware. What do you mean by that?

Joel Miller:

Well, I think we tend to think about books like the content in them. We think about the information in them. So we tend to think about books as software, but in reality, books are both software and hardware. And the reality is that the physical format of the book, the way that you interact with the book, has a very important impact on what we get out of it, what it enables us to do and how it’s used. And you can kind of trace that all the way back to the very earliest days of books all the way until the present.

Brett McKay:

And we’re going to do a history of the development of the book as the format, the hardware that we have now today, because it’s a really interesting history. But what are some of those benefits? What’s the benefit of having this thing that you hold in this rectangle that has pages? What’s the benefit of consuming content in that way?

Joel Miller:

Well, I start the book with the story of Augustine in the garden. There’s this classic story out of the confessions where Augustine is distraught and he walks off to a garden. He’s got a copy of St. Paul’s letters with him and his friend Olympia is also with him and he doesn’t want Olympia to see that he’s crying. He’s just kind of completely wrecked. And he wanders off to another corner of this garden. He sits down under a fig tree and he just begins to weep. And while he is in that state, he hears over the wall of an adjoining villa, the Latin phrase for take and read. And he remembers his copy of his book. So he runs back to the bench where he dropped it off and picks it up and he opens the page at random, opens the book at random, and he lands on a page, lands on a passage that completely upends his life.

It salves his troubled spirit. It solves the kind of quandary that he’s in. And there’s a very interesting detail in that passage of the confessions where he says, after that I put my finger or some other marker in the place to hold what he found. And that’s like a completely throw off line that you wouldn’t necessarily think about until you recognize that the book is also hardware as well as software. Because what that enabled him to do was then go back to that line, it enabled him to share it with Oly, his friend. And you can imagine just the benefit of being able to do that, not just with one book, which of course he did at that moment, but with an entire library to be able to mark the finding within a book enables you to do it across the book, multiple citations within a book.

It enables, in other words, a kind of critical engagement with that text that would otherwise be unavailable to you. It also enables you then to take all of these different marks that you have and compare them with other books, which enables an even deeper level of critical engagement and now a new level of synthesis where you’re able to take ideas from one place and ideas from another place and put them together. And if you couldn’t go back and find them, you’d never be able to do that. So that’s like a really simple example of how the format itself, the function of the book, enables you to do more with it than merely interact with content.

Brett McKay:

And you contrast that to say scrolls. Before we had the codis, we’ll talk about this, the book format that we had today. There was some organization in scrolls, but it was a lot harder. They were just cumbersome and you couldn’t do that sort of marking the way that Augustine did.

Joel Miller:

Correct. Augustine was able to open a book with essentially random access. So with a Codex, that’s the style of book that we have today, which is basically a bunch of pages bound within two covers. And with that format, you’re able to open a book at random. You can’t do that with a scroll if you’re a Gen Xer like me. The nearest comparison would be when you went to Blockbuster and some fool didn’t rewind the VHS and you were stuck having to rewind the thing to go back to the beginning. You just started wherever the thing was left. And that’s how a scroll worked. There wasn’t the ability to sort of navigate the text anywhere near as easily as with a codex.

Brett McKay:

Well, you mentioned video. That’s one reason why I’m not a big fan of even online video. You can’t jump to different parts. I mean, YouTube has done stuff where they kind of add these chapter things, but it’s still hard to get to this one specific thing and this one part of this video. Same thing with podcasts. I mean, I like podcasts more because at least I can do other things while I’m listening, but I feel like video just holds you hostage. But if you’re looking for something specifically, you can’t beat a book.

Joel Miller:

Yeah, a hundred percent. Like podcast apps and YouTube and others, they take these linear formats like that and they are introducing essentially index features or content finding features. Those are necessary. The truth is, you can’t sit through a two hour long video or even a 30 minute video and get what you want and then go back to it easily. And so the need to do that is inherent in the format. If you’re going to consume content, you have to be able to go back and identify parts of that to reassess and to use again. And so those kind of linear formats like video, audio, they limit that. And these developers are going to have to, because the typical consumer is going to want to have ways of overcoming that limitation. The book already has it built into it,

Brett McKay:

So they’re trying to make podcasts and video more like books essentially. So books are the OG best way to organize information. The other thing I like about books too is that, and this is about writing in general. We’ll talk about writing here in a bit, but Socrates has beef with writing. But something I’ve noticed with books and reading and writing is that I feel like it helps you think better when you read something. You’re able to really see someone’s completed thoughts about something in a linear argument and synthesize it, then you can go back to it and analyze it again. I mean, it’s something about the format of the book. Even a physical book. Totally improves my thinking.

Joel Miller:

Yeah. Well, one of the things that I emphasize in The Idea Machine, which is kind of my metaphor for what a book is, and then of course the adjacent things around it, like libraries are also part of the idea machine. But one of the things that an idea machine allows you to do is think new thoughts. And the way that you have the ability to do that is one of the ways is the book makes ideas like objects. You can see them and you can manipulate them, you can play with them, you can move them around, you can analyze them such that you can see the components of an argument when you are reading a book, for instance, and you can write in the margin point #1, point #2, point #3, it enables you to go back to that page and quickly reassess the argument or quickly go back and see how it holds together.

If something is made objective like that, it’s much easier to dissect it, to be critical with it. Whereas if you’re listening to an orator or a speech or whatever, you can’t really do that. It’s very difficult to go back and analyze “How was that? How did he make that argument? Was that a specious argument? Was that totally bogus?” The answer is probably yes. And you have no way of actually going back and doing anything other than using your memory to get the gist of what he said. Whereas with a book, you have quotable objective data that you can look back at.

Brett McKay:

At the beginning of the book, you developed this grid that shows how the format of the book can allow its content or the software to not only persist over time, but how its meaning can change over time as well. So how are books kind of like these weird time machines?

Joel Miller:

Yeah. Well, I talk about basically a three dimensional grid. Imagine you have an X axis, which is the expression of an idea. The Y axis going up is the specificity of that idea, the clarity of that idea. And then the Z axis is time itself. And time goes as far as it can run. And because the format of the book freezes content in a place in a time, you are actually able, we do it all the time without thinking what a wonder this is, we’re able to access the thoughts of people like Augustine or Paul or Socrates or whoever, as those ideas were formulated originally. And we’re able to go interact with those ideas. And sometimes those ideas are super clear to us. Other times they’re not. We are able to impose new interpretive criteria on those messages. We’re able to use those messages in ways the original people had no intent. They never would’ve imagined the way we’ve gone off and used them. But those are all capabilities of the book because of the particular form that it takes.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, this past year I’ve been rereading books that I read in high school, like the Great Books. So I reread Moby Dick, I reread Ralph Ellison’s, Invisible Man. I reread Catch 22. And it was interesting to see how the meaning of those books changed compared to when I initially read them when I was in high school, because the thing is that you have more experience, you learn more. I have more of an education for Ralph Ellison’s, Invisible Man. He was making all these references to Marxism and Hagel, some of the sociopolitical stuff that’s going on in the 1950s, 1940s in America. And when I was in 12th grade, when I read that, that went completely over my head. But then when I read it again as a 42-year-old man, I was like, oh, okay, I can see what he’s doing here. This is an interesting kind of critique of what was going on there.

Joel Miller:

Yeah, I think that’s one of the great things about revisiting books is the book says exactly the same thing as it did when it was first published. However, we’re not the same people from one reading to the next. And so we bring different things to it every time we open it.

Brett McKay:

So before we could have books, we needed to have writing. But you highlight the fact, and I’m sure a lot of people know this, the most famous philosopher in the west had a beef with writing. Why didn’t Socrates like writing or reading?

Joel Miller:

This is actually such a funny story. Yeah, Socrates kind of hated, well, lemme say it differently. Socrates is his most popular voice. The person that gave him his voice, Plato, who wrote the dialogues, he has Socrates make this very robust case against books. And Socrates thought that it degraded memory. It’s kind of a complicated case because the way he tells it is through a myth. But essentially this Greek God comes to this Egyptian Pharaoh, and he says, “Hey, I’ve invented this amazing thing called reading. It’s going to be great.” And the pharoah is like, wait a minute, unpack this for me because all I see are downsides. And he starts reciting all these downsides and they include things like reading will give people the appearance of knowing stuff when in reality they don’t really know anything. They can just pair it what they’ve read. And we know people like that. If you spend any time on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it, we run into those people all day long, folks that claim to know things that know nothing.

And that was kind of like the beginning part of what he was saying. But what’s interesting is everybody has read him. Everybody has read Socrates ever since then as being critical of writing. And there are other aspects to it. For instance, he says like a book can only say what it says. Therefore, if you have an objection, the book can never deal with the objection. A book can be read by anybody. So a book that’s meant for one audience can be read by any other audience, and therefore it can fall into the wrong hands. So he levels all these objections to it. And I think as a result of this persuasive case that he makes, a lot of people have walked away with the assumption that Socrates was against writing and against books. And on its surface, I think that’s true. But Plato’s very dialogues and then Xenophon, another disciple of Socrates, his memorabilia clearly show him interacting with books in a way that violates his own objections. So I call him a hypocrite out of a little bit of fun and recommend that we don’t follow what he teaches, but instead follow what he did.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean, I think I see what he’s getting at for Socrates or the way that Plato presents him to know something. It was all about knowing the forms, and that’s how you knew what the right thing to do was. I imagine Socrates would think, well, if you sort of outsource that knowledge to an external book, you really can’t say the forms, and therefore you can’t make wise good decisions. So you don’t want, I can get where he is going from, but it’s not very useful to try to memorize everything that you come across.

Joel Miller:

Well, there was this concept that everything that could be even taught in education, anything that an educated person would ever know, they already know that they have access to that through essentially the divine, and it needs to be awakened within them. And then they would simply know the things that they needed to know. There wasn’t a sense that education was informing people. Education was more about forming people who could then have access to these truths, to the verities. And I don’t think there’s any objective way of demonstrating that that’s remotely true, but books violate that model of the world and Socrates theoretically held to that model of the world.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, Socrates, he does read, I mean, there’s a dialogue where he says, I got to go back to this book to look up a reference. So he must’ve been reading. And then even Plato in the Republic, he makes this kind of a critique against poetry. I mean, how it can corrupt the mind. But Plato himself, he’s a fantastic writer. I mean, his writing is not only philosophically dense and thorough, but it’s beautiful. I mean, it’s really nice to read. So clearly he values the written word.

Joel Miller:

Well, there’s a great funny example. This again kind of goes to the hypocrisy point. There is a story told about Plato that after he died, his writing tablet, which would’ve been a wooden board that had a recess on the top and wax would’ve been poured into that, so you could incise letters with a stylus. This was before paper. So this is kind of what people used to use in the old days to jot down ideas or rework ideas. So this is kind of like where your first draft would’ve been kept. And when he died, people went back and looked at his tablet and it showed the first line of the republic written out in multiple ways. He was sitting there editing the text in order to get the right phrase, to get the right formulation of it, which shows how dependent he was on the technology of writing and the technique of writing the technology of the writing tablet in order to convey his own ideas.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so writing, even though some ancient philosophers had a beef against it, they knew that writing had its benefits, reading had its benefits. You pick up this section about writing and you shift over to the Romans. The Romans relied on slaves to dictate the writing and copy books out and even read books out loud to them. And you really highlight the fact that the Romans really started to use reading and writing as a form of thinking.

Joel Miller:

I think you get this actually in that story of Plato also where you see him editing the text. One of the arguments I make in the book is that writing leads to editing and editing is evidence of thinking you cannot critique your own work without having engaged cognitively and critically with it. And you see that actually in that example of Plato, he is re-engaging his own text. But the same thing is true for now in a refined sense in the Roman context because you have examples of Virgil talking about, or rather pious, his biographer talking about how Virgil worked. And the way Virgil worked on his Geox or the Inid was to basically dictate all morning and then ju and edit all afternoon until he had what he wanted to keep from the morning’s work all solidified. So he dictates, and his scribe is busy keeping track of all these notes writing, and then in the afternoon he goes back and he cleans it up until he has a draft that he likes.

And then on top of that, whenever he has new ideas pop in like, oh, I need to remember this, or I need to remember that, or whatever, he basically works with an outline. He goes ahead and he jots down these ideas in rough shape. He calls them wooden pillars that are placed in a building while we’re awaiting the marble pillars to come the final product. This is like a prop for his own thinking, in other words. And so there’s this clear sense in the way Virgil worked that he is using writing as a prop to his own thinking as a support to his own thinking. And he structures even the work itself to facilitate that. And then in Quintillions instructions on oration, he talks about the same basic thing and including the idea that whatever we first write out in our first draft, we like it.

We love it. It’s our first go at it, we feel great about it. It’s probably bad. You got to go back and edit it. You got to go back and clean up the flow. You got to go back and tidy up these phrases. You got to go back and kill your darlings. He said almost the very same thing that Arthur Quiller Cooch said 2000 years later, Quintilian said it way back when because what he recognized is is that the writing process itself and then especially the editorial process, is part of formulating the ideas. And so the actual page, or in their case, the actual tablet on which they’re writing is a reflection of the thought process itself. In fact, it is part of the thought process itself. So when we write today on a word processor or a notebook or whatever, we’re doing the same thing. We’re literally thinking on the screen, thinking on the page, the device, whether it’s a notebook or a tablet or whatever, it’s an externalized part of our own brain at that point. It is a part of our own mind. We’re using it to scaffold our own creative processes.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve noticed that with my own writing. If I can’t write it clearly and succinctly and where it makes sense, I realized I don’t even know what I’m trying to say.

Joel Miller:

Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay:

I mean, I had this problem, there was an article I was working on a couple weeks ago and I thought it sounded good. Technically it was good, but I wasn’t hitting the idea. And my wife, I was getting some feedback from her and she’s like, what are you trying to say? And I’d be like, I don’t know.

Joel Miller:

Totally.

Brett McKay:

I don’t know. So I had to just dump it and I had like, I got to think about this some more because I couldn’t articulate what I was trying to say. I didn’t know what I wanted to say. So you can think you have a good idea when it’s all amorphous in your head, but if you can’t write it out, you really don’t know what you think.

Joel Miller:

That goes back to that idea grid that we talked about earlier. The X axis represents that expression, and the Y axis represents specificity or clarity of thought, and what you have there is the ability to express a lot. So you’re high on that x axis, but you’re low on the Y, like the clarity isn’t there, and we experience that all the time, and it’s like writing enables us to move it up into that other quadrant, that far quadrant where it’s both fully expressed and also very clear.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So when did the book appear, as we note today? So pages that are sandwiched together, bound together, when did that come onto the scene?

Joel Miller:

It’s kind of a first century Roman invention. You could find it going back like pre-advent of Christ kind of time, but it would’ve been very new at that point, and it wasn’t used the way we think of it, it was kind of like a notebook, basically tradespeople use them to just jot down notes. These would’ve been usually on parchment or possibly papyrus, and they basically would’ve just taken sheets of papyrus or sheets of parchment and folded ’em together and stitched them down the back, and that was what a codex was in those days. The use of that was primarily for work a day purposes, keeping notes on business or maybe rough drafting something or jotting down the draft of a contract or something like that, keeping tallies if you’re a merchant and so on. Those were the workaday purposes to which the codex was put.

It was not a literary format. The first rule reference to it as a literary format comes from the Roman poet Marshall who talked about this amazing innovation that you could basically, instead of having a big bulky scroll, because Codex could be, COEs, could be a slightly more compact, you could end up with, in his case, he was bragging about some of his own work, but he talked about other people’s work also that you could find in a codex and it would be smaller, you could carry it around. He talked about someone being able to carry him in one hand and being able to thumb through his work everywhere, but that didn’t really take off. I guess he mentioned that in some very public poems that were designed as kind of gift suggestions for Saturnalia. And it was like, if you think about it as an early marketing effort, like a lot of book marketing, it didn’t work.

Nobody took his advice but didn’t take off. The group that actually did embrace the codex weirdly enough, were Christians. And so first century Christians began using the codex the same way everyone else did, but they began using it for other things too, including recording their scripture. And that was a novelty. No one else did that. And that eventually took off. And as Christians became a larger and larger percentage of the population in the Roman Empire and then beyond, they kept that format and kept using it. They never went back and sort of adopted the older version, and as a result, the codex took off wherever Christians went.

Brett McKay:

Why do you think Christians glommed on to the Codex?

Joel Miller:

There is so much speculation on this and there’s no real solid answers, but here are a couple sketchy ones that I think are generally agreed upon. One was that a codex allowed you to gather together different texts and present them in a way that you could have all of it in one bundle. So ancient codices have, for instance, you may have a letter of Paul and a letter of James and a poem and a Psalm, and somebody may have all that stitched into one codex. That would be odd in a scroll. The way that would work in a scroll would be a little strange. And so that just didn’t happen that way, but it did happen with codices. The other thing that was interesting is that if you wanted to collect all of a thing like all of Paul in one document, that would’ve been a codex.

That would’ve been kind of like the preferred way to do that. If you took all of Paul’s letters and put them into one scroll, it would be a massive, massive, massive scroll. But you could do it all in a codex by basically taking many of these individual codices, these choirs they were called, stacking them up on top of each other and binding them together. So the end result is what we think of as a book with a book spine with a big thick spine. You can’t do that in a scroll, but you can do it with a codex. And so as Christians in their bookish ness begin to collect these letters of their early founding voices, that’s how they found the best and most efficient way to do it. That’s one particular kind of argument for it. Another argument for it is that the Christians were using kind of the technology of the codex to capture extracts out of the Jewish scriptures that kind of tended to confirm their claims about Christ.

These were called testimonial, and Paul actually might be speaking to one of these when he tells Timothy in one of his letters to bring his cloak and a few other things when he comes, I think, what is it to Troas, and he says, bring the books, especially the notebooks or the Latin. There is Menani, which is a parchment notebook, and so that could have been his collection of his own letters. When he sent a letter out, he probably kept the original and that was copied down in his notebook when he had his own insights and his own arguments and his own interaction with the Jewish scripture. He was probably writing that down in a notebook so he could refer to it later. That would’ve been the kind of thing he was asking Timothy to collect for him. And so Christians just tended to glom onto it and hold onto it. And the end result was a lot of Christian documents ended up in Codices almost to the complete exclusion of scrolls. It’s just not very many scrolls of Christians from that time. It’s almost all codices. And as Christians spread, that preference just took off. There are maybe other reasons, but those are the primary ones.

Brett McKay:

Maybe there’s another speculation of mine, but I wonder if it was also because the early Christians, they were outsiders in Roman culture, so maybe they were scrolls, oh, that’s for rich guys. That’s what the elites use. Were not that, so we’re going to use these kind of humble workaday notebooks to take care of our writing.

Joel Miller:

That’s an interesting speculation, and I think a good one because it actually parallels another one like that, which is why monks became copyists. So if slaves were the infrastructure of the book trade, as Rex Wesbury said, the reason for that is that copying manuscripts was laborious, difficult, mostly unappreciated work. And Christian monks adopted it in part because of its aesthetical value. It was a way of mortifying the flesh to copy manuscripts. And so they took that up with relative gusto. And as the sort of Roman model began to disintegrate, the Christian model began to emerge. Monks became the new infrastructure of the trade, but they did it because they were rejecting the assumptions around that work that the Romans had.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean, if you were in first grade and he had to copy stuff out for punishment in school, the monks did that on purpose. They were like, that’s how they wore their hair shirt.

Joel Miller:

It was just like fasting long bouts of prayer, like keeping vigil. I mean, it’s just like that. 

Brett McKay:

But you talk about how monks, these early Christian monks, how they changed reading and writing with the help of the book the Codex. How did Christian monks change reading and writing so that it looks more like what we do today?

Joel Miller:

Well, this is one of those examples that, again, unless you’re looking at how it worked in the ancient world, you would never even assume it was anything other than this. But monks did something as simple as put spaces between words. In the Greco-Roman method of producing literature, of producing text, they did not put spaces between words, and they didn’t really need to because students were trained to read by basically memorizing syllable combinations, and then they would pick out the words from this river of letters or this monolith of characters as a couple of scholars have called it. And so if you go back and you look at very ancient copies of Greek manuscripts, they don’t have punctuation, they don’t have spaces between words. They don’t have any of that stuff. Those were all innovations by Christian monks.

Brett McKay:

And they also introduced because they put in these spaces and commas and punctuation, they also introduced silent reading. Yeah, tell us about that.

Joel Miller:

So this is kind of contested, but in the ancient world, it was more common for people to read aloud, and that has to do with that script continua text. In other words, all those words just jammed together all the letters in a constant stream with no breaks. The way you did that was you picked out the syllables, and the way you did that was you at least mouth them, if not verbalize them. And so you can find various indications of this in books like Cyril of Alexandria, he has to direct, or it might’ve been Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyril of Jerusalem directs the women in his congregation in this catechetical setting to read while moving their lips, but without letting other people hear your voice. So here’s direct evidence that people were reading aloud. That’s just kind of how they did it. And in the confessions, Augustine talks about seeing Bishop Ambrose reading quietly to himself without doing that, and that was an oddity, which warranted being mentioned, like this guy didn’t even need to mouth these syllables in order to read. It was kind of like a freak of nature sort of thing. So people could read silently, but the tendency was to read aloud because the format itself encouraged you to read aloud.

Brett McKay:

And I think that change from reading aloud to silent or inner reading, that opened up some new possibilities with how you approach the text. I think.

Joel Miller:

Oh, absolutely. First off, it enabled private reading on a level that really wasn’t accessible before. And I think this is a highly underrated aspect of our understanding of how books transformed us as people, but we mostly read in private now, either we listen to audio books which are contained within earbuds in our own, just our own headspace or a book in front of our eyes. We rarely read aloud anymore unless it’s to children or something like that. And so our consumption of texts is almost entirely individualistic. In those days, it was not. The way that you heard a book when it was first published or thereafter, was mostly to go listen to the writer, read it aloud at a public presentation. You didn’t just go to the store and buy a copy. They didn’t have copies. You went to a store perhaps to have a copy made for you, but that was expensive. And so people went to what were called CIOs to have a book read that you would listen to. That was how it was published in those days. But as these technologies of presenting text enabled the text to be more easily discernible, spaces between words, standardized, punctuation, that kind of thing, it enabled people to read more easily on their own. And when that could happen, then you could have private reading. And private reading really frankly changes the landscape of the world.

Brett McKay:

How does private reading change the landscape of the world?

Joel Miller:

Suddenly you can have your own opinions about what you’re reading. You can challenge things. You can read things on the slide that you’re not supposed to be reading. You can have interpretations of those things that are not acceptable. You can wrestle with received expectations on how to interpret something by holding your own interpretation. And what that does fundamentally is it ultimately tends to erode community interpretations and help elevate individual interpretations where that matters on big scale stuff would be like religions, but it also matters in small scale stuff. Imagine you are reading, for instance, a book I talk about a dedicated chapter, not exactly to Uncle Toms Cabin, but it’s a primary example within this chapter, reading about the horrors of slavery. You’re reading that on your own. You could read that anywhere. You could read that in the north where abolitionist attitudes were already rife or you could read it in the south where they were not. And there were literal laws passed against reading that book as a result because they were worried that people would come to alternative interpretations of how society should be structured.

Brett McKay:

Well, going back to this idea of how individual reading can cause big changes, you mentioned religion. We see this in the Renaissance after the printing press, like the printing press skyrocketed, the number of books available during the Renaissance. Can you give us some numbers so we can really see how rapidly the book proliferated during this time?

Joel Miller:

Yeah, this is nuts, but if you look at, say the ninth Centuries between the sixth and the 15th centuries, European scribes produced about 11 million books, 11 million individual copies. This is based on the best analysis of the available data, but about 11 million copies in just the 148 years between 1452 with the invention of the printing press and 1600 printers produced about 212 million individual units. So that is basically an 1800% increase. It’s unbelievable. And that was just getting started. That’s just 148 years. Those numbers go into the beyond that they go into the billions eventually.

Brett McKay:

And as you said, people were reading these books on their own. So a lot of those books that were printed were Bibles, and so people were reading the Bible on their own and figuring out what does this mean to me? And then that gave rise to the Reformation and all these different Protestant break offs. And then, I mean, people argued the printing press is actually what caused all that war fair that happened during the, it was very violent, and then they attributed to the printing press.

Joel Miller:

Yeah, there’s the arguments that say that that was an instrumental part of it. There’s the arguments that say that’s way overstated and all of that stuff is all interesting, and it’s very difficult to suss out the ultimate story. Of course, history is mostly an argument we just talk about in retrospect. We don’t actually know a lot of stuff for certain, but I do think one thing is very clear, and that is the reformation could not have happened without the printing press. There would’ve been no way, for instance, for Martin Luther to do what he did, which was swamp all of Europe in text presenting his particular view. Other people held views that were similar before, and they had nowhere near the impact. They had zero impact. Luther blew up Christendom, and that was in part because of the printing press.

Brett McKay:

So the number of new books started posing a problem for people. It was organizing and finding information. They were having a problem with information to overload thousands way back, way back when. Today we think of, this is really interesting. I thought this is really interesting. Today we think of organizing books. The way you do is you put it on a shelf with the spine facing out, so you can read the title and then you can organize those based on subject or however else you want to organize them. But that’s not how people kept their books during the Renaissance. How did people store their books and how did that make finding information a big chore?

Joel Miller:

I think it’s Duncan Watts as a writer who has a book called Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer. But this is one of those examples. We all have bookcases, we all have books sitting on our bookcases. They all mostly sit upright with their spines facing out and a lot of words on the spine. So it is like, of course, that’s how you organize books, right? It seems so obvious. Well, that’s not how they did it in the old days. They didn’t have words on the spine, or if they did, they might not have even been things as simple as a title. They regularly kept them inside of chests. So imagine just a big box full of books. They might be kept in a wall niche in a window or something like that if you just had a dozen or so books and monastic libraries are a great example of this.

They tended to be small. Even big ones may have only several hundred books in them. The biggest might’ve had a thousand. There’s a few that had even more than that, but we’re not talking about massive tons of books. However, they were all kept in boxes or maybe with some sitting out on top of the box or some sitting on a table often chained to that table so that they wouldn’t wander off. Book theft was a real thing. And so the end result was finding books was a chore. You had to kind of know what was in that box, and the only way to do that was to lift up the lid and go digging through it to see what was in it.

Brett McKay:

When did they start figuring out like, oh, hey, we don’t have to stack books in boxes or keep them in trunks. We can put them on shells and organize them by subject. When did that start happening?

Joel Miller:

Well, that was really a product of the Renaissance, and that was the late Renaissance or the early modern era. Hernando Colon, who was Christopher Columbus’s bastard son, was one of the very first to do this. He realized that books could be much more efficiently stored on open air shelves standing upright. Even the idea that we think of the book as upright that way tells you how we’re now so wired to thinking, but standing upright. And then he basically created collections of indices, like a massive catalog and indices that enabled him to find anything in his library. And he was trying at his time to develop the biggest library in the world. Basically, that was his mission, was to create a library of everything ever printed, including things that nobody thought were valuable at the time, all this print ephemera, posters and things like that. He had all that too.

And he created essentially an internet browser out of a paper that had this massive printed catalog of everything in his library where you could go into that library catalog and you could find the entry that you were looking for and then go find it on the shelf. But more than that, he also then digested a lot of what were in those books in this catalog setup that he had, so that you could, without even having to go pull the book off the shelf, you could decide if you needed it or not. So he was basically coming up with a way of digesting texts so that it could be searchable in essentially like a proto Google, an analog Google. And it’s a pretty phenomenal feat that he accomplished, but it’s like he was one of the first to ever think to even do that.

Brett McKay:

And then I imagine other people thought, oh, that’s a good idea. I’ll try that too.

Joel Miller:

Yes, exactly. Every age, if you look at the production of books going all the way back to the ancient Near East when books were really first invented and they were written on clay tablets, every society that has ever had to deal with information has had to come up with ways of doing what I’m just describing. But in the age of print, when instead of having thousands of tablets, for instance, now you have tens of thousands of books that are all far more information dense than those clay tablets could be. The work has suddenly become infinitely harder. And so what colon invented and innovated on at that time, and then others around him and after him enabled a much more immediate access to those ideas.

Brett McKay:

So we’ve been talking about books as a hardware, right? Its format allows you to do things with ideas that you couldn’t do if it were in another format, but they also have a software that’s the form of the content of the book. And starting in the 18th century and really picking up speed in the 19th century, a new type of book software started showing up, and that’s the novel. Why did it take so long for the novel to develop after the Codex was invented?

Joel Miller:

That’s a great question. I mean, there are examples of proto novels that go back much further. You can find things that kind of qualify as novels in ancient Roman literature, there’s Christian Hagiographies where they’re writing about saints and the saint’s lives, and there’s full of imaginative, almost fantasy like elements within those. All of that though, kind of is pushing towards the modern novel. And Don Quixote is kind of the first example of that. Miguel Cervantes’s massive novel in which he warns about novels, which is hilarious. He gives us this massive novel to warn us about the dangers of novels. But that was kind of like the first, but as a cultural thing, I think it required mass literacy in order for that to take off. Because for a novel to really work, it can’t just be that the upper 20% of a society has access to it and they can read it.

It has to be where you’ve got a lot of people with some expendable time, like either in between jobs or waiting for this or waiting for that or whatever, where they’re able to take this portable thing, pull it out of their pocket and start reading it. And it wasn’t really until the 18th century, the 19th century where that was possible. And then on top of that, you really needed what happened in the 19th century, which was industrialized printing, because what that did was as incredible as the original printing press. And that original revolution was, it was really industrial printing that created the scale that we think of today as the ubiquity of books. Because before that, every book that was printed was printed one sheet at a time, and that one sheet might have eight pages on it, but still we’re talking about somebody manually feeding a sheet into a printing press and the machine having to come down and press it onto the paper and so on. By the 19th century, steam power had been invented and they figured out how to basically create rotary presses that could take paper off of a roll, so not sheets any longer, take it off a roll, feed it through a rotary press, and within an hour they could produce what had formally taken two weeks to produce. So that created a massive ubiquity of books, which then drove the price down, and that suddenly meant that middle class and even poor people could afford to pick up a novel and be entertained by it.

Brett McKay:

That’s interesting. So some, and I think often men think of fiction reading or novel reading as just entertaining fluff, but you make the case that the novel is a powerful tool for individual and societal change. So what does reading fiction do to us?

Joel Miller:

Man, reading fiction does so many things for us. Let me just, this is kind of a personal perspective, personal story here, but I grew up reading a little fiction. I’ve always read a little fiction over the course of my whole life, but as a young man, I mostly read nonfiction. I wanted serious stuff. I wanted to read economics and politics and history. And I mean, that’s literally all that in theology. That was all I ever read except for the occasional novel that would come across my path that interested me. For whatever reason, now that I’m almost 50, I almost only read novels. And I think what I’m getting ready to describe is available to anybody at any age, but we don’t quite appreciate it usually when we’re younger, at least I think at least I didn’t. So maybe the world’s blame on this one rests on my shoulders.

But the way to think about it is this. When you pick up a book and you’re reading about a character, whether that’s in a first person narrative or it’s a third person narrative, we impose our own cognitive faculties on this character. We loan our own emotions to the character we loan, our goal setting ability to the character we loan, our problem solving ability to the character in ways that other kinds of literature don’t allow us to do or don’t invite us to do. So when a character is stuck, we are busy problem solving with them. We’re like, well, you should really do X. You should really do Y. And then that happens, and then we feel either grief or joy at how it happened or whatever. That emotive connection is also powerful all by itself because it is formative. It is the kind of thing that actually shapes our own emotional intelligence. So as we’re reading fiction, we are learning about the world in a way, and other people, more importantly in a way that we couldn’t, outside of books that were so directly related to that kind of experience.

Brett McKay:

A while back ago, I wrote an article for the site Why Men Should Read More Fiction, because I was like, when I read, it was like I was going to read nonfiction history books, whatever. But yeah, I mean, studies show that reading fiction increases your theory of mind, which is this cognitive ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of other people. Basically, you need theory of mind to socialize, right?

Joel Miller:

Totally. You’ve got to guess what so-and-so thinks, and then you’re going to guess what they think based on what this other person might or might not think.

Brett McKay:

Right? And reading fiction allows you to do that. Seeing theory of mind and action. You’re seeing the thoughts of all these different characters, and you got to keep ’em in place. I mean, as you said, it makes you more empathetic. The character’s emotions become your emotions and your emotions become the character emotions.

Joel Miller:

Exactly.

Brett McKay:

And you were talking about that’s why Uncle Tom’s Cabin was so powerful, because it really affected people. And I mean, even Abraham Lincoln when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe is like, oh, so here’s the little lady that started this war that we’re fighting because everyone read Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Joel Miller:

Yeah, absolutely.

Brett McKay:

Let’s say there’s some guys out there who are listening, they want to start reading more fiction. Are there three novels you’d recommend they start with?

Joel Miller:

Oh man, they’re so freaking many great novels for men that don’t regularly read, I would have them read something like Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men.

Brett McKay:

Oh, yeah, that’s a great one.

Joel Miller:

That would be such a great book to start with. Kurt Vonnegut is a blast. I can’t imagine a better starting place than Slaughterhouse-Five. That’s a funny, very satirical snide, but very wise, fascinating book. That’s a great one. And then personally, one that I’d love, it’s a little bit more speculative in the way that it’s written, but it’s a beautiful, wonderful book by the Russian novelist, Eugene Onegin. Don’t let Russian novelist be a phrase that scares you away. It’s very contemporary and it’s translated very ablely by the wonderful Lisa Hayden, but it’s called The Aviator, and it’s a book about a guy who is frozen during the Russian revolution and some cryogenic experiment and wakes up in the modern era and has to kind of understand what happened to him. And it’s really great.

Brett McKay:

I haven’t heard of The Aviator. That sounds awesome. So what do you think the state of reading is today? So we’ve talked about the book, how it’s this amazing thing, it’s this idea machine. We have the book to think for the spread of religion, the rise of the scientific method, the rise of different institutions, governments, democratic governments, constitutional governments. What’s reading look like right now? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about it?

Joel Miller:

I’m both. One of the reasons I wrote the book, I just wanted people to appreciate the book. I wanted people to appreciate this amazing technology, especially as we are so technologically fixated these days. I say at the very beginning of The Idea Machine that books basically suffer from their ubiquity. They’re everywhere, and most things don’t like ubiquity. And all of that doesn’t really breed contempt so much as neglect, familiarity. We just tend to ignore it. And yet this has been demonstrably instrumental in making our modern world. We wouldn’t live in the world we live in today without the book, without the invention of the book. And so I wanted people to be inspired by that history, which is part of the reason I wrote the book. But in terms of what I actually think on a day-to-day basis, I kind of ping pong between discouragement and encouragement.

On the discouraging side, fewer people today seem to be reading than they have in the past. Now on a historical scale, we’re still reading it much, much higher than they were in the Middle Ages say. So these things are all relative, but those numbers that you see on how much people engage in books these days, there’s studies published every couple years, every several months, you can find this or that study. And none of them have encouraging news hardly ever however I say that. And yet at the same time, I also go to a platform substack where I keep my newsletter, millersbookreview.com, and there are loads of people celebrating classical literature there. There’s loads of people talking about what they’re reading. It is phenomenal, and that’s very substantive in its depth and breadth in terms of the quality of the discussion there. At the same time, there’s places like TikTok where I don’t think the discussion is anywhere near as robust, but it’s very plentiful. Like BookTok is a thing where there’s scads of people talking about this or that romantic author that they’re reading or whatever. I don’t want to denigrate any of that. People reading should just be reading and enjoy what they’re reading. So whatever you want to read, rock on, do it. But I see those kind of anecdotal examples and I think, ah, maybe there’s a lot to actually still be enthusiastic about. So I kind of vacillate between the two.

Brett McKay:

I’ve heard people say that books, at least nonfiction books are going to become outmoded in the age of LLMs like chat GPT, because instead of having to read through a whole book to find the information answers you want, you can essentially generate a text entirely tailored to your interest in questions from the LLM. So what role do you think books will play in a world with large language models?

Joel Miller:

I end the book with Sam Bankman-Fried the disgraced founder of that massive cryptocurrency exchange. He very prominently said near his downfall, in fact, very closely to that, that if you wrote a book, you effed up. He had no appreciation for a book. He literally said, I don’t say that no book has any value, but I almost say that that’s almost a direct quote from him. And I think what he’s missing, what he missed, he became like a reverse poster boy for the benefit of a humanities degree, basically, is that there is some deep soul and mind formation that happens when we read. That does not happen when we simply glean extracts from say, an LLM report any more than from the headlines pulled out of a Google search. You have to go deeper and you have to engage at a more robust level in order to be shaped by the content that you’re reading. And that requires books like you can’t get that from an LLM. You can get great stuff out of an LLM. And let me just say right out, I think large language models are astonishing. They are, in fact, in my mind, they’re an extension of what the book has done for us. They’re a part of that whole trend. But the way people use them is often to misuse them and to miss the benefit that a book would provide in comparison.

Brett McKay:

What’s great about books is that you serendipitously discover things you didn’t know you wanted to know. You don’t know the questions to ask without the wider ranging knowledge you get in a book. But I do think LLMs can actually enhance your reading. How are you using large language models in your own reading and writing so that they enhance rather than replace your thinking?

Joel Miller:

Well, for a lot of business work that doesn’t actually require the level of creative thinking that personal writing projects do. For me, I use LLMs to draft early things or to help me brainstorm ideas, to help me take one form of a document and turn it into another form of a document where I might have some derivative uses of a core text that I want to use, but I need to turn it into another thing that might take me 45 minutes to an hour, but it’ll take an LLM seven minutes including me fixing the sloppiness in it or whatever. So I use it as a productivity tool. And for that, it’s fantastic for research. I also use it, I find perplexity and also the deep research functions on several of the different LLMs to be very helpful, especially when it provides me actual links. I can go back and check that can help. I’ve written whole business plans using that, and they’ve been very successful. And I couldn’t have even done the work that I did in the time if I had done that in a traditional way. So the research side of it can be very, very good. And then I also sometimes will load books up into an LLM like notebook. The Google one, which is now suddenly escaping me . . . Notebook.

And then sometimes ChatGPT and then also Claude. I’ve tried it in all three of those and a little bit with Grock where I’ll take a manuscript. I’ve done this with my own book just to query my own book on certain things. But I do it with classic literature where you can get basically free PDFs of these classic novels and other things, and I’ll use it to query the novel. I’ll have a conversation with the book. Basically I’m trying to find something, there’s no index for it. I find it quickly using that. Or I have done some work where I will investigate essentially an angle in a book, and I’ll use the LLM to help me do it where I would have a hard time, I think sussing it out.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve done that reading along with an LLM. I’ll do this fiction books. I’ll just start a chat where as I’m reading and I see something I don’t know what that means or what’s going on. Basically, when there’s a historical novel, I’ll start talking to the LLM, give me some information on what’s going on in this chapter. For example, I did this a lot with The Count of Monte Cristo. There’s a lot of history in that thing, and so I use ChatGPT to help me flesh out some of that stuff a little bit more, so I understood it better, and I thought that was a useful way of using an LLM with your reading.

Joel Miller:

Yeah, totally. I think that’s a great example of that, for sure.

Brett McKay:

Well, Joel, this has been a great conversation. Where could people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Joel Miller:

Millersbookreview.com is probably the best place. That’s where I post book reviews and literary essays there, and you can also find out more about The Idea Machine there.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Joel Miller, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Joel Miller:

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Joel Miller. He’s the author of the book, The Idea Machine. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, millersbookreview.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/books where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website artofmanliness.com. Find our podcast archives and make sure to check out our new Substack Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. 

And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you got something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the show, but put what you’ve heard into action. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Each day, too, acquire something which will help you to face poverty, or death, and other ills as well. After running over a lot of different thoughts, pick out one to be digested thoroughly that day. —Seneca 

Today, we largely associate daily “devotionals” — short, reflection-spurring texts — with religious scriptures and faith-themed books which feature musings, challenges, and brief bits of inspiration for each day of the year. 

But as Seneca proves above, for millennia, devotional-type exercises have been engaged in not only for religious purposes, but for philosophical ones as well. The devotional habit is really for everyone, and is more important than ever in a time of uncertainty and existential stress.

If you’re part of a faith tradition, you probably already know of some popular devotional books to study. Below, we’ll highlight some spirit-edifying but secular devotional texts that men of every stripe may enjoy and find uplifting. 

First, however, let’s dig into why you should consider making devotional reading part of your daily routine, and how to get the most out of this practice. 

The Benefits of Daily Devotional Reading 

While the effort needed to sustain the devotional habit isn’t onerous — reading just a few pages of text for a few minutes each day — the benefits it will accrue to your life are significant: 

1. Maintains a deeper element in your life. When you were a teenager and in your twenties, perhaps you read religious and philosophical books with some frequency. Maybe you even had a daily devotional practice back then. You thought big thoughts. You pondered big questions. But then you got a real job, and got married, and had kids. And that soulful reading and reflection dropped out of your life. You started living on the surface of things, metaphorically “paycheck to paycheck,” in that your thoughts only extended to taking care of life’s basic necessities from one day to the next.

A daily devotional practice restores a more existentially profound element to your life, so that you don’t lose track of life’s deeper dimensions amidst the more mundane stresses and urgencies of day-to-day living.

2. Keeps your focus on the most important things. While we like to take a kind of “one-and-done” approach to life’s great truths — believing that once you learn and know something, you never have to think about it again — the reality is that we need constant, daily reminders of who we want to be. Daily devotionals keep your most important values at the forefront of your mind, where they can actively influence your decisions. 

3. Injects a bit of ritual into your day. The power of ritual is undeniable, especially in a chaotic world. There are a number of ways to add spirit-centering structure to your routine; a daily devotional reading is one of the most powerful. 

Some Guidelines for Your Daily Devotionals 

1. Morning is best. You can do your devotional time whenever it works for you. But, there’s a case to be made for scheduling it for the a.m.

For a lot of people, the morning starts with a handful of stressful emails or some social media/newsy doomscrolling. But given that how you start the day will influence your mindset during the rest of it, it’s hugely beneficial to kick things off with something that’s more uplifting than such mind-muddling noise.

Reading a devotional doesn’t have to be the very first thing you do after getting out of bed; if you need a shower and a cup of coffee right after rising, that’s just fine. But make it happen before getting into the real meat of your day — whether that’s before anyone is awake and the house is quiet, or in the first few minutes that you sit down to your desk for your workday (if your job allows for that sort of thing). A morning devotional practice gets your whole day off on the right foot, centering your soul before you wade into the weeds of “worldly” cares and providing edifying grist to chew on in the hours to come.

2. Write down something to think about. What’s the benefit of doing intentional morning readings if the thoughts it provokes just leave your head the minute something stressful encroaches on your day? By writing down a note or quote, you’re further cementing these insights into your consciousness, and even more so when you regularly return to your notebook/journal throughout the course of the day (to add additional thoughts/review past musings) or the next morning. 

3. Consider reading it aloud. Much poetry was intentionally written to be read aloud, and prose can benefit from oral recitation as well. Abraham Lincoln preferred this practice, observing: “When I read aloud two senses catch the idea; first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I can remember it better.” In addition to writing it down, this is another way that powerful words can lodge themselves in your memory. 

4. Don’t fret if you miss a day. Don’t beat yourself up about missing days of devotional reading; life’s too short for that crap. Cut yourself some slack and just move on ahead the next day. 

You can find more tips for deeper spiritual study here.

10 Ideas for Daily Devotionals

Some books are specifically structured for devotional reading; that is, they’re made up of short entries, meant to be read one day at a time, often over the course of a year.

But other kinds of books, even if they’re not explicitly designed for devotional reading, can work too. Anything with short chapters or easily digestible sections that move your spirit can be used for the purpose. Essays, poetry, letter collections, even some of the great novels work well. 

Below we offer 10 recommendations of non-religious texts that can serve as worthy reflection-generating fodder for a more edifying daily routine: 

Manvotionals by Brett and Kate McKay

The second Art of Manliness book, published in 2011, is a collection of philosophy, self-improvement, and wisdom texts, ranging from Aristotle to the success books of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the speeches and writings of Theodore Roosevelt. The myriad poems, quotes, and essays contained within — centered around 7 primary virtues — are designed to inspire men in particular to cultivate the highest ideals of character and live a truly flourishing life. You won’t always be familiar with the authors of the ideas, but you’ll always be vigorously renewed in your energy for the day’s tasks. 

Meditations on the Wisdom of Action by Kyle Eschenroeder 

In 116 short, pithy, gut-punchingly inspiring chapters, Kyle Eschenroeder expounds on the meaning of action and what it looks like in our modern world. Kyle possesses the soul of a philosopher in the body of an entrepreneur. If philosophy doesn’t lead to action — to answering the question of how to better live this thing we call life — what good is it, really? In this book, Kyle takes the best action-oriented philosophical nuggets from a wide variety of authors and luminaries and riffs on them to create his own unique set of proverbs and calls to . . . action. Supping daily from this book will continually push you to turn your abstract intentions into concrete realities. 

The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday

In The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday grabs an inspiring Stoic quote for each day and adds his own ideas and questions to ponder on and use as grist for becoming a better person. It’s a great collection, though I must mention that the original sources also lend themselves quite well to daily reading: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Letters from a Stoic by Seneca, Epictetus’ writings, etc. Regardless of the source, Stoic philosophy will leave you better prepared to meet the day, and its attendant, inevitable annoyances, with patience and perspective.  

In general, philosophy is a great fount of daily devotional reading. Ancient wisdom is often easier to digest in small chunks than en masse. 

Essays of Montaigne

Brett has called Montaigne the first blogger; it’s an astute observation about a man whose 107 essays from the late 16th century cover a range of topics from the philosophical (“On sadness,” “On the length of life,” “On prayer”) to the more practical and mundane (“On smells,” “On drunkenness”). Even within the essays, Montaigne goes from subject to subject, eventually coming back to the titled topic . . . most of the time. He displays the full range of human feeling, logic, irrationality, and hypocrisy, which is exactly what makes his essays so interesting. He’s clearly processing ideas while writing them, and going back and forth between various conclusions. You’re guaranteed to find something to think about within each chapter. The essays average about 12 pages, making them easily digestible at the pace of one per day.  

A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy 

While Tolstoy is deservedly most well known for his epic, door-stopping novels, his daily reader, A Calendar of Wisdom, should get some love too. Compiled over the course of about 15 years, Tolstoy heavily researched this collection of quotes, proverbs, and sayings which spans religious traditions and schools of philosophy. Though a deeply Christian man, Tolstoy understood that great ideas which resonated within the soul could come from anywhere. Organized by subject and with an entry for each day (using 3-4 quotes/sayings plus a short thought from Tolstoy), the compiler and author himself used it for a good portion of his life.

War and Peace, often listed as the greatest novel ever written, is also particularly well-suited to daily reading over the course of a year, given its 361 short chapters.

The Secrets to Power, Mastery, and Truth: The Best of William George Jordan

This anthology contains the very best personal development essays of Gilded Age writer William George Jordan. All of the chapters are short and certainly devotional in nature; they’re rich in incisive, edifying insights, including vivid metaphors that help the reader see his life through a transformative lens. The real benefit of Jordan’s work is that you can tell he was pushing back against the individualistic, get-rich attitude of his era and fought to instill in folks the less flashy, but more meaningful values of compassion, service, honesty, forgiveness, and the value of a daily fresh start. 

Walt Whitman’s Poems

Poetry, in general, is a great way to consume a bit of daily wisdom and beauty; sometimes the most transformative insights are those that waft through your mind indirectly, rather than being hammered home head-on. It can be an intimidating genre to dive into, though. Admittedly, I don’t really get most poetry, and it often leaves me feeling more confused than inspired. There are a few exceptions, in my opinion, which resonate with just about anyone: Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and most powerfully, for me, Walt Whitman. His soul-stirring poems capture the spirit and vigor of the American ideal and experience better than anything I’ve ever read, and each poem finds some line or two worth remembering and chewing on — “I contain multitudes,” “Be curious not judgmental,” “Let your soul stand cool and composed,” etc. 

The Works of Thoreau and Emerson

Thoreau and Emerson, those great American transcendentalists, are in the same vein of thought as Whitman, but with more concrete ideas and nuggets of wisdom than is to be found in the latter’s poems. Self-reliance, nature and the outdoors, self-improvement, philosophy — these themes and more abound in the pages of these great thinkers’ journals, letters, essays, and other written works. Though full of spirit and calls to transcendence, they’re never opaquely mystical nor dogmatic, and have spoken to the deepest cores of human longing and our perpetual search for meaning for the last 150+ years. Nearly all their content is suited for daily reading, but Jim Mustich, author of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, recommends three in particular for this devotional purpose: The Spiritual Emerson, First We Read Then We Write by the late Robert Richardson, and The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. I might also add The Daily Henry David Thoreau, compiled by biographer Laura Dassow Walls.   

Calling It a Day by Robert Larranaga

If you’re someone who struggles with being a workaholic, or perhaps, in our work-from-home era, the delicate task of balancing work time and home/spouse/kid time, Robert Larranaga’s daily meditations draw from both spiritual principles and sound business ideas in order to give readers the permission they need to put down their phone or laptop. As hard as it is for some men to admit, more work does not necessarily equate to better work. This is a book that helps to remind you of that on a daily basis. 

On the Threshold of Transformation by Richard Rohr 

Franciscan friar Richard Rohr has a number of daily meditation works (as well as a great daily email), but by far the best of the bunch is his collection aimed specifically at men. While he admits coming from a Judeo-Christian tradition, he acknowledges that there are other viewpoints and doesn’t lean solely on Christian ideas in this set of daily meditations. The first line of Day 1 really sets the tone: “At some point in time, a man needs to embark on a risky journey.” Each day, after a couple paragraphs of a virile main idea, Rohr asks a simple question that’s sure to stir up big questions and honest, if scary, reflections. This book is my favorite title on this list. 

Combine any number of these books, use them alongside a daily journaling practice, read them in communion with loved ones or friends — wherever your devotional practice takes you, may it serve to challenge, enlighten, refreshen, and inspire. 

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in November 2020.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

If you went to high school in America, you probably read Moby-Dick — or, more likely, you skimmed the CliffsNotes and wondered why this dense, whale-obsessed novel was considered a classic.

That was me in 10th grade.

But earlier this year, I decided to revisit Moby-Dick in midlife, and it hit me completely differently. What once seemed like a tedious story about a guy chasing a whale revealed itself to be a profound meditation on free will, perception, self-reliance, leadership, and obsession. It’s now one of my favorite novels.

To help unpack why Moby-Dick endures — and why it might be worth picking up again— I’m joined by Mark Cirino, a professor of American literature. Today on the show, we discuss why Moby-Dick was initially overlooked, the novel’s major themes, and the timeless mystery of Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal quest.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Mark’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #786: The Writing Life of Ernest Hemingway
  • Episode #922: For Whom the Bell Tolls
• One True Podcast
• The Norton Library Podcast
• Mark’s Norton Library Edition of A Farewell to Arms

Connect With Mark Cirino

• Mark’s faculty page

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you went to high school in America, you probably read Moby-Dick, or more likely you skimmed the Cliff Notes and wonder why this dense, whale obsessed novel was considered a classic. That was me in 10th grade. But earlier this year, I decided to revisit Moby-Dick in midlife and it hit me completely differently. What once seemed like a tedious story about a guy chasing a whale revealed itself to be profound meditation on free will perception, self-reliance, leadership, and obsession. It’s now one of my favorite novels. To help unpack why Moby-Dick endures and why it might be worth picking up again. I’m joined by Mark Cirino, professor of American Literature. Today on the show we discussed why Moby-Dick was initially overlooked the novels, major themes and a timeless mystery of Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal quest. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/MobyDick.

Alright, Mark Cirino, welcome back to the show. 

Mark Cirino: 

Thanks so much, Brett. Great to be back. 

Brett McKay: 

So you are a Hemingway scholar and we’ve had you on the show before to talk about Hemingway as a writer and For Whom the Bell Tolls. But you also teach a class about Herman Melville’s, Moby-Dick, which is your favorite novel. So if you are an American, you went to high school in America, you probably read this book, I dunno, right around 10th grade. That’s when I read it. It’s when we did American Literature. And if you were like me in 10th grade, you probably used the Cliff Notes a lot. And I wanted to talk about Moby-Dick because I recently reread it earlier this year as a 42-year-old man, and I absolutely love this novel. It’s one of my favorites now. And I hope with our conversation we can inspire some listeners to either pick it up for the first time or revisit it if the last time they read it was in high school English class. So let’s talk about big picture. Let’s talk about this guy Herman Melville, who wrote Moby-Dick, who was this guy when he wrote Moby Dick. What’s his story?

Mark Cirino:

Herman Melville was born in 1819, so he was born into the era that we really call American Romanticism, which began around that time. And he was a fairly prominent writer of seafaring narratives, type P Omo, just kind of romps in foreign lands. And with Moby Dick, he became more interested in writing in an abstract way. So in other words, he kept with the maritime adventures and ships, but instead he began to write in an allegorical and abstract way where he began to be all encompassing. And when this book was published in 1851, people just weren’t ready for it. Some people noted that it was an impressive book and so forth, but it wasn’t like it sold very much. It wasn’t like Melville became this unimpeachable bard of American letters. Melville would go on to write a lot of abstract work, philosophical, political, psychological, and then he really became more of a poet later in his life before he died in 1891, to the extent that when he died in 1891, his obituaries didn’t really say that he was the author of Moby Dick.

First and foremost, he was more the author of Typee, Omoo, these early romantic yarns. And it was only until later, maybe the centennial of Melville’s birth, so 1919 where people began to rediscover Moby Dick and say, wow, this is actually worth reading. If I can tell you really quickly, Brett, there’s one particular scholar named Raymond Weaver who taught at Columbia, who was prominent in what is now known as the Melville Revival, which is kind of the rediscovery of Moby Dick and the rediscovery of Melville himself. And my grandfather was a student at Columbia for Professor Weaver. And so he was one of the students reading this book that nobody had ever heard of or nobody thought much about, but this guy was like John the Baptist when it came to Melville. So now years later, Moby-Dick is celebrated as an unequivocal great American novel, and it just goes to show, it might get us to think about that the American literary canon is as subjective as anything else you think of Moby-Dick dropped down from the heavens as sacred text. It really wasn’t that it was discovered by some literature professor.

Brett McKay:

It reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby. 

Mark Cirino:

Same thing, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he was convinced Gatsby was a failure. Gatsby was out of print and it had to be reintroduced. And then now of course it’ll never go out of print.

Brett McKay:

It’s interesting, Melville had written a lot and he was well known for his writing before Moby Dick, but today, I think most people, if they’ve read Melville, the only thing they’ve read from Melville is Moby Dick, or they might’ve read Bartley the Scrivener, and that’s about it. What do you think that is?

Mark Cirino:

So I’ve read several other Melville novels to try to answer exactly that question, Brett. I was like, why? Everyone would say Melville is one of the great American novelists of all time. Everybody would say that. And then you could ask those people who say that, okay, so name two Melville novels. And they would say, well, Moby Dick and Bartley, the Scribner, okay, Bartley, the Scribner is the short story, right? So what does Moby Dick have that the others don’t? Especially since they’re kind of covering the same terrain? And if I can just be reductive and try to figure this out, the first thing it has is Ishmael. And Ishmael is this singular narrator. He’s funny, he’s imaginative, he’s enthusiastic, he’s discursive like he goes on tangents here and there, and he’s very insightful about human behavior. So Melville had never done that before, create such a perfect narrator.

The second thing it has is Ahab, this enormous figure, this mad captain determined to get vengeance on this monster of the sea. So he’s almost godlike or royalty, he’s just larger than life. And Melville had never created such a larger than life protagonist. And also Moby Dick himself, the whale, this creature that is the object of so much fury and so much scrutiny. That is the great quest that Ahab is on. And so triangulating these three unbelievable characters within this novel creates such an alchemy, such power and mystery that none of his other books ever approached this kind of structure.

Brett McKay:

Why do you think this novel is so intimidating? I think some people, they have Moby Dick on their two read list or they remember reading it from when they’re in high school and they’re like, Ugh, Moby Dick, I can’t do that. What is it about this book or the way it’s written that makes it intimidating?

Mark Cirino:

Well, you’re going to have to tell me about how you felt about it as a 10th grader. I mean, it’s kind of long. It’s not long as 19th century American novels go necessarily. I mean, there are lots longer novels. I think the writing is pretty dense and poetic and Baroque Melville writes in a very intense way. So it can be very hard to kind of unpack some of the poetic imagery, some of the philosophical ideas. Absolutely, some of that can be difficult to unpack. Ishmael also goes on digressions as I mentioned. So there’s the very simple story, which is Ahab has been wounded by this one particular white whale named Moby Dick and has now determined to set out and avenge it. And our narrator, Ishmael happens to be on that ship, the P quad. So that’s a very simple story, just a very simple story of vengeance and actually also a holy grail story trying to reach one particular object. But at the same time, Melville layers on top of this very simple, straightforward, linear story discussions about religion and politics and commerce and law and history and psychology and philosophy and nature. So it goes on and on and on. And I think that can be very either frustrating or disorienting for lots of readers.

Brett McKay:

I think when I was in 10th grade and I was reading this book the first time I remember I’d get to the chapters where Melville would just inject these almost pseudoscientific textbooks about Whales chapter 32, where you just see it’s just basically the scientific name of the whale and the description of the whale. And I remember in 10th grade, like what does that have to do with the story? So I’m just going to skip this. What do you think is going on there? Why did Melville do that? I mean, he does that several times there at the book. I remember there’s one where he just talks about the anatomy of the sperm whale head. What does this have to do with Ahab getting Moby Dick

Mark Cirino:

On the surface? It has nothing to do with it. And chapter 32, which is called Cytology, probably has caused more additions of Moby Dick to be turned into Frisbees and launched across dorm rooms all across the United States than anything else in American literature. So Ishmael takes us on a really convoluted taxonomy of the different kinds of whales and the way they looked and their behavior. And I think this is part of Melville’s vision, of course, I’m only telling you what its effect is to me as a reader. I can’t tell you what he was going for, he never proclaimed it. But I think in addition to this narrative, he was trying to say everything about whales all at once. So he was trying to come at it from an adventure point of view. He was trying to come at it from a metaphysical point of view, a historical point of view, and in this case a scientific point of view.

I’ll tell you a couple of effects that Chapter 32 has on me. The first thing it does is it shows how engrossed and enthusiastic Ishmael is as a narrator. And that’s no small thing, Brett, if you’ve ever been talking to somebody, even if you’re not inherently interested in what the person’s talking about, if they are so obsessed and hyped up on what the story is, sometime that’s charming and engaging. And I definitely find that with Ishmael, you don’t really need to be as excited about whales as Ishmael. You just need to know that Ishmael is very excited about whales. So Ishmael is eager to tell you everything that he’s learned about whales. And the second thing that I would offer about the ology chapter is as Ishmael is offering an organizational system of whales based on how they look and how they behave, this book comes out in 1851 and in 1851, weren’t we doing the same thing about human beings? We have a hierarchy of human beings that we valued depending on how they looked and how they behaved and where they were, where they lived. If we don’t in 2025, we certainly were in 1851. And so when I mentioned earlier that the Wailing adventure is kind of an allegory or a metaphor for larger things, that could be something that’s a cytology chapter suggests.

Brett McKay:

I think for me, the effect it had on me whenever he goes into these scientific digressions about whales, it made Moby Dick the whale — I understood it more, and it also made him even more impressive in a way. I don’t know if that was the effect he was going for, but that’s what it did for me. It made the whale more impressive.

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, because he’s saying, you have to understand this thing from all its vantage points, how big its head is, what its tail is like on and on. There’s even the chapter about a whale’s penis, only to show that we have never really encountered monsters like this before.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned the big picture outline of the book. It’s this guy named Ishmael. He hooks up with this ship called the Pequod, and he’s the book’s narrator and the ship’s captain is Ahab, who’s been injured by this whale named Moby Dick. And the book is all about Ahab trying to find this whale, essentially. That’s what it is. And then along the way, they’re doing some welling, then there’s some other things going on. But let’s talk about the main themes of Moby Dick. You mentioned some of them earlier, science, philosophy, religion. What would you say are the big themes you see throughout this novel?

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, there are a lot of themes. I think Melville touches on a lot of things. One of the elements that he’s addressing is the difference between free will and determinism, which is simply do you have control of your own actions? In the very first chapter, which is called Loomings, Ishmael is describing a kind of magnetic pole that he has to the sea. So it’s almost like he doesn’t choose to go. The sea draws him. And he’s saying that happens all the time that we’re drawn to certain places, we’re kind of sick of society and we’ve got to go into nature. And by the same token, the reason that theme is so important is because when Moby Dick injured Ahab, Ahab believes that Moby Dick sought him out personally to injure him like you, I want to get you. And so Ahab is personally insulted that one particular whale injured him.

Meanwhile, I think maybe most common sense readers and certainly Starbuck in the novel, they’re like, Ahab, that’s what whales do. It was instinct. Why would you take it personally? God designed this whale to defend itself and to attack potential threats. You just have to accept that. And so you see there’s a distinction between did Moby Dick act intentionally with a human motivation or was it just mechanical instinct? And that question gets turned around when Ahab is suggesting his act of vengeance on the whale is also instinct. He’s drawn to it magnetically, almost like the whale was drawn to him. So this kind of gets at a lot of questions about human behaviors. When do we act according to our own consciousness versus when do we act kind of programmatically? And so that’s certainly one of the themes.

Brett McKay:

So what do you think was going on in Melville’s time where he was thinking about free will versus determinism? What was happening in America at the time?

Mark Cirino:

Well, I think one of my favorite sentences in the novel is when Ishmael says, “Who ain’t a slave?” And I think that’s one of the most courageous sentences in that novel. In 1851, he says, who ain’t a slave? And some people actually were slaves, but he’s talking about something a little larger. He’s saying, okay, is slavery a legal issue or can it also be a psychological issue? Are there things that even free people in 2025 are slaves too? And then as one of his contemporaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, well, what if you’re a slave driver to yourself? What if you are imprisoning yourself through limitations or habits or prejudices or small-mindedness or things like that?

Brett McKay:

Another theme that you talk about and that you see in the book is this idea of objective versus subjective.

Mark Cirino:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

What’s going on there?

Mark Cirino:

Yeah. So basically there’s a juxtaposition between subjective perception, how an individual sees the truth of something and objective reality, what the empirical facts are. And this is really set up in so many ways, and I think the best way to analyze this idea is the Dublin chapter where Ahab nails up a single coin and says, whoever can spot Moby dick first. This one particular well gets this very valuable coin. And then there’s an extraordinary chapter where Ishmael describes several people starting with Ahab, going up to the delo, looking at the shapes and the figures and the symbols on this coin, and essentially interpreting it or reading it. So we might think of an inkblot test. Well, an inkblot test objectively is an ink plott. But subjectively, there might be an image or a memory that it calls up to you individually, and that the same is true for the dub. So it ends up revealing more about the person than about the coin itself. So Ahab looks at it, and you remember what he says when he sees the coin. He says, you see that that’s Ahab. Those things over there, that’s Ahab, everything, Ahab, Ahab, Ahab. So it’s the greatest expression of solipsism and self obsession, self absorption, because Ahab sees himself in everything. He’s self-obsessed.

Brett McKay:

Another chapter where you see that exploration of objective versus subjective. It’s one of my favorite chapters, one 18 The Quadrant.

And this is a scene where someone’s trying to bust out the quadrant. Sailors use this to navigate. You look at the stars and you can figure out where you’re at. And Ahab is like, I’m not having it. He’s like, I hate this thing. He says, fool. He calls it foolish toy babies play thing of hudy admirals and commodore and captains. The world brags the thee and thy cunning might. And then he says, science cursed thee thou vain toy and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven whose live vividness, but scorches him as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light. And he said, level by nature to this earth’s horizon are the glances of man’s eyes not shot from the crown of his head as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament, curse thee thou quadrant, and he dashed it to the deck.

No longer will I guide my earthly way by the level ship compass and the level of dead reckoning by log and by line, these shall conduct me and show me my place on the sea. And I think that’s a great idea. He’s like, I’m rejecting science. I’m not guiding my life by the objective science. I’m just going to use my own self to guide my life. And I read that and I can see, okay, that’s not good to reject objectivity, but at the same time, I’m kind of inspired by Ahab like I’m going to do what I want to do and not what some instrument tells me to do. I think it’s very relevant today where we have ai, people are going to chat, g gt asking chat, GBT to make decisions for them about, well, should I take this job or even about their romantic life? And I think Ahab would say like, no curse the chat GPT, and he’d smash it.

Mark Cirino:

There is definitely that to it. And this is like Luke Skywalker using the force and not putting the blast shield down. And he’s like, I’m trusting my own instinct is strong enough to solve this problem and execute this mission. And I agree with you that is inspiring. But we can see also the cautionary tale of how they can get you into trouble, how you can forsake facts and say, I got this. And there’s a difference, especially in romantic literature, capital R. So I’m not talking about romance novels, I’m talking about romantic literature. The difference in romantic literature is trusting yourself, and I’m using self as its own word, trusting yourself, which means the heart’s core, that deep inner part of you that maybe other people don’t see, maybe you don’t even see. It’s your soul trusting that which is a divine correspondence to nature and to divinity versus trusting your ego.

And so Ahab may let ego get in the way, or other leaders may let ego get in the way and they forsake facts. But I do agree with you that if you’re using instinct properly, if you’re balanced, that can be inspiring. There’s one other illustration of this, Brett, that might add a layer to it in the chart, which is not dissimilar from the quadrant. In chapter 44, Ishmael is saying essentially, Ahab wanted this whale so badly. He was so bent on this obsession that he says all possibilities would become probabilities. And as Ahab fondly thought, every probability the next thing to a certainty. And so we all know people like this, the people who they can’t see reality because they want something so badly, and because I want it to happen, I can will it to happen. So it cuts both ways because the more kind of sober, realistic people may say, wow, that’s not going to, I don’t think that’s going to work. But the fact is, don’t our heroes don’t. The really great adventurers and leaders and inventors don’t, they have this kind of little strain of hyperbole to them, this little extreme element to them. We’re going

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about some of the characters more specifically. We’ve been discussing them kind of on the surface. I want to go deeper with this.

Mark Cirino:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about the narrator, Ishmael. Moby Dick starts off in a famous way. Everyone probably knows the first line of Moby Dick. It’s “Call Me Ishmael.” What does this line do for the narrative? And what does that tell us about Ishmael that he started off this story with? Call me Ishmael.

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, that’s a question that people have been wrestling with for 150 years. What does “Call me Ishmael” mean? On the surface, it’s a really folksy introduction to our narrator who’s going to sit down and tell you a nice wailing yarn. But on the other hand, it might be a little shifty. There’s a difference between saying, my name is Ishmael and call me Ishmael. Call me. Ishmael is kind of establishing the authority of who is telling the story and who is going to be listening to the story and at the mercy of who is telling the story. So if somebody tells you, call me blank, they are kind of setting the terms of the narrative. In fact, we can go onto the second sentence of the story. He says, call me Ishmael some years ago. Nevermind how long? Precisely, so it’s already he’s telling us what to ask and what not to ask. He’s a very engaging narrator, but again, he’s also setting the terms. We might also wonder about the name Ishmael, because I dunno how many Americans are named Ishmael. This is a quintessentially American narrative, and we have American characters named Ishmael and Ahab.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, why is that? Is there something symbolic about the name Ishmael?

Mark Cirino:

There must be. So when he says, call me Ishmael, he is alluding to a figure in the Bible, the son of Hagar, who is an outcast. So when he’s saying, call me Ishmael, he might be suggesting that he serves that same kind of role in society or that same kind of role in the narrative. One of the things about Ishmael, and I think this is truly the genius thing about the novel Moby Dick or one of the genius things is that Ishmael is not the protagonist, and Ahab is not the narrator. Ishmael is kind of on the periphery off to the side observing. Sometimes you don’t even know how he has access to certain events that go on on the P Quad, but he can sometimes get into the thoughts of Ahab. Sometimes Ahab does something all by himself, even below Deck, and you wonder how does Ishmael know what is going on? Does he have imaginative powers? Does he have supernatural powers? Is he a fiction writer? Where does the truth and imagination blend?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, this reminds me going back to The Great Gatsby. It’s the same thing with Nick Caraway, the narrator, then Jay Gatsby’s the protagonist. And my son just got done reading The Great Gatsby, and he had this funny comment. He’s like, Nick Caraway is just always kind lurking. I don’t know why he’s there and these different situations, how he knows what’s going on, but he’s just kind of there in the background. I’m like, yeah, he is kind of a lurker.

Mark Cirino:

That is a great parallel. It’s exactly the same. The central phrase for Nick Caraway is you remember, and I’m sure your son just read this, when Nick Caraway is talking about this party that he’s at this really kind of seedy party in this apartment, and he looks outside and he sees kind of a bystander, and he says, I was within and without. So simultaneously, he was two places at the same time, and he was two people at the same time. And that is the brilliance of Gatsby, the way it’s narrated. But of course, Moby Dick came way earlier, and so I’m sure that Fitzgerald modeled it after Ishmael.

Brett McKay:

So Ishmael, as you said, he’s this really enthusiastic guy. He’s really enthusiastic about whaling, and he’s also kind of an outsider. What does Ishmael represent, do you think? Because Melville’s writing symbolically in this novel, so Ishmael must represent some idea that he’s trying to convey.

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think Ishmael might be the stand-in for Melville. I think he’s the writer of the, I think he’s the poet. And so the poetic leaps that Ishmael takes, the philosophical and psychological leaps that he takes, he’s really the poet and the novelist on the ship. Ahab doesn’t think on those terms. Ahab is thinking he must get the whale, and if this novel were to be narrated by Ahab, it probably would be very direct. It wouldn’t be much shorter. But Ishmael is more expansive, and I think it’s kind of showing what it’s like. And this goes back to the Nick Haraway thing, what it shows to be in the proximity of these larger than life figures. So Ishmael is kind of awestruck. He looks around with a sense of wonder at whales, at these great captains at all the events, the violence, and he’s sort of our standin and also Melville’s standin.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about Queequeg. Queequeg has always been one of my favorite characters. For some reason, I just find him endearing. Why do you think this cannibal sailor dude from the South Pacific is such an endearing character?

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, first of all, he’s great at being a harpooneer. So he gets on the Pequod due to merit, and that’s fantastic. He’s more qualified than Ishmael to get on the Pequod. He’s a great friend. He’s generous, and I think, well, you can answer why he’s endearing to you. What he’s endearing to me about is that he’s in the Emersonian sense of being self-reliant in comfortable in his own skin, which is in his own heavily tattooed skin. Imagine being a heavily tattooed Pacific Islander, observing Ramadan carrying heads in your sack in Manhattan in the middle of the 19th century. You would be extremely conspicuous. He has absolutely no embarrassment about his own actions. They give him a wheelbarrow to lug things around him. He puts things in the wheelbarrow and carries it because he doesn’t understand how wheelbarrows work, and it feels like, well, didn’t you feel silly?

He’s like, no, why would I feel silly? I don’t know how to do. This isn’t something I’m familiar with. So he’s completely at ease with who he is. I find that very inspirational. One of the great chapters in Moby Dick is called the monkey rope. And in the monkey rope, you remember this episode Brett, where Queequeg is on top of a whale carving it up, and Ishmael is on the boat tethered to Queequeg with a rope, and Ishmael finally realizes if Queequeg falls in, I fall in and if I let go, Queequeg falls in. And then he takes another step back and goes, well, isn’t this just like every human being all across the world, is that we all are connected, even if it’s not with a tangible rope, if I’m driving to work and someone swerves in, I’m done. If the pharmacist isn’t paying attention when he gives me my medicine, I overdose and I’m done. So we all depend on one another for survival. We just don’t see it on an everyday basis. And so Ishmael’s having this very physical connection, but he also appreciates this sublime metaphysical connection he has to him also.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I love that insight. He lacks that morbid self-consciousness that a lot of westerners have, and that’s admirable. Someone who’s comfortable in their own skin. I think that really ties in. I think Melville is probably getting it at that idea in American romanticism of just what Emerson hit on. You got to be your own guy, as Thoro said, March to the beat of your own drummer, that sort of thing. And that’s admirable.

Mark Cirino:

Emerson says, anybody can be themselves in the privacy of their own room. The key of being yourself, a fully functioning human being is to be yourself out in society. That’s the challenge when conformity is really pressuring you to be like everybody else. He said, if you can maintain who you really are, really are deep down that is greatness. And Ishmael’s looking around to see like, oh, who’s doing this? Am I being, he’s kind of like jittery is in a foreign land at complete ease. 

Brett McKay:

Talk about Ahab. He is one of the great figures in I’d say world literature. He’s part tragic hero, part madman. How do you think Melville wants us to understand Ahab and his obsession for the whale?

Mark Cirino:

Wow. So many ways. I think for starters, we can ask ourselves if we are Ahab at all. If there’s in common parlance, the white whale is like, Hey, what’s your white whale? It’s like, what’s the one thing that you keep trying for that you can never get? And it’s like, oh, I might be obsessive about certain things that I keep failing about or that I’m destined to fail, and I’m really driving myself crazy about it. What is your white whale? So we might all be Ahab at one time or another in our lives. Hopefully we recognize it before it’s too late. So at one point, it’s about obsession and monomania only thinking about one thing and how that, remember Brett, I hope you’re comfortable with spoilers. The way that Ahab dies I think is so crucial.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, tell us about that.

Mark Cirino:

Are we okay?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. If you haven’t read Moby Dick yet, you can fast forward. Let’s talk about this.

Mark Cirino:

Okay. Well, the manner in which Ahab dies is he’s impaled by his own harpoon.

And how symbolic is that? That what really ended up killing him was not necessarily the whale. It was his own violence towards the whale got turned on himself. I also think Ahab is a quintessential dictator. So the P quad is run in a fascist way, and so Melville is talking a lot about government and leadership. One of the aspects of the P quad is that there are people from all over the world. Almost every nationality and ethnicity is represented on the P Quad. It’s like a floating united nations, of which Ahab is the leader, is a commander, and Ahab sooner than later, gets everybody to do exactly what he wants them to do. The passion of his leadership, his charisma, his magnetism has overwhelmed everybody else on the P quad, so that his doomed insane mission becomes unanimous.

Brett McKay:

That sounds, I mean, I know this is probably not a great parallel, but it reminds me of Steve Jobs when he was the head of Apple. People would talk about how he could just because of his charisma in his just obsession with making the best product possible, he would get people to do what they thought was impossible. Oh, interesting.

Mark Cirino:

The way you’re saying it, that almost sounds like a positive application.

Brett McKay:

Well, so I mean, it was positive. We got the iPod and we got the iPhone, but the way you hear people describe working for Steve Jobs, he was a real jerk. He was awful working under him. He was mean, and he even recognized that as he was dying. He was like, yeah, I probably could have done things differently, but maybe not. Maybe he couldn’t have done things differently to get accomplished what he accomplished.

Mark Cirino:

What I think about sometimes when Ahab gives that first pep talk where he gathers everybody around and he essentially says, Hey, you know why you’re here. We’re here to kill one whale, Moby Dick. And Starbuck is like, Hey, I thought we were going to do see how many whales we could catch so we could make a lot of money. He’s like, no, no, no. We’re getting one whale. We’re going to get vengeance on the one whale who injured me. What that makes me think of is to look at a Nazi rally from the 1930s and how Hitler was so passionate filled with evil and hate and madness. You could tell the power of his insanity was greater than the emotions that anybody else in that room had. And Ahab even knows it. Ahab knows what he’s saying, might be ruinous and wrong, but he also knows there’s nobody who is his equal. Nobody wants it as bad as he does. Nobody wants the opposite as bad as he wants what he wants, so he overwhelms them.

Brett McKay:

I mean, when I read Ahab, I think Melville paints a really complicated character. On the one hand, his obsession ended up killing him and lots of other people too. But on the other hand, I mean, Melville does paint Ahab in a kind of romantic light in a way he’s got on a bad course, but there’s something attractive about this dynamism, and I feel like Melville would say there’s a role for passion, this whole American romanticism thing, but it’s got to be harnessed in the right way.

Mark Cirino:

You make a great point. So first of all, just a couple of things about that. First of all, I think there’s a moment where after Ahab kind of riles the entire Pequod up and everybody’s on his side, there’s a line that should make your heart sink, where the beginning of chapter 41, Ishmael says, I Ishmael was one of that crew. My shouts had gone up with the rest. My oath had been welded with theirs and stronger, I shouted more, did I hammer and clinch my oath because of the dread in my soul? A wild, mystical, sympathetic feeling was in me Ahab’s quench list feud seemed mine. That is for anybody, and it doesn’t have to be grandiose like politics or religion or life and death. It could be any time you went along with something that you deep down knew better then you got overpowered. 

And the other thing that your comment made me think about Brett was there’s a moment where Ahab is really humanized, where he’s all by himself, at least he thinks he’s all by himself, or perhaps Ishmael’s looking on, and he leans over, he’s thinking about his wife, and he’s thinking about what his obsession and what his career as a sailor has done to his family and how he’s spent way more time out on the ocean than on land. And one teardrop drops into the water. And what Ishmael Surmises is there was more substance in that one teardrop than there was in the rest of the ocean combined because of just how long did it take that tear to form? Probably he had never done it before, but there is that, it’s kind of a yin and yang type thing where yes, Ahab is all one thing, but there’s one dot of humanity and sanity and family man where he kind of remembers who he really is.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about another character, really important character, the whale, Moby Dick. I’m sure lots of people have written essays when they’re in high school like, well, the white whale represents this. What do you think the white whale represents?

Mark Cirino:

Okay, so let’s take one baby step back. And I think a lot of readers of literature who were asked to read this book, let’s say in high school and 10th grade seems actually very early to read this book, but let’s say they did. And their professor, their teacher said, now we’re all going to write essays about what Moby Dick represents, what the whale represents. And a common complaint is, well, why does the whale have to represent something? Why can’t it just be a whale? Why can’t it just be? And we have to have a discussion in that class about there is such a thing as literary symbols. Things do represent other things, and we don’t really need to presume this. We don’t have to guess about this because actually Ishmael tells us what the whale represents. He says in chapter 41, which is called Moby Dick, and let me just quote a sentence or two, all that, most maddens and torments, all that stirs up the leaves of things, all truth with malice in it.

All that cracks, the sinews and cakes, the brain, all the subtle demons of life and thought all evil to crazy Ahab were visibly personified and made practically a saleable in Moby Dick. So Ishmael is saying everything bad about the world, Ahab ascribed to this one particular whale. Now, it’s very important that Ishmael is saying that is what the whale symbolizes to Ahab. The thing about a symbol is that it means different things to different people. An American flag will mean something different to an American and someone from a different country. A cross means something different to a Christian and a non-Christian, and this is the way symbols are. They mean different things to different people. We almost started our conversation by talking about the difference between objective and subjective. So we have to be very careful that the whale doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody.

Ahab is trying to make Moby Dick mean the same thing to everybody. He wants everybody to hate it as much as he does. But in fact, the very next chapter, chapter 42, which is called The Whiteness of the Whale, begins when Ishmael says what the white whale was to Ahab has been hinted, what at times he was to me, as yet remains unsaid. So for every person in the book and for every reader, the white whale probably means something different. I know that’s frustrating, and I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m equivocating, but what it really is, it’s a celebration of subjective perception over objective reality.

Brett McKay:

And so, okay, Moby Dick represents evil to Ahab and he has to kill it. What does it mean to Ishmael?

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, so exactly. So Ahab is saying, once I kill Moby Dick, everything will be better. And now we may look at that and go, what is going to happen once he kills Moby Dick? He’s going to live happily ever after. Do we really think that’s what’s going to happen? So in Ishmael’s case, in chapter 42, he takes a philosophical point of view. Chapter 42 is called the Whiteness of the Whale. And he says, do you know what really bothers me about Moby Dick? The thing that really kind of exasperates me is that he’s white, and by that it’s saying he’s blank. He has no definition. It’s his absence. He says, vague, nameless horror. So what frightens Ishmael is that he’s a white whale, and it could mean anything in that sense. It means whatever you think it means. You are projecting your own anxieties, fears, prejudices onto this blank screen.

If you’ve ever had to write something and you look at a white sheet of paper, that could be very anxiety causing. But here he’s saying, and this is kind of counterintuitive because I think our culture, we look at white as pure and clean and innocent. And here he’s saying, you know what it’s like, it’s like if you’re caught in a whiteout or an avalanche and your surroundings have no definition. In 1851, the early 19th century, if you looked at the map of America, there were white spots, there were white areas, things that hadn’t been fully settled and explored. And romantic writers, Emerson and Thoreau were like, don’t explore externally. Don’t explore the continent. Go within, explore the white spots in your own brain, the areas of your own psyche and consciousness that you haven’t thought of before.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, there’s a great line in that chapter, chapter 42, talking about how the whiteness, it’s this void, this blankness in how it’s anxiety producing sort of existentially anxiety producing. He says, this is it that by its indefiniteness, it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with a thought of annihilation when behold, the white depths of the Milky Way.

Mark Cirino:

Incredible. That’s incredible. Yeah, if you are an imaginative person, if you can project and then you can spiral out of control because it’s just blank. There’s a line in Walt Whitman’s song of myself, which is 1855, and I might butcher it, but I’ll do my best. He says, the white topped mountains are in the distance. I fling my fancies toward them, fling my fancies toward them. So he’s looking essentially at a white easel or white canvas, and he’s like, whatever’s in my brain that is going to project onto it. And that’s scary. What Ishmael is gesturing towards is that we really, as human beings seek definition. We seek boundaries. We want things to be contained. And if the white whale is so enormous and he’s white, we don’t know if there’s any end to it. It could be just an infinite beast.

Brett McKay:

You’re a Hemingway guy. You have a podcast called One True Podcast, and it comes from this line from Ernest Hemingway in a movable feast where he describes how he writes, and he says, all you have to do is write one true sentence, write the truest sentence that you know. What do you think is the true sentence in Moby Dick?

Mark Cirino:

Well, that question is just, now I realize how evil that question is because there’s about 91 true sentences from Moby Dick. I can choose one of my many one true sentences. So as the novel goes along, and this might be a little bit of a key for people who get frustrated with some of Ishmael’s digressions, we start to see a little bit of a pattern in how Melville structures Moby Dick. What he’ll do is he’ll spend a few pages of a chapter talking about some arcane aspect of wailing or whales or the practice of wailing. And you’re saying, why am I engaged with this? Why do I need to know this? And then at the very end, maybe the last sentence or the last paragraph, Ishmael will tie it in to a larger, universal or metaphysical concept, and you’re like, oh, now I see why we’re talking about it.

And it’s absolutely brilliant. Many of these chapters are absolutely brilliant. One such chapter is called Fast Fish and Loose Fish, and this is chapter 89. This very small chapter is essentially a rule book about whaling, which is to say, what do you do when two rival ships are both pursuing the same whale? How do you know who gets it? And the short answer is, whichever ship is fast to it or attached to it, and if the whale is loose, if it’s unclaimed, then whichever ship becomes fast to it gets this whale, and you’re like, well, this is kind of interesting. I never thought that there was a rule book about wailing, but I guess there’s rule books about everything that’s kind of interesting trivia, and that’s that. But towards the end of this chapter, Ishmael begins to talk about being fast and being loose in the sense of metaphysics or your soul or your spirit or your psyche.

And then let me just end the chapter the way he does. He says, what are the rights of man and the liberties of the world, but loose fish, what all men’s minds and opinions, but loose fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them? But a loose fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling, ISTs are the thoughts of thinkers, but loose fish, what is the great globe itself, but a loose fish? And what are you reader, but a loose fish and a fast fish too? And that last sentence brings it home and kind of twists the knife in where he’s basically saying, okay, so what are things that you are susceptible to being influenced by? It goes back to a lot of the strains of conversation, Brett, that we’ve just been having, which is okay, who could come along and convince you to do something that you wouldn’t ordinarily do? And then he goes back to, but what are you fast to what has already claimed you in ways that you might not even be aware of? Like, who ain’t a slave? What are you imprisoned by? Have you ever taken a step back to say, what am I loose to and what am I fast to? It’s an absolutely brilliant way to parallel this weird, trivial law of wailing and the way we all experience life.

Brett McKay:

That’s amazing. Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. I hope it’s inspired some people to go pick up their old copy of Moby Dick and give it a reread. Where can people go to learn more about your work and what you do?

Mark Cirino:

So I am actually hosting two podcasts. One, as you say, is Hemingway specific called One True Podcast. The other is called the Norton Library Podcast, of which there are two beautiful episodes about Moby Dick with the editor, Jeffrey Insco and I have recently published an edition of Hemingway’s, A Farewell to Arms with the Norton Library that I hope everybody enjoys. 

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Mark Cirino. He’s a professor of American literature. Check out the podcast he hosts. He’s got the Norton Library Podcast, as well as One True Podcast, which is about Hemingway. You’re available on all podcast players. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/mobydick where you can find links to resources we can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com and make sure to check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Note: We’re excited to welcome back longtime contributor Jeremy Anderberg, who will be writing occasional articles for AoM once again.

Reading aloud to your children provides a host of benefits for little ones and adults alike. Beyond even the measurable advantages is the simple pleasure of connecting with your kids and engaging in the ancient tradition of sharing stories.

When kids are ages 4 and under, getting through read-aloud stories can honestly feel like a chore. The same board books repeated again and again and again . . . one can only handle so much Pete the Cat and annoying rhyming ditties.

Ages 4 to 7 bring some relief. Kids can enjoy longer, more engaging tales, plus they can start to read words and sentences themselves, which adds a special magic to the experience.

Somewhere between ages 7 and 9, things change yet again. Kids are usually reading on their own and may not “need” stories read aloud — heck, they might even ask you to drop the nightly routine. But if you keep the practice going, you’ll find it becomes even richer and more fun than before because they’re ready to listen to more interesting middle-grade chapter books.

It’s when kids get to this crucial age that they can truly start learning some of life’s most important lessons about love, courage, relationships, and more — and those lessons don’t change much as you age. It’s no accident that many of the classic novels in this category are among the best-selling titles of all time. Their blend of timeless lessons with compelling adventure has made them favorites in our own household too.

Below are four we’ve read aloud to our kids that they really enjoyed.

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

Tolkien’s classic children’s book is generally seen as the appetizer to the immense Lord of the Rings trilogy. But when read with kids, you’ll (re)discover that it makes for a fantastic story of its own that doesn’t just need to be a stepping stone to its door-stopping follow-up.

Introducing Middle-earth and all its inhabitants — hobbits, elves, orcs, dwarves, wizards — readers are immediately drawn into a world that combines whimsical adventure with rather serious battles between good and evil. (Tolkien knew his age group, though: this story doesn’t get as dark or scary as Lord of the Rings.) At its core, The Hobbit is a tale of a quiet fellow who discovers a well of courage and resolve to do good and daring deeds.

While any version of it works well, our family especially enjoys the edition illustrated by Jemima Catlin.  

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

If the movie Interstellar were a children’s novel with a little more fantasy and a little less sci-fi, it would be L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. This book has a bit of everything: time travel (and tesseracts), aliens, sibling conflicts, mitochondrial science, and a darkness vs. light theme running throughout. What makes this story really stand out are its beautiful meditations on love, family, and accepting who you are. A Wrinkle in Time is perhaps our household’s most beloved story; I’ve read it aloud at least three times, and I expect I’m not done yet.

The graphic version, adapted by Hope Larson, is fantastic. We started with it before moving onto the full, unabridged novel. And although we’ve tried the sequels (there are five books in the series), none have been enjoyed nearly as much as the original.  

The Odyssey by Homer

This ancient Greek epic is not your standard children’s fare. But I know a bunch of kids, mostly boys but not entirely, who love learning about Greek and Roman mythology in school. They eat up all those old stories of heroes battling monsters and fighting next to their brothers in arms. What better book to read, for this group, than one of the oldest and most powerful narratives in the history of world literature.

Now, don’t jump right into the full text of the Odyssey. That’s enough to make an adult’s head spin, let alone a 10-year-old. For this book, I recommend going with an abridged graphic version that hits all the narrative highlights while retaining the classic poetic writing style. There are a few options, but the best of the bunch is Gareth Hinds, who has adapted a number of famed novels and plays into accessible graphic editions. If that goes well, consider trying the real thing — Emily Wilson’s translation is great — but don’t be too discouraged if it doesn’t hit the same.

By now you’ve seen I often recommend illustrated or graphic editions. Some people worry about this trend in children’s literature, but I see them as a great bridge between picture books and chapter books. If it keeps kids reading I’m all for it, and the visuals usually make the story stick even more.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis’s most famous book is also the shortest and most accessible title on this list. Combining mythologies and religious ideas, Lewis gave the world the kind of story that anyone and everyone can enjoy.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a rich, beautiful tale about four kids who find themselves in a hidden world that’s been plunged into an epic conflict. They’re drafted into that battle and are forced to find deeper reserves of bravery and love than they thought possible.

Our kids love all things Narnia, including the whole seven-book series, along with a few movie adaptations. But the book that started it all is still their favorite — and mine too.

Here are a few more recommendations from Brett and Kate that the McKay children especially enjoyed:

• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
• My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
• Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
• The Curse of the Blue Figurine by John Bellairs

Reading aloud doesn’t have to end when kids learn to read on their own. In fact, these middle-grade classics show that it can get even better — and go a long ways towards raising confident readers! They remind us that stories aren’t just entertainment, but also offer adventure, tradition, and lessons that last a lifetime.

Keep up with all of my book reviews and reading lists by subscribing to my newsletter at readmorebooks.co.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The idea for the Art of Manliness came to me 17 years ago as I was standing in the magazine section of a Borders bookstore. As inspiration struck, I took my Moleskine out of my pocket and jotted down some notes, like potential names — I considered things like “The Manly Arts” before settling on “The Art of Manliness” — categories of content, and initial article ideas. Almost two decades later, the fruits of those notebook jottings are still bearing out.

That’s the power of a pocket pad’s possibilities, something Roland Allen explores in The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. Today on the show, Roland traces the fascinating history of notebooks and how they went from a business technology for accounting to a creative technology for artists. We talk about how famous figures from Leonardo da Vinci to Theodore Roosevelt used notebooks, the different forms notebooks have taken from the Italian zibaldone to the friendship book to the modern bullet journal, and why keeping a personal diary has fallen out of favor. Along the way, we discuss ways you can fruitfully use notebooks today, and why, even in our digital age, they remain an irreplaceable tool for thinking and creativity.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: 100 Ways to Use Your Pocket Notebook
• AoM Article: The Manly Tradition of the Pocket Notebook
• AoM Article: The Pocket Notebooks of 20 Famous Men
• AoM Podcast #194: The Field Notes of Theodore Roosevelt
• AoM Article: The Right and Wrong Way to Journal
• AoM Article: Finally Understand How to Keep a Bullet Journal
• Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks
• Charles Darwin’s notebooks
• John Locke’s Method for Commonplace Books

Connect With Roland Allen

• Roland’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. The idea for the Art of Manliness came to me 17 years ago as I was standing in the magazine section of a boarder’s bookstore. As inspiration struck, I took my moleskin out of my pocket and jotted down some notes like penitential names. I considered things like the manly arts before settling on the Art of Manliness categories of content and initial article ideas. Almost two decades later, the fruits of those notebook jottings are still bearing out. That’s the power of a pocket pad’s possibilities, something. Roland Allen explores in the Notebook, A History of Thinking on Papers. Today in the show, Roland traces the fascinating history of notebooks and how they went from a business technology for accounting to a creative technology for artists. We talk about how famous figures from Leonardo da Vinci to Theodore Roosevelt used notebooks, the different forms notebooks have taken from the Italian Zibaldone to the Friendship Book to the modern Bullet Journal, and why keeping a personal diary has fallen out of favor. Along the way, we discuss ways you can fruitfully use notebooks today and why, even in our digital age, they remain an irreplaceable tool for thinking and creativity. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @aom.is/notebook. All right, Roland Allen, welcome to the show.

Roland Allen: Hi. It’s nice to be here, Brett. Thank you.

Brett McKay: So you put out a book called the Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper. And this is a history of the humble notebook. And I think hopefully by the end of the show we’re going to find out it’s not so humble because if you look at any advancement in art, technology, economics, there’s typically a notebook involved. I’m curious, what got you to take this deep dive into the history of the notebook?

Roland Allen: Well, I guess there are two questions. There’s where did my interest come from in notebooks? And then what made me take the deep dive? The interest came from keeping a diary myself, essentially, which I did for years. I started in my mid-20s, and quite quickly it became a really important part of my life, and it still is. And keeping a diary, I started just to notice other people’s notebooks. And in my work, I’m a sales guy. I’m not especially creative. But in the publishing companies where I worked, the really creative people always had sketchbooks and notebooks which they would use to design things or write books or generally be enviably creative. So I would sort of notice them and always sneak a peek at them if I could. How did the book come about? I guess one day it just occurred to me that this absolutely universal, omnipresent, really simple object had in fact been invented at some point like anything else. And so I thought, well, where was it invented? And it was really hard to find out, by which I mean Google didn’t help. So that was what set me looking. And yeah, and it sent me off on this sort of wild journey which turned into a book pretty quickly. And you have the results in front of you.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And what I loved about this book, it really captured, I think, the love and the mystique that I think people have around notebooks. I know for me there’s something about buying a new notebook. You open it up and it just. You feel good. What do you think is going on there? Why, why do you think people are so drawn to notebooks and keeping a notebook and buying new notebooks even though they already have unfinished notebooks at home? What’s going on there, you think?

Roland Allen: I think partly there’s a promise. There’s potential, isn’t there? It’s like any vaguely improving thing. It tells you that you can be a better version of yourself. I think you can be a bit more creative, you can be better organized, you can write that novel or you can start keeping a journal or you can get really on top of your workload. I think that promise is in the blank pages, I think. But also you find it inviting. A lot of people actually, particularly who aren’t long term notebookers, do find it a little bit intimidating, almost the blank page and they get a bit frightened of it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve known people like that. They’ll buy a really nice journal and they won’t write in it, like, well, I just want to make sure what I write in it is good.

Roland Allen: Yeah, it’s got to be perfect. And that’s not the right attitude at all.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So let’s talk about the history of the notebook. What did humans use to keep track of notes before paper notebooks existed?

Roland Allen: There were three main things and we’re talking about Europe here. It’s largely a European story that I tell in the book, although I’m not arrogant enough to think that that’s the entire world. But they used parchment, which is very tough. It’s very expensive. It’s very tricky to write on. It’s very hard to use parchment if you’re not sitting at a desk and in effect you’re painting onto the page when you write on parchment. So it’s not the most practical medium.

Brett McKay: For those who aren’t familiar. What is parchment? I’m sure people have heard, like, oh, this is parchment. But, like, what is parchment made out of?

Roland Allen: A parchment is basically a kind of leather. It is animal hide, which has been stretched very thin, so it’s been tensioned while it’s been, I guess, cured. But it is leather and it’s made out of the same stuff as your boots are, and it does therefore last forever. It’s incredibly tough, it’s very robust, but it’s very thick pages. So if you have a parchment book with 100 pages, it’s like a brick, but it’s a very tough material. And as I say, if you can sit down on your desk, it’s a great material. Then you have papyrus, which came out of Egypt, which the ancient Egyptians famously used, but also the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans used a lot of papyrus, and it’s much easier to use for sort of quick and dirty writing. And it was very cheap, but it falls apart over time. It’s very, very hard to keep papyrus together, which is why it basically only survives in Egyptian tombs, which are sort of the driest, stillest places in the entire world. So the Romans had a lot of literature on papyrus, but it’s all gone. And then the third thing, which is, in a way the most interesting, were these little wax tablets which people all over the Mediterranean used and the Middle east used for thousands of years.

And these were very much the notebooks of their day. You’d have a little pair of wooden frames, if you like, which opened, like those little picture frames with a hinge in the middle, and you’d have wax on the insides, which you could scrape into with a stylus. And so you could fill up these pages with scratched writing. And then when you filled the page or didn’t need it again, you could just wipe it clean. Now, obviously, that’s really, really useful if you want to just make a shopping list or keep a quick list of something that’s going on. But it’s not so practical if you’ve got something like a contract, which you want to preserve forever and never change. So all of these mediums had their advantages and disadvantages.

Brett McKay: I thought that was interesting, the handheld wax tablets. There’s actually mosaics of a woman, and it looks like she’s using almost like a PalmPilot. It was really bizarre to see.

Roland Allen: Yeah.

Brett McKay: It’s like, wow, this is like thousands of years old, but it looks like she’s got a little PDA in her hand.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And they were absolutely used everywhere for maybe 2,000 years or probably more. They were really, really good. Little bit of technology, and then they vanished with paper, basically, because paper was so much more practical.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And during this time, what did people keep track of? I mean, today we use a notebook for all sorts of things. What were people keeping track of on their handheld tablets or parchment or papyrus?

Roland Allen: Well, one of the interesting things which I found out during the book is really that people’s lives back then were as complicated almost as ours are now, or rather that they were certainly as varied. So people had shopping lists, they had anything to do with their businesses. If they were buying and selling or making, they inevitably had to take notes about their customers or the money that they borrowed or lent, et cetera. And so any kind of business, it was very important. But also, people were writing down prayers and poems, any kind of what we would call literature. But obviously they didn’t have printed books in those days. So if you wanted to have poems or any kind of writing in your house, you had to have it basically in a notebook or something like that.

Brett McKay: Okay. So these three mediums, parchment, papyrus, tablets, they allowed you to get stuff down and keep it there. But they all had their downsides. Parchment too heavy, too expensive. Papyrus didn’t last very long. The wax handheld tablets good for shopping list, and very ethereal type things that you could just erase at the end of the day. But you talk about. There was a big change that happened in the 1200s in Italy that basically revolutionized the notebook and created almost the notebook that we have today. So what was going on in Italy in the 1200s that led to the development of the paper notebook?

Roland Allen: They… It was a really important moment in history, I think, and it was a real technological leap forward. So they got hold of paper from the Spanish, and the Spanish got hold of paper from the Arabs or the Islamic occupiers of what is now Valencia. And for hundreds of years, they’d been making paper there as part of the Islamic caliphates, and they got really, really good at it. And then when the king of Catalonia, who was a guy called James II, wanted. He wanted it, basically, he went out and conquered them, and he got hold of the paper, and the paper makers kept hold of them, treated them very well, and started exporting paper everywhere. Now, the Italians, what they did was they realized that it could transform their business because suddenly they had this medium which they could do business on, which was permanent and therefore secure. So if you had a business ledger and you wrote something down in it, you knew it could not be forged.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Why is that? What is it about paper you talk about in the book, that parchment? That was one of the key difference between parchment and paper. Paper was permanent. What was it about paper that made it permanent?

Roland Allen: If you write on paper with ink, the ink goes into the middle of the paper and it sticks there and you can’t get rid of it without destroying the page. If you write on a parchment sheet with ink, it just sits on top a bit like paint, and it’s very easy to scrape it off and replace it with something else, which people who used parchment did all the time because it was so expensive. So if they’d finished with a book, they wanted to reuse the parchment, they just scraped off the writing and it was as good as new. So. But merchants suddenly had this secure way of recording transactions, debts, deals. And of course, that enabled them to have much more interesting, complicated businesses because they could suddenly trust their information technology.

Brett McKay: And this allowed the development of paper and paper books. This led to the development of… What’s that? Accounting. Double book accounting…

Roland Allen: Double entry bookkeeping.

Brett McKay: Double entry bookkeeping. I mean, maybe people have heard this, but for those who aren’t familiar, what is double entry bookkeeping and why is it such a big deal?

Roland Allen: Right. Among your listeners, you’re going to have, I hope, plenty of accountants, plenty of people who’ve got double entry bookkeeping degrees or qualifications, people who have trained in any kind of money management. And I just want to salute them because they’re the real heroes of the story. Double entry bookkeeping is tricky, but it’s a very, very useful way of managing money. And it enables you to create a profit and loss picture out of quite a complicated array of deals. So when you talk about a company’s balance sheet today, you’re talking in terms of double entry bookkeeping, balancing credits and debits. When you talk about the profit and loss account, which every company does to this day. This was invented in Italy around the year 1300. When you talk about an annual statement or an annual statement of a company’s accounts, that was invented in Italy. They invented limited liability partnerships, they invented futures markets, they had very sophisticated insurance and modern banking, and they invented the company. So if you’ve ever worked for a company, you can thank these Italians. Back in the year 1300, they invented all of these things in probably around Florence.

Brett McKay: And it was all done in paper notebooks.

Roland Allen: And that was their technology. Yeah. And because there was so much cash flying around, Florence became one of the richest places in the world, despite the fact that it’s a small city with very few natural resources of its own. They were so good at money management that their bankers basically ran European business for 100 years or more. And their merchants and manufacturers were among Europe’s leading tradesmen, so basically because they were incredibly good at managing money. And that people from all over Europe would look at them enviously and say, oh, they’re doing it the Italian way. But they couldn’t quite understand it because looked at from the outside, double entry bookkeeping is quite opaque, a little bit difficult to get your head around. So it took quite a long time for other people to do it. But the northern Italians learned how, the Germans learned how, then the Dutch and the French and eventually even the British learned how to do double entry bookkeeping. And that is where the sort of the whole European economic model capitalism really comes from.

Brett McKay: And something that happened at the same time is you had these Italian accountants basically with their notebooks, their ledgers. And there were the artists around the same time, looking around like, oh, these guys have got this cool thing that’s. They got this medium.

Roland Allen: This is handy, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah, they got this medium where they can just look at things. It’s lightweight, it creates a permanent record. Maybe we could use that for our art. So how did Florentine artists co opt paper accounting books and then turn them into sketchbooks?

Roland Allen: I think it really was that simple. Imagine if you are an artist in a time before paper, then you can paint on the walls, you can paint on parchment or canvas, which are both inconvenient and expensive. You could carve wood or stone, but you couldn’t casually go out and just sketch something. And today’s artist, whether or not they’re a hobbyist or a pro, good or bad, can take it absolutely for granted. You can pick up a pencil, just go out and sketch whatever you want, or draw a picture of a person or of a rabbit or of a tree. But this is actually again, a sort of surprising development which people weren’t always able to do. So I think there was like a generation of artists in Florence basically, who saw their contemporaries using these notebooks, which were quite cheap by this point, for quite interesting business things. And they just picked it up and started drawing in it. And they realized or they discovered that if you draw a lot, you get good at drawing. And suddenly they were better artists than they would have been without these notebooks and turned into really great artists. A generation, I think, of great artists.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s when you see the development of perspective. Like there was an artist you highlight and you can actually see how you develop this perspective, where things. Because before that time when people drew things people have always seen those sort of like Byzantine type paintings where they’ll just basically stack people on top of each other. And maybe they might. The person that’s supposed to be far away looks smaller, kind of, but then it’s still not in perspective. Well, the notebook, the sketching allowed these guys to figure out, oh, if we do it this way, we can actually provide some visual depth to our art.

Roland Allen: Yeah, and they could try and try and try again, which is really important. You know, if they produced a drawing which wasn’t very good, all they had to do was turn the page and try again. And that was never really available to previous generations of artists. But this movement from business technology to creative technology, we’ve seen in our own time, because we’ve seen computers go from IBM to the Apple Mac and then you have Pixar and you have these amazing digital artworks which no one could have conceived of 50 years ago. And it’s a very similar story. It’s information technology being co opted by creative people and used in crazy new ways.

Brett McKay: And the other thing that the notebook allowed artists to do was not only could they just draw a whole bunch, but because it was lightweight, they could share things with other artists. So it allowed artistic ideas to spread faster than before. If you wanted to see a painting, you had to like, go visit a church or go look at this mosaic wall. Now, the notebook, you could just hand someone your sketchbook. Hey, what? I’m doing this thing with perspective or two point perspective. You should check this out. And then it just started spreading faster and faster.

Roland Allen: Exactly, exactly. And there was definitely training going on in artists studios which worked exactly like that, where they would have some really good drawings of feet in the studio. Notebook. Studio sketchbook. And then you would just practice drawing feet using those. And you would get good at feet, and then you’d move on to the next piece of anatomy.

Brett McKay: And during this time too. So you had the artists using paper notebooks for sketchbooks. You had accountants keeping the ledger. During this time in the Renaissance, you also had this development in Italy of a notebook called the Zibaldone. Did I say that right?

Roland Allen: I guess so, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. All right, so tell us about the Zibaldone. What is the Zibaldone? What was that?

Roland Allen: Zibaldone seems to have meant at the time salad. And it was a kind of notebook which was exactly like a salad in that it was all mixed up, it was all different kinds of things. It was basically just what you fancied having. So remember that, again, people didn’t have printed books to rely on. If you wanted to have literature in your house of any kind, it had to be in a notebook, it had to be handwritten. And a Zibaldone was your own personal collection of your favourite book bits of writing. So very commonly it was prayers, but it could also be songs, poems, Aesop’s Fables, translations of Ovid or other classical authors, or just the business of the town, proclamations from the town authorities and so on. Anything which was going to be fun or useful, people just wrote down in their own notebooks. And they were called Zibaldoni because they ended up as hodgepodges. You know, they were completely mixed up like a salad. And these are great because they’re a real insight into what people actually were interested in. And so some of them are a bit smutty, but most of them are very just enjoyable. They wrote down the fun stuff. It’s a bit like a kind of mixtape, if you like people copying down their favorite tracks back in the ’80s, as I’m sure you did, or I certainly did, and making these unique mixes. And no two were ever the same.

Brett McKay: I thought was interesting too, about the Zibaldone was that they were oftentimes intergenerational. Like a father would pass on his notebook to his son and then the son would pick up where his dad left off.

Roland Allen: Exactly, yeah. They were like a family asset. And you see it in people’s wills when they died, quite often even. And this was in a time when, outside of Florence, most people couldn’t read by really, the vast majority of people couldn’t read. But in Florence, where this went on, the vast majority of people in their wills would leave two or three books behind, and those were mostly Zibaldoni, which they would leave, as you say, to their sons or their daughters, and they would just be carried on in the next generation.

Brett McKay: All right, so they were writing things like poems, prayers, catchy quotes. Did anyone do any drawing or sketching in the Zibaldone?

Roland Allen: Yes, they did. And this is one of the things that makes them so fun, because these people aren’t by and large, trained artists. So when they draw, for instance, a scene from the story, like an Aesop’s Fable or something, it’s a bit haphazard. It’s clearly the work not of a trained artist. It can look quite childish, but therefore it’s really fun and charming. And again, it really brings the people to life who actually used them.

Brett McKay: Did they keep to do list or grocery shopping list in their Zibaldone, or was the Zibaldone was like, no, it’s only for things we want to keep for a long time.

Roland Allen: Yeah, I think that’s right. I don’t think I came across one which had anything like a grocery list in it. They would have things like recipes in them, though, which are pretty functional. You know, people would have cures for baldness, for instance, which would involve mushing up various grains or herbs or produce in olive oil and then smearing it on your head, that sort of thing. So they had that kind of list. But anything as casual as a shopping list, they probably just put on a bit of scrap paper, I guess.

Brett McKay: And there was no. Again, there’s no rhyme or order to the Zibaldone.

Roland Allen: No.

Brett McKay: It’s just, you just whatever you want to write, I’m gonna write in there.

Roland Allen: Yeah, yeah.

Brett McKay: And I think that’s a difference from the commonplace book, which we’ll talk about here in a bit. So it was just. It was like. It was like a tossed salad.

Roland Allen: Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay: Okay, well. And one of the most famous notebooks keepers during the Renaissance, I don’t know if you’d call his notebooks or zibaldonis. They’re kind of like that was Leonardo da Vinci. How many notebooks did this guy go through during his life?

Roland Allen: Ah, no, we can’t know, but thousands and thousands of pages. I think we have surviving 1,300 pages of his notebooks, and they estimate that that’s maybe a quarter of what he produced in his lifetime. So what’s that, about 5,000 pages?

Brett McKay: Wow.

Roland Allen: Which I guess is. Oof. That’s 20, 25 big fat moleskins. But some of his notebooks were oversized. Some of them were pocket sized. He actually wrote about how he used notebooks for sketching. He said he always had one tied to his belt. He never went anywhere without a notebook. If he ever had a thought, he could write it down. If he ever saw something interesting, he could sketch it. And he never stopped. He basically just never stopped. He filled pages of notebooks and sketchbooks every day.

Brett McKay: So give us an idea. What did he keep in his notebooks? Like, what kind of things was he writing down?

Roland Allen: Oh, Lord, where to begin? He had lists, for instance. He wasn’t super well educated, Leonardo. The education he got was pretty. You’d call it elementary. And then he went off to work in an artist studio when he was a teenager, but he was very keen on learning Latin. So for instance, he kept lists of Latin words. He did keep shopping lists and traveling lists, for instance, packing lists in his notebooks so that we know when he moved house, what he took with him, we know who he owed money to, who owed him money, etc. And then sort of these very mundane everyday things go up to incredible anatomical drawings, which he made from drawing dissected cadavers. He was way ahead of his time as an anatomist. But then there are mathematical sketches. He was obsessed with geometry and polyhedrons, so 12 sided things, tetrahedrons, that sort of thing. He was obsessed by mechanics. He designed things like ball bearings, we don’t know if they were ever manufactured. And then he designed these crazy machines which look like flying machines or tanks. I don’t think that they were necessarily ever built.

One Leonardo expert said to me that you’ve got to think of his sketchbooks as kind of him showing off a little bit, because his job was basically to be a genius. He didn’t actually do anything very productive apart from painting. And he actually didn’t paint very many paintings either. But he was kind of like a public court genius. And therefore the Duke of Milan or the King of France or whoever would want to pay him to be around. And his sketchbooks and his notebooks were really important for that because he could show off all of his crazy ideas, just turning a few pages and people would have their minds blown. So, yeah, so Leonardo’s notebooks are undoubtedly some of the best ever. And he didn’t really see any boundaries. He just wanted to write or draw everything that he thought of.

Brett McKay: The thing that stood out to me when you’re describing Leonardo’s notebooks was how much drawing he did in it. This is not like a Zibaldone, where people are just keeping prayers and writing things down. He did a lot of drawing, I think you pointed out. What he was doing is he was like the title of your book says, thinking with paper. He was taking these abstract thoughts that he had in his head and he was trying to make them more concrete by drawing them out.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And so, for instance, very famously, he was obsessed by drawing running water. So he could put him by a stream or by a watermill and he would draw the water moving over the rocks very, very happily. Must have done it for hours and hours. He was obsessed by hair as well, by drawing curly hair and looking for similarities between it. But he was always looking, for instance, when he was drawing the water moving. He was also thinking about fluid dynamics and he was trying to work out why the water moved the way it did, what forces were working on it and so on. So he never stopped asking why. And I think that’s what’s kind of inspirational about Leonardo’s career is he just never ever stopped asking why, why, why, why? Like a really irritating five year old why, why? And of course, because he was always looking for answers. He found some.

Brett McKay: The thing about Leonardo’s drawing, it inspired me because I’m not much of a drawer. I’m trying to become more of a drawer in my notebooks because I think there’s something to that idea of thinking with paper and like drawing things to help you understand things. In your experience with your notebooks, do you do a lot of drawing? Have you found any benefit to adding sketches along with your writing in your notebook?

Roland Allen: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Funny enough, I used to keep separate sketchbooks and diaries. I never really drew in my diary, but I always love seeing people who can draw doing a visual journal. You see so many of them online, people who go traveling and then they sit in the town square with the coffee and they sketch the town square and then write about it around the page. And I think those are so beautiful. I think those are wonderful. They’re really inspiring. But I just don’t feel confident enough in my own drawing to do that. But drawing is a great thing to do and you never look at anything as closely as when you’re drawing it. You never really concentrate on a scene until you’ve got a pencil in your hand, I find. So if you want to really experience a place, then drawing it is the best thing to do.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’d agree. One of my favorite presidents, US Presidents was Teddy Roosevelt and he was a naturalist. He kept journals where he talk about his adventures he went on and his observations of nature. And he did a lot of drawing and I was, I was pretty impressed, like how, well, how good of a drawer this guy was.

Roland Allen: Yeah, I did not know that. I missed him. But this is the, the hazard of doing such a wide ranging book. You, you miss all of the ones which you wish you found.

Brett McKay: Okay. So if you want to have a notebook like Leonardo, just write anything and everything that you come across do you think is interesting and do more drawing. I think that’s a good takeaway from that.

Roland Allen: That’s my takeaway. Yeah, yeah. Draw more. You’ll be very happy with yourself.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So this was a Renaissance period. Eventually notebooks started spreading across Europe and then you see this development of something that’s kind of like the Zibaldone but different, the commonplace book. What is a commonplace book and how is it different from a Zibaldone?

Roland Allen: So you should think about this as a reaction to the age of print arriving. So Zibaldone you have. Because you can’t have printed books, basically, commonplace books arrive about 100 or 60, 60 odd years after print and suddenly there are books everywhere. And suddenly, for the first time in Europe anyway, there are more books than you can ever hope to read because of this explosion in print. So everyone’s busy reading more and more books, which are cheaper than ever, and therefore it’s hard to remember what’s going on. Commonplace books are a really good method of taking the best bits out of what you read, organising it, and therefore you end up making your kind of own encyclopedia, which is thematically arranged.

So, for instance, if you’re a legal student, if you’re studying to be a lawyer, then all of the law books you read, when you go through them and you come across a concept like, I don’t know, divorce or murder or justice or sentencing, you take a little quotation out, you take a snippet out on that topic, you collect all these snippets from different authors and you end up with your own little law encyclopedia. But that could work equally well if you’re studying to be a priest or if you were just reading generally, or studying Latin or Greek or anything. So they’re much more organized than Zibaldonis and they’re quite hard work to make and they’re definitely less fun. But commonplace books are very, very good way to educate yourself to a high standard.

Brett McKay: So who were some famous commonplace bookkeepers?

Roland Allen: More or less anyone you’ve heard of between about the year 1500, 1550 and say the mid Victorian period? So Shakespeare, undoubtedly, that generation of dramatists with definitely massive commonplace bookers in their youth, that’s how their education worked, that’s how they were taught. But basically anyone who had any kind of education in the period would have kept a commonplace book at school. And then if they carried on keeping them into adulthood, often they became quite serious, weighty tomes. John Milton kept a commonplace book into adulthood. Isaac Newton used his stepfather’s as a kind of sketchbook, but he also would have kept his own when he was a student. So it was a really important part of education at that time.

Brett McKay: I think John Locke was another famous. Didn’t he write a book or a treatise on how to keep a commonplace book?

Roland Allen: He did, yeah. And this is quite a common thing because people recognized that it was quite hard work, so they’re always trying to make it slightly easier for each other. So Locke published this, as he said, treatise on how to commonplace, which seems to have been fairly popular. People seem to have listened to him.

Brett McKay: I thought was interesting about the development of the commonplace book. You saw people borrowing again from accounting. So I think accountants had different types of books that they kept. There’s like the main ledger and then there’s like a waste book. There’s things that were like, temporary and you shifted it over to more permanent records in the. The accounting books. And people who had commonplace books had a similar system. They’d have like a work a day notebook that they would carry with them all the time, write down things they came across during the day and they would get home and then they’d go to their main book and then synthesize and organize everything and that they track down that day into the main commonplace book.

Roland Allen: Yeah, absolutely. They would always be organizing their thoughts. And if this is one of the most important things you can do to help you understand things better or think more creatively, always try and organize your thoughts. It’s just a really, really good process to go through. It’s the same when you’re drafting a piece of writing or making preparatory sketches for a painting or a drawing, or just trying to work through what you’ve seen. A really good example of that is Darwin when he was on the HMS Beagle, going to the Galapagos and places like that and looking at tortoises. The notes he made on the spot were absolutely minimal, completely illegible to anyone but him. Very, very, very sketchy, in tiny little notebooks, which he could just put in his pocket when he was out and about. But every evening when he went back to the ship, then he would break out the big notebooks, he would organize his thoughts, he would write a proper journal and he would pull in facts from his reference library, which he had with him on the boat, and create something much more sophisticated. And then in turn, that goes on to be the foundations of the rest of his career on the evolution of species by natural selection.

Brett McKay: Do you keep a commonplace book?

Roland Allen: Do you know what? Literally two weeks ago, I thought I’m going to have to do this. I started one and what I did was I went and got a little Moleskine address book. I’m holding it in my hand now. You know, the sort which has the tabbed pages.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Roland Allen: Because what I wanted to avoid was having to go through and if I would need to write down the Alphabet and all the head words hundreds of times. So, yeah, so I’ve got those little tab pages down the side and I’ve made a few entries, but really, I should be making more. You’ve reminded me. But like I say, keeping a commonplace book is hard work.

Brett McKay: It does sound hard. And I think part of the reason why a lot of people don’t do okay, it’s hard. And I think instead, what a lot of modern people do, instead of writing things out by hand and taking the time to organize things manually, is they’ll use digital tools where if I highlight text on the web, it’ll go to this app that will then organize the notes. And I’ve. I’ve experimented with those things. I don’t find them particularly useful.

Roland Allen: No. And the reason they’re not that useful is because they’re really easy. So your brain doesn’t have to engage too much. You just. It’s no more complicated than, oh, that’s interesting. Copy, click, pi.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Roland Allen: And then you move on. Whereas if you’re actually writing something down in a notebook, you have to pause. You have to take five, 10 minutes to write it down. And when you’re writing it down, you’re concentrating on every word because you want to make it an accurate record. So. Yeah, so it goes into your mind, it goes into your brain. The work is very much the point.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the work. It’s not the writing itself. It’s the work you have to do to organize.

Roland Allen: Yeah, it’s the mental work you’re doing. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. That reminds me of when I was in law school. In class, you would take notes, lecture notes, but the thing that really helped the most was after class, I’d have to go and take those notes and then put them into my outline, which I guess you call my commonplace book for that law class.

Roland Allen: Exactly, exactly. There you go. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Okay. So if you want to do a commonplace book, you probably recommend, get yourself an actual physical analog notebook and make that your come. Don’t try to do this digitally.

Roland Allen: But I would also say, like, when I was a teenager. Making mixtapes, if I heard a song and I particularly liked the lyrics, I would always write the lyrics down. I had a notebook which was just nothing but snippets of Bob Dylan and things like that and which actually I didn’t know, but that was my Zibaldone and I would recommend that, really, if just anything you read, which you like, just write it down in a notebook. Keep it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So after you talk about the development of the commonplace book, what I love, you take these little side journeys and different fads that notebooks went through throughout Western history. And one you talk about was the Friendship Book. What was the Friendship Book?

Roland Allen: Oh, these were lovely. Yeah. So these, these started off as a kind of autographed book in Germany, and students who were particularly impressed by their professors would take them up to Luther or to Melanchthon and get these little notebooks signed and autographed by their professors, who were their stars, and then they would go off and study at another university. Because in those days when you studied at university, you were expected to travel from place to place quite a lot. You didn’t really root yourself in one place. And when you arrived in your new town, you would whip out your autograph book and you would show it to professor so and so, and you would say, look, I am friends with professor such and such over in that other town. And he would say, ah, well, you must be a clever young chap. So this is what Germans did, and then the Dutch got hold of it, and this is around the year 1600 or so, and they made it into something much more fun, which was the Friendship Album. So it wasn’t just for students and professors anymore, it was for anyone. And when you went out for dinner with new people, you would take your friendship book, your album Amicorum in Latin, and if you met someone interesting, you would whip it out and say, it’s so nice to meet you.

Could you dedicate yourself into my book? You would give them a page of your book, they would write down a little prayer again, or a snippet of poetry, or a motto of proverb, or they would do a sketch of something and hand it back, and that would be a little record of your friendship. And you can see thousands of these things have survived in Holland. They were hugely popular. And you can see people making these little social networks in these notebooks and recording their friendships for again passing down through generation after generation. And of course, you have people like Rembrandt or the other great Dutch painters would leave sketches in people’s notebooks. So these are now incredible little works of art in their own right. But they’re lovely. I mean, really, really nice things, really. Strangely, no one ever did it, apart from the Dutch. We don’t really know why they did it. For a couple hundred years and then they kind of just stopped. It petered out. But it was such a nice habit to be in for those couple of centuries.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it sounds like it was like the 1600 version of Dutch Facebook.

Roland Allen: Yeah, it exactly was. You’re exactly right. Yeah.

Brett McKay: That’s funny. Another thing you talk about in the book is do a chapter about the role of notebooks in traveling. What role did the notebook play in the lives of travelers?

Roland Allen: Well, it’s really interesting. People seem to have an impulse when they go traveling to write a diary, to keep a journal. It seems very natural. But people did this when they would never have dreamt of keeping a diary at home. So you have people like Marco Polo, for instance, who kept an amazing travel journal when he was in China, but then any kind of traveler afterwards would. And then these became a kind of literary sub genre, because when people went traveling, they would keep notes, expecting it to be published when they got back if their journey was particularly remarkable. So, yeah, travelers notebooks are always great, and particularly if they are filled as well with sketches and things like that. There are so many wonderful, wonderful examples.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, going back to Teddy Roosevelt, there’s actually records of his travel journals that he kept as a boy when he did this European tour. And I think he also went to Egypt, and he drew pictures of the things he saw in Egypt and writing about how it was boring on the ship and that sort of thing. It was really cool.

Roland Allen: Yeah, that’s amazing things.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then I guess the most famous travel journal would be or travel notebook keeper, Charles Darwin. You mentioned him earlier. He kept, like, a notebook with him all the time where he just kind of wrote slipshod notes that he could later transcribe in his main notebook and that eventually. And what’s crazy, on these little notebooks, you can see him develop the theory of evolution in real time.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And also, he seems to have been a really nice guy, Charles Darwin. He was very chatty. He was not secretive at all. He would share his ideas with whoever he met, but he would also whip out his notebooks, and if anyone said anything interesting, he’d be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. And he would make a little note of their conversation, and then that would get fed into his. His writing later on. So he absolutely never stopped taking notes.

Brett McKay: Wasn’t there. There’s like an excerpt from one of, I think, maybe a diary or a notebook that he had about marriage. Like he was doing this pro and con list of whether or not to get married.

Roland Allen: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And he sort of weighs up the cost of his independence against the sort of the benefits of companionship and not being lonely and things like that. In the end, he plumps to get married. And fortunately he made a very happy marriage and it worked out well for him. But he did have to think it through before. He did.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you talk about too, the history of the diary. And I thought, this is interesting. So notebooks had been around, like the paper notebook around since about 1200s. And people had commonplace books, the Zibaldones, they had ledger books, they had sketchbooks. There weren’t a lot of people who were using their notebooks to write about their thoughts and feelings.

Roland Allen: They really didn’t. It’s so, so strange when you think of people who buy moleskins these days. They’re doing it basically to write journals, a lot of them, and it’s a completely normal thing to do, but for hundreds of years no one did it. And when I was researching, I’d keep on coming across mention of a notebook which was called the Diary of so and so. And then I’d go and look at it and it wouldn’t be a diary at all. It would be an account book or it would be a business notebook, or it would be a town chronicle or something like that. It would never be a personal diary. Like, here’s what I did today. I got up, I had this breakfast and how did I feel?

Brett McKay: Yeah, and it was funny too. Even if you look at these notebooks from the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s, people would sometimes talk about children dying, but it’s almost like they were just keeping track of livestock. They never talked about, like, oh, I felt sad, I’m grieving. You know what most people do today with a notebook, if a child died? They didn’t do that.

Roland Allen: Yeah, no, it was very much because it was to do with accounting. And I don’t mean that in a cold way, but they viewed it as that. Rather, they wrote about these terrible events and wonderful events. They wrote about the birth of children as well. They would mark the day, but again, there was no emotion really. Sometimes they would, for instance, write a prayer or they would write a little formula saying how sad they were. But then two years later, another child would die and they would write exactly the same thing. So it was a formula rather than a genuine feeling pouring onto the page.

Brett McKay: So when did diary keeping, the way we know it today, is the sort of self reflective notebook. When did that come to be a thing?

Roland Allen: Well, this is England’s moment to shine. So for most of the story, England is this terrible backwater inhabited by thugs, very poor education and muddy roads and all that. But for some reason, around the year 1600, in England, they do invent the diary, the daily diary as we know it. We don’t really know why. Various theories out there, but I’m not convinced by any of them. I can’t think of any explanation myself. But by the year 1600, it was definitely a fashion which, for instance, people in plays could refer to. So there’s a play by Ben Jonson from 1604 in which one of his characters writes a diary and people take the piss out of him for it, and he’s very humiliated. And everyone’s familiar with that. I think the idea that some stranger reading your diary is a terrible humiliation. So by then, by 1600, people were keeping diaries. We know that, but where it came from, we have no idea.

Brett McKay: And you talk about. They kind of went out of style in the 1940s. What do you think was going on there?

Roland Allen: I think time, actually the mass media comes along. Imagine 120 years ago. Imagine in 1900, you don’t have radio, you don’t have any Internet, you don’t have the movies, don’t have any tv. What do you do in the evenings? You read. Okay. You chat, you talk, you sing, you play instruments. But you’ve just got quite a lot of time, particularly in the Northern hemisphere with long, cold winters when it’s dark. You know, diary keeping is a good way to fill that time. And then over the 20th century, you have more and more distractions. You have the cinema, you have the radio. You then have the tv, and then you have the Internet. And every time, it chips away at people’s evenings, essentially. So it became harder and harder, I think, to find the time just to sit down and think, okay, I’ll think about what I did today for half an hour. And I find it difficult to carve out the time.

Brett McKay: No, I agree. And something else you point out in the book is that keeping a diary has declined in the west because we live in a peaceful time. And you can see that in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was during times of war that sales of diaries or journals would spike.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And this is, I’m sure, true to this day. Whenever there is some upsetting, traumatic event, your world turns upside down. People start keeping diaries, which is why teenagers keep diaries, because their lives are in turmoil automatically because of hormone poisoning, as someone said to me. So teenagers keep diaries and people in war zones keep diaries for the same reason. And I think anywhere you’ll see it now, I’m sure in Ukraine, for instance, there’ll be a lot of people keeping diaries who didn’t before.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve seen that in my own life. I was a big journal keeper in high school and then the early part of young adulthood, and then I remember. And if I look back at what I wrote, it was a lot of the. Just ruminating over, oh, here’s this problem, here’s this big decision I got to make. I’m feeling anxious about test scores if I’m going to get a job. And then I remember I kind of reached this point in my 30s career established, had a house, kids. I just didn’t really have the itch to write in a journal anymore. And I, I stopped doing it. But I’ll notice whenever I have a problem going on in my life, I will bust out the journal to write.

Roland Allen: Very healthy habit. Really healthy habit. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When you talk about this. There’s research that backs this up of. It’s called expressive writing, where you just write, kind of stream of conscious what’s going on in your thoughts and your emotions.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And this, I think, was the single most surprising thing I came across in the whole project. You know, three year project, whatever it was, that writing your emotions down on the page then helps your body heal from physical wounds because it reduces the levels of stress in your body so much that your body is able to recover from, for instance, an operation or an injury or a burn more quickly simply if you write down your emotional trauma. And this is now they’ve researched it and researched it and researched it, tested it, all kinds of experiments. It holds up completely. And this blows my mind every time. If you go for a cancer biopsy, you will heal more quickly if you have written your diary beforehand. It’s absolutely baffling to me how powerful it is.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You talked to the researcher, James Pennebaker, who sort of the father of expressive writing.

Roland Allen: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And I think one of the things he noted too, is that in order to make expressive writing effective, you don’t have to do it all the time. Like you don’t have to journal every day to get the benefits, basically. So just do it when you feel like you need to do it.

Roland Allen: Exactly. And when I asked him about that I said to him, do you ever keep a journal? He said, yeah, yeah, when I’m feeling low or when I’ve got something to think about some problem. And I said, do you keep it all the time? He just laughed. He said, no, why would I do that? I’m fine.

Brett McKay: He also has some advice on how to get the most out of it. I think one problem that people run into, I’ve run into this problem when I’ve kept a journal, when I’m trying to sort through problems, is I end up doing a lot of ruminating, just bellyaching. And it’s not very productive because I’m always asking, why is this happening? And why that one bit of advice? Instead of asking why in your journal, ask how and what? Because that’ll give you better, more concrete answers.

Roland Allen: Interesting. Okay. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Because it’s often hard to pinpoint why something happened. And then also what writing does in general is it forces you because it’s very logical and linear. You have to call in your prefrontal cortex. So it calms you down if you’re really emotional. So it gets you to think more clearly and turns your emotions into actual thoughts.

Roland Allen: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay: You have this fun chapter on bullet journaling and I’m sure our listeners, if they’ve been on Instagram, they’ve seen pictures of people’s really cool looking bullet journals. Tell us about the history of bullet journaling. When did that get started?

Roland Allen: So I guess people have been keeping lists obviously, and checking them off since they were able to write anything down. Ryder Carroll, however, sort of taken the list and turned it into a kind of, I wouldn’t say art form, but a very sophisticated way of organizing your thoughts and feelings. And the reason he felt driven to do this was because he had very pronounced ADHD, which made school life for him impossibly difficult. He couldn’t concentrate, he couldn’t focus, he couldn’t get anything done. He was constantly being shouted at by his teachers, et cetera. And school was miserable for him until, I think at college, I want to say he started just writing things down in lists in bullet pointed lists. And he did it with everything. And this kind of had a transformative effect on how he was able to approach his day because it helped him to focus.

It helped him break big, unmanageable tasks down into small, actionable little things and therefore complete things. And he went from being this sort of constant headache for his teachers and his parents to being super, super productive, very entrepreneurial. I’ve got to say, he’s a lovely guy anyway, but he’s also incredibly productive and gets a lot done with his time in a really interesting way. And he invented the Bullet Journal thing, which is essentially a really ingenious way of creating lists that organize your thoughts and organize your day. And it took off. He wrote a couple of books and has thousands of hundreds of thousands probably of people who have gotten his little method now and use it to organize their lives and benefit from it.

Brett McKay: What I think is interesting about the Bullet Journal is the visual aspect of it. Whenever you look at them, there’s lists. People just kind of keep it to a list. But sometimes people get really fancy and they add in little pictures and drawings and they kind of look like Zibaldonis sometimes when you look at the pages.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And again, the feeling of making something with your hands, I think, is really powerful. So every time you fill up a page of a notebook like that and tick everything off and you can look back and think, yeah, I’ve really accomplished something.

Brett McKay: Have you experimented with bullet journaling in your notebooking?

Roland Allen: Not formally, but all of my notebooks are full of lists.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Roland Allen: Full of lists. So I’m a great believer in lists and therefore I’m a kind of bullet journaler. But I never had the ADHD type issues, which Ryder did.

Brett McKay: So after your deep dive into the history of the notebook, what do you think is the future of the notebook?

Roland Allen: I don’t think it’s going to go away. I think a conversation I often have is people sort of waving their iPads and saying, oh, aren’t these things going to take over? But what we’re seeing, I think, is a reaction to it. When people like you, you’re saying that Evernote or whatever doesn’t seem to work for you as well as a commonplace book does. So you’re going back to keeping a commonplace book or a written notebook. That’s quite a common experience. People are realizing now, certainly the scientists all know, the psychologists all know, that writing by hand is better in terms of learning and it’s better in terms of thinking things through than typing all the time. So I don’t think that notebooks are going to go away anytime soon. People are always experimenting as well, with these clever kinds of half notebook, half iPad things, the remarkable tablet, things like that. And they have their place, I think, particularly in the office. But I don’t see the next Leonardo da Vinci using a notable tablet.

Brett McKay: How do you combine your use of an analog notebook with digital tools?

Roland Allen: I try and go through a handwritten phase with every project. I mean, not when I’m bashing out emails for work, because I have a day job as well, but When I’m doing anything creative for work or anything kind of strategic or trying to do any kind of deep thought, then I pick up a pencil first rather than go straight to typing. And then when it’s my own creative work, anything I’m writing, I’m writing another book at the moment and thinking about the book after that. It’s all in notebooks to begin, and they’re full of spidergrams and little charts and graphs and lists and notes from what I’m reading. And I’ve become more organized over time with that. So now I keep a notebook, basically, or a series of notebooks for every chapter I’m working on. Then my notes are pretty organized, which they certainly weren’t six years ago when I started writing about notebooks. My notes from then that time are really haphazard, but now they’re very organized.

Brett McKay: Do you refer back to your notebooks from old projects at all?

Roland Allen: Ha! That’s interesting. Yeah, I did. I had a quick flick through the notebook ones once fairly recently, and they were just horrible. It was so like the ones I use, the ones I make now are so much better organized. And it’s interesting that I sort of really educated myself on the journey and I found so many examples of really good note taking which I could essentially copy. Yeah. So my old notebooks, my old writing notebooks are pretty horrible. The ones I make at the moment now I like a lot. I’m sure I’m going to hold on to them for a long time.

Brett McKay: Well, Roland, it’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Roland Allen: Well, the book is out in the States. It’s published by Biblioasis, who are a fine Canadian independent publisher. And it’s available everywhere. Your Barnes and Noble or your local independent bookstore, or even online if you’ve got no other choice. But yeah, so seek it out. The Notebook by me, Roland Allen. I’d be really grateful.

Brett McKay: And when you pick up the book at the Barnes and Noble, you got to check out the moleskin section. Get yourself a moleskin too, while you’re at it.

Roland Allen: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Roland, it’s been a great conversation. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Roland Allen: Thanks very much for having me. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Roland Allen. He’s the author of the book The Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, roland-allen.com also check out our show notes @aom.is/notebook. You can find our links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net It’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcast but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

I remember when I was a kid, and my dad was in his forties, Christmas shopping for him was tough.

By this point in his life, the guy had pretty much everything he wanted or needed.

Socket set? Had it.

Ties? He had plenty of those and didn’t want any more.

Briefcase? Acquired.

Cologne? He had his go-to drugstore cologne and bought more on an as-needed basis.

Even though he was pretty set, the one thing he still enjoyed finding under the Christmas tree was a new book.

My 12-year-old brain couldn’t comprehend it.

The one time a year you could ask for anything and all you wanted was a book?

Well, now that I’m in my forties myself, I completely understand my dad.

I don’t want or need much these days. But I always welcome a new book.

I’m sure a lot of guys can relate.

The holidays we need now aren’t those that burden us with more “stuff.” But more enticements to read? We could all use that.

If you’ve got a tough-to-shop for man in your life who’s reached the stage of dad development that my dad and I are in, below I highlight nine highly interesting, can’t-miss books to gift him (or get yourself!). While any book makes for a great gift, history books have broad appeal and tend to be a favorite genre of dads everywhere.

Merry Christmas and happy reading!

Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne

There are few books I’ve thought about more often since reading them than Empire of the Summer Moon. This gripping history charts the rise and fall of the Comanche nation through the story of its last great chief, Quanah Parker. The son of a Comanche warrior and a kidnapped white woman named Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah’s life serves as a lens into the larger clash between Native Americans and white settlers across the Texas frontier.

S.C. Gwynne doesn’t romanticize either side — he details both the Comanches’ tactical brilliance and brutal raiding culture, and the settlers’ resilience alongside their ruthless expansion. The book is particularly strong on the practical details of frontier warfare, from the Comanches’ mastery of horseback archery to the game-changing impact of the Colt revolver.

While some histories of the American West can feel either too apologetic or too triumphalist, Gwynne strikes a clear-eyed balance that makes the tragedy of this cultural collision all the more powerful. This is a great book to read in conjunction with Lonesome Dove, the greatest dad novel of all time.

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing

What makes this survival story so compelling isn’t just the unbelievable hardships Ernest Shackleton and his band of explorers endured — it’s watching leadership in action when everything goes wrong. Drawing from crew diaries, Alfred Lansing shows how Shackleton kept 28 men alive and hopeful after their ship was crushed by Antarctic ice. His decision-making under extreme pressure is a masterclass in crisis leadership: maintaining morale through months of darkness, knowing when to abandon equipment, having the gumption to risk everything on a desperate gamble for rescue. While other accounts of the expedition focus on the adventure, Lansing’s crisp prose highlights the human dynamics — how Shackleton managed personalities, delegated authority, and earned the kind of loyalty that kept every man alive through nearly two years of unimaginable adversity.

Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides

Hampton Sides is one of the best narrative historians at work today. His knack for making history read like a compelling novel is on particularly strong display in his biography Blood and Thunder. Sides uses the illiterate mountain man Kit Carson to provide a sweeping history of the American Southwest and the collision between Native American, Mexican, and American civilizations.

Carson emerges as neither hero nor villain but something more interesting: a man caught between worlds, serving as both friend and nemesis to the native peoples he understood better than most. The book’s account of the brutal Long Walk, when the Navajo were forced to march to Bosque Redondo, is unforgettable. While the scope of the book is ambitious, Sides uses his reporter’s eye for detail and gift for pacing to keep the story grounded and intimate.

The Last Lion Trilogy by William Manchester and Paul Reid

These are quite possibly the best biographies of all time. William Manchester spent decades crafting the first two volumes, covering Churchill’s youth through the 1930s with novelistic detail and psychological insight. After Manchester’s death, Paul Reid stepped in to complete the trilogy; while the third volume thus falls slightly short of the first two, all are eminently worth reading. What sets these books apart is their mastery of both the intimate and epic — you get Churchill’s wit and personal quirks alongside his towering historical impact. It’s hard to call any biography a page-turner, since you know what happens, but The Last Lion comes awfully close; the chapter on the dark days of 1940, when Britain stood alone against Hitler, is particularly gripping. Don’t let the combined 3,000 pages intimidate you; Manchester’s vivid prose makes them fly by.

Patton’s Prayer by Alex Kershaw

Old Blood and Guts — General George S. Patton — was a walking contradiction. He was a warrior poet, a mystic tactician, and a sensitive soul with brass bravado. Through newly unearthed letters and diaries, Alex Kershaw captures Patton during his months of exile in England after his infamous slapping incident, showing us a man who consulted medieval military texts, composed poetry about reincarnation, and fervently believed he was destined for battlefield glory. On the eve of his campaign to relieve soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge, Patton had a prayer composed that asked for good weather. Some saw it as a PR stunt, but Kershaw shows that it was a genuine expression of Patton’s deep, if unorthodox, faith. While other Patton books focus on his campaigns, this intimate portrait lets us see the man behind the medals — a leader who was incredibly profane, but deeply pious.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

I read this book over seventeen years ago as a law student, and it had a big impact on the ethos and mission of the Art of Manliness. It chronicles Theodore Roosevelt’s life from his asthmatic childhood through his transformation into a specimen of “strenuous living,” covering his years as a Harvard boxer, Dakota rancher, NYC police commissioner, and Rough Rider.

What sets this TR biography apart from others is Morris’ eye for detail and his skill at making you feel the raw energy of the man — you can practically hear Teddy’s high-pitched voice and see his big gleaming teeth as he bounds through the narrative.

While some biographers get caught up in hero worship, Morris gives us the full picture, warts and all: TR’s occasional pomposity, his blind spots, his sometimes manic drive. But it’s impossible not to be swept up in the sheer force of Roosevelt’s personality and his infectious enthusiasm for life. No wonder The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt won the Pulitzer.

The rest of Morris’ trilogy on TR is also worth reading, but if you’re going to get just one volume, make it this one.

In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors by Doug Stanton 

After carrying the components for the Hiroshima-bound atomic bomb, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine, setting off an epic survival struggle for the 1,000 men who went overboard, only 300 of which would survive four days of exposure, dehydration, and nightmarish shark attacks. In Harm’s Way evocatively details those personal accounts of survival while describing the historical context for the sinking of the Indianapolis, why it took four agonizing days for its survivors to be rescued, and the later controversial court-martialing of the ship’s captain, Charles B. McVay III. The greatest test of historical nonfiction is whether it can maintain a sense of tension and suspense despite the reader already knowing the outcome, and In Harm’s Way passes with flying colors. Gripping, frightening, and poignant, it’s hard to put down.

Grant by Ron Chernow

While plenty of books cover Grant’s military achievements, this 2017 biography pierces through to the enigmatic man himself. What sets it apart is Ron Chernow’s skill at revealing Grant’s complexity — the hesitant shopkeeper who became a masterful general, the supposed drunk who showed extraordinary self-discipline in wartime, the quiet soul whose determination reshaped a nation. The section on his presidency overturns decades of lazy historical consensus, showing how Grant’s pro-civil rights stance and willingness to deploy federal power against the Klan made him a more consequential leader than previously acknowledged. Chernow’s attention to detail and fluid prose bring fresh life to a figure we thought we knew.

Ten Caesars by Barry Strauss

The meme that men are always thinking about the Roman Empire may have gotten overplayed, but the sentiment still rings true. If you’re looking for a window into that fascinating period of history as offered through the lives of the men who ruled it, check out Ten Caesars. Barry Strauss’ book offers readable profiles on the lives of ten of the consequential emperors who defined and shaped the Roman Empire, from Augustus to Constantine. What makes this book particularly engaging is how Strauss draws thoughtful parallels to modern leadership challenges. Rather than getting bogged down in academic minutiae, he focuses on the human drama and practical lessons of imperial power. It’s fascinating to see how each emperor navigated the delicate balance between military might, political savvy, and public image. While some popular histories of Rome can feel either too dry or too sensationalized, Strauss hits the sweet spot between scholarly rigor and narrative flair.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.