JANNIK SCHILLING

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I have been reading more of the Great Books recently. I always had a propensity to get obsessed with a wide range of eclectic fields, such as cybernetics or differential geometry in the past, but only recently got into reading the Great Books more deeply. It now seems true that knowing the Great Books well has a high payoff – at the very least, it helps with thinking and writing.

Most of the books were recommended to me by friends based on my interests at the time. I have also been traveling a fair amount and visited a few bookstores, e.g. Daunt in London, Dog Eared Books in SF, and Unity Books in Auckland, where I picked books that seemed interesting. The former clearly leads to less quality variance and seems like the better approach, although visiting a bookstore like Daunt every now and then clearly seems worthwhile for getting exposure to different kinds of books.

I plan to share more of my readings every few months¹. If you know books that you think I should read, please DM me on Twitter. Note that none of my remarks are endorsements of the books, but rather commentary on my reading experience. If you would like to read longer book reviews in the future, let me know as well.

Fiction

1. Joan Didion: A Book of Common Prayer, Play It As It Lays, The Last Thing He Wanted, Democracy. Joan Didion is one of the best writers I have read so far. Although her New Journalism writing style lends itself better to non-fiction, I enjoyed all her fiction books as well. They are rather short and I finished every book in one sitting; Didion’s books are hard to put down.
2. Alan Paton: Cry, The Beloved Country. One of the best novels I have read this quarter. Paton is a Christian writer and the prose is beautiful with lots of stylistic overlap to the Bible. The plot is centered around families in South Africa shortly before the Apartheid regime and demonstrates the disorienting experience for tribal groups to settle into life in Johannesburg, the irrationality of gold markets, and the growing tensions between different social groups. Highly recommended.
3. Graham Greene: A Quiet American. I like Graham Greene as a writer but this book did not live up to my (evidently too high) expectations based on Greene’s experience as a war correspondent and my friends’ reception of the book. The plot is set in Vietnam after initial US involvement in the country. It contains a love triangle (some of the Great Books have much better articulations of them though, see Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel), American exceptionalism (Pley) and the experience of a journalist (like Greene). The book is not bad to be clear, but it did not seem outstanding to me either.
4. Hilary Mantel: An Experiment in Love. A coming-of-age book set in England in the 1960s, special emphasis on the complex class relations and the pressure to excel, from the perspective of Carmel, a poor English girl. A good summary can be found here. Thanks for the recommendation, Sam.
5. Werner Herzog: Vom Gehen im Eis (engl. Of Walking In Ice). Short and enjoyable reading experience, written by German movie director Werner Herzog. The book contains his diary entries for a walk from northern Germany to Paris after he learned that his friend Lotte Eisner is dying in Paris. Thanks for the recommendation, Demren.
6. David Benioff: City of Thieves. Good historical novel, set in WWII Leningrad. Not outstanding, but a fast and good read.
7. Donna Tartt: The Secret History. This is one of these books whose relevance I can conceptualize intellectually but cannot understand intuitively as a German; it is about the adventures of a small friend group studying the Classics with an eclectic professor at a liberal arts college. I do not love dark academia, but it is well-written. Thanks for the recommendation, Asher.
8. Daniel Suarez: Delta-v. A fine science-fiction book about asteroid mining with some interesting ideas, but shallow characters. I am probably going to finish the second book of the series eventually, but it is not a priority.

Non-Fiction

1. Joan Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Blue Nights. All of them are great, but I like the first two the most. The Year of Magical Thinking is probably Didions’s most well-known book and a beautiful account of grief and mourning after the death of Didion’s husband; highly recommended. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is another well-known book on Counterculture in California by Didion; I first found the book through my interest in the history of SV and found it both beautifully written and insightful.
2. Annie Jacobsen: The Pentagon’s Brain, Nuclear War: A Scenario. Annie Jacobson is a great author and consistently picks topics around defense, security, and intelligence that capture the imagination of the masses. A key takeaway from Annie’s Nuclear War book is that “everyone loses” in the case of nuclear war. Highly recommended.
3. Leo Strauss: On Tyranny, Persecution and the Art of Writing.
4. Rene Girard: Resurrection from the Underground, Battling to The End. Resurrection: Girard’s interpretation of Dostoevsky’s texts remains timeless and made me put The Demon close to the top of my reading pile. Battling to The End: Strongly recommended for thinking about nuclear war in the 21st century and understanding Girard’s apocalyptic outlook on the future.
5. Karl Löwith: Meaning in History. Löwith introduces and comments on various historical accounts on the meaning of history and its theological implications. In contrast to most contemporary books, he works through these accounts anti-chronologically, which emphasizes how much our conception of history has changed over time, despite our belief in our omniscience about the nature and content of history.
6. Eric Voegelin: The New Science of Politics. Good book on Gnosticism and the problems of modern political theory.
7. Kishore Mahbubani: Has the West Lost It? A provocation by Singaporean Diplomat Mahbubani, who served as the President of the UN Security Council (2001/2). His theses seem more relevant today where we are facing an even stronger China and US foreign policy has come under more scrutiny.
8. Richard Sennett: The Corrosion of Character. Sennett follows-up to his book on American Class and argues that shorter tenure at American companies and more flexible working arrangements (time-wise and scope-wise), driven by automation, create severe problems for the modern Man. He observes that shorter economical processes infiltrate the family and the social life. It got me thinking about Communism in the current age: If Sennett is correct, why hasn’t there been a surge in Communist thought in a world of the “gig economy”? Is it because the rich paid off the poor?
9. Neema Parvini: Prophets of Doom. Similar to Löwith (but in chronological order), Parvini summarizes various accounts of “Grand history” with an emphasis on historians that theorize about the “lifecycle of civilisations”, including their eventual decline. It includes the thought of historians like Spengler or Toynbee. Pretty good although obviously inferior to reading the thinkers directly.
10. Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death. I have read some Neil Postman before and usually find his writing to summarize a pretty common sentiment in a more intellectual way. The same is true for Amusing Ourselves to Death, where Postman criticizes modern TV culture, how it creates a more shallow culture, and what the transition away from written culture to more oral culture means for us. Maybe we have less great novels published today because of TV?
11. Jennifer Pahlka: Recoding America. This is the kind of book that adds a lot of real-world context to a well-known problem: technological incompetence in the government. I usually don’t like these books; in this case, the context is actually useful because it emphasizes that conflicting and numerous regulations makes technological progress almost impossible. Thanks for the recommendation, Sam.
12. Marilynne Robinson: The Death of Adam. Robinson’s interview with Tyler is a good starting point if you have never thought about Calvinism before. The book contains ten essays on questions around Puritism (and why it is underrated) and religion and faith more broadly.
13. Keyu Jin: The New China Playbook. The first few chapters are useful for understanding China’s fertility crisis, how the one-child policy helped reduce career-related discrimination against women, and how state-owned enterprises work. The later chapters were not particularly interesting, mirroring common pro-China accounts. Reading views that one disagrees with seems underrated though.
14. A.C. Grayling: Who Owns the Moon? Not great for anyone with a basic understanding of space law, unfortunately. However, Grayling makes the important argument that (1) there is going to be fierce competition around moon resources and territory between different governments, (2) current treaties are an extraordinary achievement of international relations that could only be achieved in the political climate of the 1950s and 1960s but not today, and (3) these treaties are not sufficient to regulate or allocate moon resources and territories in the 21st century where the prospect of establishing infrastructure on the moon becomes more likely by the year.
15. James Dyson: Invention: A Life. I liked Dyson’s perspective on engineering, design, and being an entrepreneur in the UK.
16. Thomas Evan: The Road to Surrender. A 250-page account of how the US government thought about the Japan question after Germany’s surrender. It argues that nuking Japan was inevitable and illustrates how even after dropping the first nuke, Japanese government elites were highly reluctant to surrender unconditionally. The book could probably have been half the length.
17. Peter Thiel & David Sacks: The Diversity Myth.
18. Wang Huning: America Against America. Written by China’s “Chief Ideologue” and political scientist Wang Huning, the book reads like the Chinese version of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Huning writes about his visit to the US in the mid-1990s and mainly describes the tension between ideals and reality during his visit. Clearly influenced by Allan Bloom and somewhat reactionary, he presents himself as worried about American values, families, and tradition. He is puzzled by two phenomena: (1) How the US could rise to global dominance in less than 200 years, and (2) how the Chinese Empire with thousands of years of glory (stylized) decay so much. The translation in the printed version is terrible and most of Huning’s observations are banal; I enjoyed how he explains the concept of a credit card to Chinese people at home though. The most interesting parts of the book are the few critiques of America he offers from a Chinese perspective and how his thinking on this visit influenced his thinking on a Great Power Conflict. The book is apparently well-received and still widely-read in China.
19. Christian Brose: The Kill Chain. A good book; it argues that the DoD is not well-prepared for a Great Power conflict and that the US military is not taking sufficient action to leverage the information revolution.
20. Carl Schmitt: Land und Meer (engl. Land and Sea).
21. Heinrich Meier: Ein Dialog unter Anwesenden (engl. The Hidden Dialogue). Overrated and probably, at least partially, wrong and overstating the case. Robert Howse wrote a good rebuttal.
22. George Orwell: Books v. Cigarettes. Cute short stories by Orwell, recommended.
23. Norman Angell: The Great Illusion. The reason why this book is not commonly read today is that Angell (1872-1967) gets the future radically wrong. The 1933 Nobel Peace prize winner postulates in The Great Illusion, published in 1909, that the economic integration in Europe (mainly between Germany and the British empire) has grown so strong that a future war between them would be futile. He further argues that war would be economically and socially irrational, unlikely to ever start, and necessarily of short-lived nature. The most striking experience of engaging with the book was that a lot of contemporaries would not disagree with Angell’s arguments and perspectives, despite their historic track record.
24. Christopher Lasch: The Revolt of The Elites. Lasch offers a reasonably interesting critique of how modern elites share vices similar to past aristocratic elites but don’t share their virtues, while there is a growing disconnect and gap between the top and the bottom of the broader population. Written in the 1990s, the title is an antithesis to the 1929 essay The Revolt of the Masses and is still relevant today. Thanks for the recommendation, Linus.

Thanks for the helpful edits, Zi. C. (Sam) Huang. And thanks to all my friends for recommending books to me.