President Truman famously noted that “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.”
History, of course, has validated this.
Search high and low across the globe, and you’ll not find a great leader who is not also a voracious reader. For example, President Teddy Roosevelt often read an entire book before breakfast. And President John F. Kennedy read six different newspapers, in their entirety, with his breakfast.
For more than 2500 years, philosophers and poets have shown us the success of a free society is contingent on its having a virtuous and enlightened citizenry, which only ever occurs in places where the populous nourishes itself with a steady diet of good books.
Like so many others wiser than me, I believe reading is critical to an enriched and meaningful life.
Books are our friends. They have the potential of rescuing us ignorant image worshipers from our platonic caves (That’s just another way of saying “educating ourselves.”)
But as Solomon, the resplendent king of ancient Israel wrote “…Of making many books there is no end….”
Since there will never be time enough to read everything that’s been published and everything published is not worth reading, it’s important to make our reading choices intelligently–and selectively.
Mortimer J. Adler called these selections, “The Great Books,” and helped publish a 54-volume set by the same name representing the greatest liberal reading (reading that liberates us) of the past 2500 years.
Harvard University president, Charles W. Eliot, was of the same cloth, and often said a liberal arts education could be obtained by reading for just 15 minutes a day from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf. He later edited the 51-volume anthology known as “The Harvard Classics.”
In the spirit of cultivating readers of great liberal literature, I’m publishing my recommended reading list here. This will not be a place to bore you with every book I read, but to share insights and promote the books I believe are worth an investment of your time and money.
This list will continue to grow and expand, and the format and function of this page will morph as I learn how to best present these books to you. From time to time I may write reviews and share how certain books have challenged me or shaped my thinking. I’ll post links to those articles here as well.
If you want to receive these updates or book reviews in real time, be sure to subscribe. It’s completely free. Plus, you’ll be the first to learn when I offer new products, services, or books–and various freebies I’ll be giving away occasionally as a way of saying thanks for hanging out.
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The Federal Trade Commission mandates I tell you some of the books on the list have affiliate links. That means I may get a small commission on some of the books you purchase if you use these links. Regardless of the FTC’s policies, I will never suggest a book I have not personally found beneficial to me in some way. Any monetary compensation goes toward keeping this blog online.
Biography/History
coming soon… thank you for your patience.
Christian Living/Ethics
coming soon… thank you for your patience.
Classics
- The Holy Bible
- The Illiad, Homer
- The Republic, Plato
- The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
- Selected Plays of Aristophanes, Aristophanes
- Oedipus the King, Sophocles
- The Greek Tragedies, Aeschylus
- The Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides
- Confessions, St. Augustine
- Politics and Ethics, Aquinas
- The Prince, Machiavelli
- The Leviathan, Hobbes
- The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Shakespeare
- The Divine Comedy, Dante
- Paradise Lost, Milton
- The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
- The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan
- The Poetry of John Donne, Donne
- The Heart of Darkness, Conrad
- Frankenstein, Shelley
- The Federalist Papers, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay
- Democracy in America, Tocqueville
- Age of Reason, Paine
- Origin of Species, Darwin
- Mere Christianity, Lewis
- The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe
- Great Expectations, Dickens
- Collected Works, O’Connor
- The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky
Ministry/Leadership
coming soon… thank you for your patience.
Novels
coming soon… thank you for your patience.
Theology
coming soon… thank you for your patience.
Writing
- On Writing by Stephen King
- The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
- Spunk and Bite by Arthur Plotnik
- The Elements of Editing by Arthur Plotnik
- On Writing Well by William Zinsser
- How to Blog a Book by Nina Amir
- Wordsmithy by Douglas Wilson
- The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
- A Pen Warmed-up in Hell by Mark Twain
- Ambrose Bierce’s Write it Right by Jan Freeman
- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
- Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield
- The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
- Do the Work by Steven Pressfield
- On Writing by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- On Moral Fiction by John Gardner
- The Art of Fiction by John Gardner
- On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner
- Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer’s Guide to Getting it Right by Bill Bryson
- Writers on Writing edited by James Watkins
- APE by Guy Kawasaki
- On the Art of Writing by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
- You Are a Writer by Jeff Goins
- The Terrain of Comedy edited with intro by Louise Cowan
- A Defense of Poetry, and Other Essays by Percy Byssche Shelley