This is my first public “what I’ve read” list. It’s new, it’s rudimentary, yet it will take shape as I wade through mistakes, tinker with ideas, consider the feedback, and deliberate how I see it going forward.

The reviews below, many come from Twitter. I’m sure those are rife with grammatical errors. And some will have the “too online” feel of Twitter. I am speaking to the Twitter audience. But most of the reviews you will get the gist. And they are good enough.

You’ll also find a few sources of intellectual, creative, and cultural pondering that speak to me. You’ll find podcasts, writers whose prose I respect, writers influencing my thought, and we’ll see what else the tinkering brings about for the future.

Since 2019, I have kept an index and journal of the books I read. The main source is the Leuchtturm1917 Ex Libris reading journal. Unfortunately, they stopped making that journal (I’m on the hunt for another). Yet In that journal, you can rank the books between 1-6. One being the worst, six the best.

Here is how I dissect the ranking.

One: I can’t recall many books getting a one. Not because they were great, but if I find a book a stinker, I throw it out, literally. I don’t want my worst enemy to waste their time with that book.

Two: I read it, or most of it, but found it boring, delusional, trite, flippant, smug, wrong, banal, unoriginal, patronizing, pandering, and other terms. I do NOT recommend these books.

Three: Meh. These books I do not recommend, yet I wouldn’t say don’t read them. But I found them blah. I found the argument deeply flawed or misguided. Or I found the story or characters or dialogue mediocre, boring, confusing, or banal.

Rankings of 4-6 are books I recommend reading. 

Four:  Well written, readable, and interesting. The lower ranking here tends to be, if it’s non-fiction, perhaps the author injected too much ideology, or the argument is deeply flawed, or the author felt like he pandered to his worldview left or right.

With fiction, the story is good, but maybe the dialogue was flat, or perhaps the writing a bit too formulaic, or maybe certain characters are too stiff, cardboard, or an ideological stereotype that is eye-rolling.

And oftentimes, nothing is wrong with the book, it’s just my opinion that it’s a 4.

Regardless of the criticism, I still recommend the book and quite enjoyed it.

Five: A superb piece of writing, or a great story. It’s not in classic territory, nor is it a book I would likely reread. But it was a book or story I thoroughly enjoyed, gained insight from, or would highly recommend.

Six: I consider a six to be one of two categories and sometimes both: I would or will reread, and would do so multiple times. Or it’s a classic. Either it’s a known classic, like Fyodor Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment or Saint Augustine’s City of God, or it’s a book I consider that will be or should be recognized as a classic in years to come. This would look like Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities or Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions.

Some books are part of a deep read series. Some happen as a curation, some will be a one-off. I will note below if it is part of a series, or you’ll see the section of it’s a series.

Note, these series may be way, way out, as in a year. And some may be a few books coupled together over a stretch of time. For instance, for my Christianity Deep Read Series I currently have a bunch of books for it, and some are quite long, like City of God by Saint Augustine. So I might do a few here or there to break it up.

But here are some series on the horizon. If you’d like to join in, go here, become a member, and I’ll see you on the forum.

And many more. This list changes often.

Good Word Members get a heads up when I will start a series and can join in on these topics.  And they can read along and discuss it with me.

Author: John Barton

Start date: 08/01/24

Author: William Lane Craig

Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda Author: Megan Basham

Author: Raymond Chandler

Author: Victor Davis Hanson

And what’s next can change in an instant.

Author: William Lane Craig

Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda Author: Megan Basham

Author: Victor Davis Hanson

Author: Lenore Skenazy

And my wife listens to The Morning Wire in the mornings, I tend to eavesdrop on it.

1. Niall Ferguson The Free Press

2. Ayaan Hirsi Ali (and she’s Niall Ferguson’s wife) Restoration

3. Charles C.W. Cooke National Review

4. Ted Gioia The Honest Broker

My twitter review:

Someone once told me, “Libertarians have an answer for everything and a solution for nothing.” I agree.

After few pages, I was convinced the author was the guy in the Sopranos reading Nozick (scene below).

I wanted to like it, but I found it flippant, cynical, and something Libertarian intellectuals would stew over in the faculty lounge.

I also have a hard time with those who still take Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow as rigorous. That book, while interesting, failed replication studies, and is now known as shaky theory.

But in this book, it’s treated as gospel… AFTER… it was well known that book had issues.

If you’re young, or maybe oblivious to politics, this book can maybe get you close to a starting line to understand American political discourse.

The axes lens offered isn’t wholly wrong, but it misses much and is cynical frequently.

Scene

My Twitter Review:

The saying goes, “Don’t meet your heroes.”

Often, it’s true.

Raymond Chandler is a hero of mine, but had I met him, I would walk away saying that.

This book is for Chandler fans.

It’s part biography but what makes it distinct, Freeman goes down the rabbit holes of her Chandler sentiments.

She visits the 35 addresses Chandler lived at in and around the Los Angeles area. If you really love an author/artist, and often are a fellow author/artist, going to where they lived manifests an essence of the person.

And Freeman investigates the enigma. that was Chandler’s wife, Cissy.

We come to learn what a truly troubled person was when Chandler touched the booze. Chandler’s iconic creation, Marlowe, was an ideal I believe Chandler wished he could live like, yet outright failed, and this failure aggravated Chandler’s insecurities.

Freeman wades into fashionable liberal intelligentsia Freudian analysis. Such as viewing any ideal form or hyper-masculine behavior as “homoerotic.” And seeking to give certain females the true power while castrating any masculine offer.

Regardless of those moments, this is still a wonderful read for Chandler fans. We gain empathy and truth for Chandler. That he was brilliant, but we understand why only a handful of people showed up to his funeral.

It busts the myth that booze and drugs help creativity, we instead see how it destructs creativity and the creator.

Recommended for Chandler fans and anyone who lives or has spent time in Los Angeles.

 

Twitter Review: A lot of fun.

Intrigue, an invention criminally overlooked that changed the world, geopolitics, conspiracy, engineering, and the brilliant man behind it.

If you want the fun summer read, this one hits a lot of the right beats.

Twitter Review:

What’s not to love?

It’s got the ANNIHILATION of empires and its people, not just some dainty fall.

Constantinople.

Carthage.

Alexander the Great.

Hernan Cortes.

And more…

Plus Victor Davis Hanson at the helm.

Entertaining, damning, insightful, and masterful.

And enlightening on human nature, and how our nature plays out in foreign policy, war, savagery, pretensions and so on.

Wise wisdom is packed into this book, as is memorable history.

This will easily be in the running for top non-fiction books read in 2024. And I know I’m going to reread this at some point.

Masterful.

Twitter Review:

Meh.

It has some fun tidbits.

If you’re a fan of 1980s action you’ll find out some juicy but unsurprising gossip. That gossip, Hollywood is mostly Trimalchio’s feast — sex, affairs, drugs, garishness, and egos.

The book wades into Republican Derangement Syndrome here and there, and ends on a cringe note: how modern action movies are far superior since they are diverse and feature strong female leads.

I would recommend watching the movies instead.

Twitter review:

The movie (the original with Chevy Chase)  is far superior. And much different than the book.

The book is more nihilistic, the ending is lazy. It’s not awful, but Fletch possibly sleeping with a 15-year-old heroin addict hooker was cringe and didn’t move much forward in the story.

The movie expands the best parts of this book and delivers a character of depth, charm, and a moral code. The screenwriters for Fletch saw a much better story, and took the character to sonic levels. Thank goodness they did.

I had high expectations. I love the movie with Chevy Chase. It’s one of my favorites. The book is fast-paced, dialogue based, but lacks atmospheric detail. I expected and extended version of the movie, but instead got a jaded pedo. Bummer.

Twitter Review:

Hilarious and a great tale that could only happen in Florida.

Post my American Decline series, I knew I needed to read a bunch of fun books.

This one will be hard to top for fun.

Dave Barry is an American icon. He’s one of America’s greatest writers.

He’s known for his comedic writing, but what makes him special is his uncanny knack of depicting human nature. He shows our absurdity but does so with humanity.

A hilarious tale. Read Dave Barry, you’re life will be better from it.

Twitter Review:

A powerful current in our modern culture is therapy culture.

I found this book insightful. At times, especially earlier on, I felt it waded into sweeping statements regarding therapy on the whole, but much of that was tied up in the latter parts of the book.

The most powerful section of this book was about schools. Schools have become activist and therapy centers, and either directly or indirectly undermines kids resiliency and traditional family structures.

The part on parenting was also fascinating. She details the three styles, permissive, authoritarian, and authoritative.

The first two are the most common, with permissive being the most en vogue, and those styles have the worst outcomes. The latter is rarely done nowadays, even though many parents think they do it. This one is a give and take, but with an actual leader, boundaries, consequences (without them being carefully and emotionally detailed via the other strategies), and high standards.

I would have liked to see more on authoritative styles, and a bit more about therapy from those schools.

But all in all, if you’d like to understand a major current of modern culture, this is a fun and insightful book.

A few key factors influenced this series: reading the entirety of Edward Gibbon’s work on the decline and fall of Rome, the questions people asked me upon finding out I was reading Gibbon; and my living in Denver for fourteen years, seeing Denver begin to struggle around 2017, and my wanting to move away from it, and asking myself why did I want to move away from a place I once loved dearly, and a place I dug deep roots and a place that shaped me. And the question of why I wanted to leave really hit me hard since starting around 2020, I suddenly connected with a strong group of people.

That all influenced what I curated.

Twitter Review:The final book read for my American Decline series (I read 13 books for the series). And a fitting last book. It tied everything together for me. And pointed to a period just about all the other books pointed to.

Crowds of people claim the same ills and issues causing the decline and fall of the Roman Empire are plaguing America. This is false.

Other crowds claim we’re reliving what fomented the rise of the Third Reich. We’re not.

We are living with the consequences of Great Society from the 1960s, both good and bad.

To understand today, to grasp the sentiments, cultural fashions, political divisions and beliefs, the 1960s is the place to start. Amity Shlaes is a first rate writer. This book paints what Thomas Sowell calls, “tradeoffs.” A policy decision is made, tradeoffs occur. Shlaes depicts the facts and the atmosphere of the tradeoffs, which makes this book both enlightening and filled with tension.

That tension is from wanting to shake various politicians, scream at them, or to tell them to go with their gut instincts or core principles.

Much of today’s cultural and political climate are revealed here.

Well worth the read. The same goes for her other works.

Twitter review:

The penultimate book read for my American Decline series.

Steele shows how the new liberalism of the 1960s used a formula of: relativism to dissociation to legitimacy to power.

This formula, coupled with poetic truths, won the culture and polarized our country.

And the way forward, as Steele believes, is conservatism. He’s not calling for a one party state, as that would be a nightmare, but he’s calling on conservatives to gain ground in the culture, and to regain the vision of freedom and what it entails.

Steele is a lethal writer. How he’s able to pack so much into his words, and the clear argument he lays out, is a study.

Right when he seems unassuming, he comes on like a freight train.

This book paints what drives our cultural currents and policy, and it goes well beyond race.

Twitter Review: The 10th book read for my American Decline series.Absolute banger.

I bet it will be a top 3 book I’ll read for 2024.

Before I get into the decline bit, anyone single should read this book. A side-effect of reading it: elite wisdom on how to approach vetting, dating, and sex.

While it details more of the U.K. it’s the best account of the cultural forces fueling serious issues in the U.S.

Like the title says, the focus is on Feminism. Harrington lived and breathed the progressive Feminist lifestyle, but having her daughter was her Road to Damascus.

She aims her salty, poignant, and concise arguments at feminism, red pill manosphere, Progressives, the Pill, transhumanism, equality agendas, and more.

A big takeaway, how we look at relationship struggles through the lens of the Industrial Revolution. Even the desire to return to “traditional relationships” doesn’t look back far enough, is unrealistic, and the desire to return is too stuck inside the framework of Big Romance.

Basically, men and women focus too much on their self-actualization via the platform of a relationship.

Doesn’t go back far enough?

Harrington details the relationship style in the 1400s, one based on a complementary values, where both parents can work (especially knowledge work and the better opportunity to work from home in our modern era), and taking on the responsibility to create a family unit, and all the virtues that go with that.

She details the forces attacking motherhood, and it’ eye-opening. Harrington delivers robust history on the topic, and an even more detailed history on the ideologies of birth control.

The part on re-wilding sex, bringing consequences back to sex, is brilliant.

Her solutions are pragmatic and realistic.

The writing style is first-class and distinct. Heady, intellectual, philosophical, empirical, and then salty, tongue-in-cheek, and honest.

A remarkable book.

Twitter Review:

The 9th book read for my American Decline series.

This is a book “from the other side” so to speak.

After reading Alienated America, Coming Apart, Bell Curve, and then this, it’s eye-opening seeing how marriage is one of the most elite institutions.  And marriage has largely become the institution of the elite — the highly educated (college and advanced degrees) high earners.

Kids of single-parent, fatherless households, especially boys, are the worst off.

Despite money Twitter telling you that people who don’t go to college are doing totally amaze-balls, nothing could be further from the truth.

They are not getting jobs, the men are checking out of marriage, and single moms, they are raising kids who face almost little chance at upward mobility.

I had my gripes with this book.

I saw a failure to recognize in any way, the policies and philosophies that lended a hand to issues we see today: Great Society, Sexual Revolution, and the isolation that government policies tend to create.

Also black and white men of single mothers face the same issues, yet somehow it’s the fault of discrimination for blacks and not a lot else.

She makes a great point of how men are really struggling. And that we need to make men marriageable again. Agreed. Many men are not helping themselves these days. But with that, there is ZERO look at the other half, women. It takes two to get married, the other half needs a look.

Regardless of my gripes, and policy disagreements, I’m glad this book exists.

It has an endearing tone of wanting to solve what is truly a crisis. It’s carefully researched and well considered.

Highly recommended.

Twitter review:

Sobering.

The 8th book read for my American Decline series.

Money Twitter would hate this book because it destroys the majority of their claims and beliefs. And it destroys the famed bell curve meme.

The manosphere corner that says all modern women are ran through and marriage has nothing to offer would hate it because they would see how low IQ they are.

Returning to the real world.

IQ is a key driving factor for an individual on the whole. But since the 1960s we’ve seen a cognitive stratification in America.

Since the 1960s the economy and work has become far more complex. It rewards the cognitive elite, say IQ 110+.

And since that time, and really since 1980, America is more or less divided into an upper class and lower class.

But as the upper class becomes a silo, their policies handicap the upward mobility of the lower classes.

Fashionable ideas from the broad elite, such as “women can have sex like a man!!!” only hurt women in lower socioeconomic stations. Meanwhile the college educated women saying that Feminist trope, especially those with advanced degrees, get married, are less likely to divorce, have kids, and live a rather conservative lifestyle. And their kids will also likely live more conservative lives versus indulging in  “liberated” sexual lifestyles.

But what struck me most, is that divide. The more conservative “pull yourself up by your bootstraps and chase the American dream” is not really viable to many who are in the lower classes of our modern economy.

And the more liberal policies to help those in the lower classes only push down and isolate people.

What concerned me most, an activist education plaguing our future. K-12 through college morphs our best and brightest into what we saw with Gemini.

Also the obsession with the test score, or the tech handling it for us, has dumbed down critical and abstract thinking.

We no longer know what it means to be a civic minded person anymore.

And the activism, the cynical Progressive views towards America and traditions, along with things like transhumanism, are only dividing America. The same goes with the cynical, anti-intellectual new Right.

I did not find this book racist or determinist. I can see a disingenuous person trying to wield the book for their purposes. But it’s a book with a lot of empathy and compassion.

Quite the read.

Twitter Review:A sobering book.

The 7th book read for my American Decline series.

Red Pill bros would hate it. As it outs their truth: they’re low class, low IQ idiots pushing messages of isolation and societal decline.

HustleBros would hate it. As it shows inherited cognitive ability is the key factor in success, not pure motivation and discipline.

Also it shows that the rags to riches story method is bullshit, and hustle culture mainly sells to fairly well to do people who are already motivated. And that their advice doesn’t do anything to help people who are truly broke. It just cycles among people just like them – it’s stationary.

But moving outside my X circle…

A sobering book for multiple reasons.

IQ is at times like money, a radical and honest truth. It doesn’t always predict outcome, but it can be a race car vs a bicycle.

SAT score is a great predictor of what income you will likely make, and even what zip code you’ll find yourself in.

And since 1960 a class divergence occurred in America. Higher IQ people make more money, and they migrate to the best towns or best parts of a city. And these people are involved in their community.  To them, the American dream is not dead. Things are great. Lower rates of divorce. Lower rates of sexual transgression. And they uphold one of the most elite in situations in America: marriage.

We all know exceptions of some rich man or woman living hedonistically. But that is on the margins, and rare.

Lower IQ people have less available opportunity and find themselves in the stagnant, decaying, or blighted towns or parts of the city. They have higher rates of crime, more single mothers, more abortions, more “ran through men and women” and less marriage. They live the “alternative lifestyles” or they check out.

This isn’t saying one group is better than the other. But the upper classes in some ways keep the lower class out, via policy, ideology preached, or trying to have government handle it (which foments worse alienation).

The higher class maintains the 4 virtues that makes America exceptional and any community functional:

1. Marriage

2. Industriousness

3. Honesty

4. Religiosity

While those things are at scary lows in lower income areas.

What might be scarier, the well-to-do areas are starting to take on things like, less marriage, less kids, and less religiosity. They work hard, but when you get rid of the others, it doesn’t bode well.

A sobering book, but a book that isn’t nihilistic. In fact, I find it gives us the dose of reality we need.

A meticulous book well worth a read. It will destroy many myths, and will give light onto questions on the “why” of good and bad areas.

Twitter Review:The 6th book read for my American Decline series.

By far the most granular book I’ve read on American decline.

And it would likely upset many corners here on X. It destroys empirically many tightly held conceptions and beliefs.

For instance, the idea that wealthy people are isolated and bohemian is false.

The wealthy,  college educated, broad elite, marry each other, have lower divorce rates, are the ones having kids, and their kids are less transgressive, often are happier, and enjoy more economic mobility.

And while they are more isolated in their big homes, they are active in the local institutions – school, sports, town boards, etc.

It is the lower classes and non-college educated or non-degrees who have higher rates of divorce, childlessness, and out of wedlock children.

Remember that whole small town vs city debate?

Small towns suffer if church attendance is low and jobs leave. The people are more isolated, transgressive, and alienated.

Money does not solve this. If the institutions have left, money coming back to areas only fuels the isolation and alienation.

Small towns can and do succeed, but most in that town are college educated, attend church, the town has jobs, and also a bunch of churches.

Red pill dudes will hate this book.

Despite the psychosexual fantasies, college women on a whole, especially those with higher IQ and college educated parents from a strong community, are not “ran through!” They pick other men of the same IQ level, have less partners, and tend to have kids. As in, they aren’t banging everything that moves and dying their hair purple after a carousel of dicks.

And the men who philander and sleep around tend to be from the lower classes, and a whole lot dumber, and also financially poor.

Exceptions exist, but the norm is the majority here.

Twitter Review:My final read of 2023, and it ends the year on a high note.

This is the 5th book read for my American Decline series.

Noah Rothman is a gifted wordsmith.

Writing wisdom tells writers to use the best word. Rothman uses words packing the most effect. And how he balances Latinate and Saxon words, how he structures each sentence – an absolute masterclass.

I read Edward Gibbon this year. And Gibbon sits among the greatest stylists. Rothman is on Gibbon’s playing field.

For the writers in my audience, read this book. A lot of writerly skill can be gained from its pages.

For the content: considered, insightful, and enjoyable.

Most fare covering this topic either ventures into tossing red meat to a hungry audience, or points out issues of “woke” and then passingly blames Postmodernism or Foucalt or Marx.

Rothman is far more considered and deliberate.

The ideals, impulses, and behaviors of the Puritans imbued itself into American culture. And the Progressives of our modern era have picked up the Puritan flag.

If you want to grasp the psychology and nature of why Progressives wish to impose their will on everything, and lecture and moralize the whole way through and take any failure of their ideas to catch as a sign of a moral impurity, read this.

Superbly written, and timely.

And a fun aside, the boarding school I attended, Governor Dummer Academy (I refuse to call it by its new name, Governor’s Academy) was founded by an elite Boston Puritan, William Dummer.

When I was there, traces of the Puritans were abound, just like they are in many other elite New England prep schools.

And it’s ironic that much of the curriculum now adheres to the tenets of the New Puritans.

Twitter Review:The 4th book read for my upcoming American Decline series.

This was my 2nd time through this book.

Every American should read this book.

I’ll say that again.

Every American should read this book.

Hanson gets America. His Classicist background and salt-of-the-earth eye, provides granular insight into American decline.

If you want to grasp why populists decry globalism (and want to know what populism and globalism truly means) or want to know what the “deep state” actually is or wish to know what comprises the values of America and why tribalism puts those values into grave jeopardy  — read this.

This is so far the BEST book I’ve read on American decline.

Twitter Review:My 3rd book read four my American Decline Deep Reading Series.

Meh.

I like Douthat as a thinker. I enjoy his prose. And I agree with most of his arguments. I even agree with some his critiques of the Right.

But where he and I end up agreeing, how he gets there by circuitously pacifying his New York Times base, and offering palliatives for their worldviews, that got exhausting.

It was: here is something off, then a good argument, then a cynical explanation of the Right (how they are ethnocentric and Xenophobic) to appeal to standard NYT reader’s views, then he waded back into something more sound.

Still, I find merit inside his thesis of decadence. Mainly, the repetition of culture, the enervation of family, the politics as entertainment, and our growing isolation.

1. Democracy (e.g. political institutions)

2. Capitalism (e.g. businesses big or small, etc.)

3. Rule of Law (e.g. laws, lawyers, etc.)

4. Civil Society (e.g. schools, gyms, Lions clubs, bowling leagues, etc.)