A Reading List for the New Year

F or those who, like the author and at least some of his readers, are afflicted by a pathological book-browsing habit, scouring beginning-of-year booklists is a prescribed ritual. But where to stop scouring and begin reading? Below is a small selection intended to lead off. The titles, all of which are out this month, are, of course, to this writer’s tastes — but hopefully not exclusively so. May your year of reading be a rich one.

Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, Agnes Callard

It has been said that a proper philosopher thinks only one thought, but in endless permutations. University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard’s first book, Aspiration: On the Agency of Becoming, which appeared with Oxford University Press in 2018, sought to provide a philosophical account of how it is we become different people than we are — what it means to aspire, to create oneself. That book laid the academic groundwork for her latest, for non-specialists. Here, taking Socrates as her guide, she again raises the question of becoming, challenging readers to embrace the philosophical life of unceasing intellectual inquiry and the ongoing personal transformation that it demands. Often unconventional in her conclusions, Callard is endlessly inquisitive and a sui generis voice.

(If you like it, try Zena Hitz’s delightful Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life.)

Desire and Fate, David Rieff

During the dual pandemics of Covid-19 and Woke Fever, David Rieff’s newsletter, “Desire and Fate,” was one of the best things going — like reading the dispatches of historians marveling, from a calmer future, at our unstrung present. This book collects the entries of that time, and so offers not only an essential, real-time chronicle of a period of global madness, but also an interpretation of those episodes that remains incisive, provocative, and stylish. Rieff is not only an inheritor of good literary genes (his father was Philip Rieff, and his mother was Susan Sontag); he is also one of the best English-language practitioners of the literary tendencies of the great German critical theorists. Writers such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno specialized in miniature prose forms, particularly the denkbild (“thought-image”). Rieff is an enthusiast, too, of the short form, and in the age of the meandering blog post, he has the gift of pungency.

(If you like it, try Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. And don’t miss Rieff’s Substack, of course.)

Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License, Brad Littlejohn

How to think about liberty — its nature and its limits — is one of the important, if sometimes highly abstract, questions distinguishing parties on the contemporary American and European right. The latest intervention by Brad Littlejohn, president of the Davenant Institute, follows his 2017 The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty: Richard Hooker, the Puritans, and Protestant Political Theology. The new book deepens those reflections and offers contemporary case studies — relevant not to Christians exclusively but to anyone concerned with the conditions of spiritual, moral, and political flourishing. And for readers who follow intra-conservative disputes, it will help to draw a bit more brightly the lines that define different flavors of right-of-center political thought.

(If you like it, try D. C. Schindler’s Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty.)

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” published in The Atlantic in 2008 and expanded two years later into The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, was one of the original internet-anxiety essays. Since then, Carr has become an indispensable chronicler of our digital transformation. Neither mindless booster nor despairing critic, he produces work that is measured and contextualized. His latest looks at the proliferation of our communications technologies, arguing that “as communication becomes more mechanized and efficient, it breeds confusion more than understanding, strife more than harmony” — that is, our communications technologies, rather than augmenting the human distinction, eliminate it.

(If you like it, try Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience, which I reviewed for National Review here.)

Ballerina, Patrick Modiano (fiction)

All of 2014 Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano’s fictions are variations on a theme, like looking at infinite gradations of the same color of light. His newest is set in the world of the 1960s Paris ballet. Modiano’s plots are less important than the mood he strikes: vague, impressionistic, dreamlike, ever turning over the question of memory, individual and collective.

(If you like it, try Modiano’s Invisible Ink, also from Yale’s Margellos series, or his memoir, Pedigree.)