Books+ Fall 2025
We're in a time of transition right now in the Western world, and it seems prudent to ask what we're leaving behind, what social experiments we've run, and what worldviews we've tested. What was successful, and what did not hold up? What should hold up? Some of the books below are candy floss, but they still reveal enough about human nature and the age we've been in to help me think about the above questions a bit. Other books reveal more. Plus, they're fun. You can call this a binge of English authors.
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The Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire by Tom Holland
I wrote about Holland's book Dominion, which looks at the role of Christian ideas in shaping the development of the Western world, here. The Shadow of the Sword is even more meandering and in want of editing (intentionally so?), but also fascinating because it sheds light on the many forces at play in shaping the rise of Islam. I know little about Islam, but it's more and more present in the U.S. in various ways, so it seems prudent to learn a bit about its deep roots. There is so much to this period of time that is bizarre, including the stylites, the political tradeoffs of the Eastern Roman empire, and all fighting over where to draw the still murky boundaries between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--and it's still relevant. Are chronically online streamers or posters a disembodied perversion of the stylites? (I hope not.) I suggest reading Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War before reading The Shadow of the Sword to add some broader structural pillars to Holland's narrative, particularly since this book really does read like a bowl of sloshing soup.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
I asked my teen daughter to read this book about a man's pursuit of hedonism and how his choices take him down the path of evil over the summer, so I read it with her. My daughter loves horror movies, and I want her to think deeply about how she uses her phone. The story held up. She complained about the fact that the book starts slow, an unfamiliar concept to her generation, but also found it sufficiently disturbing, particularly the scenes of mundane evil--the indifferent, shallow noticing of a dead body of an old friend--toward the end of the book. There is clearly a movie to be made here that's more or less a knock-off/tragicomedy about Kim Kardashian and her original selfie on Instagram. In this film, Ms. K must ruthlessly hide the post of said selfie in her drafts to avoid anyone seeing what's become of her soul, even as her life flourishes. Why her? Well, Ms. K is enough of an old/Millennial icon at this point for her to seem classical to Gen Alpha. The new gothic, even. A refreshing number of today's young have a stronger sense that the hedonism praised in the last few generations doesn't hold up. And as Wilde illustrates, never has.
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
This is a hilarious little book. If you find yourself lamenting the loss of integrity in the newspapers and other news sources you once trusted, you'll find this a cathartic reminder that the news business has never been something you should trust. Scoop is the story of a young Englishman accidentally sent to cover a civil war in a fictional African country and his unlikely success in the world of competitive journalism. It's a satire of Waugh's own experience as a reporter. I read it for the laughs. But it's also a good reminder to me to ask myself what I'm looking for whenever I pick up a media source: truth? confirmation of a narrative? cortisol spike? community? what to say in polite company? information? wisdom?
The Children of Men by PD James
This is the book version of the popular movie from 2012. I loved the movie, though I never want to rewatch it. Too upsetting. The book version of the story about a world in which humans have stopped being able to have children is quite different; it's thankfully far less violent. The sad reality, though, is that we're confronting some of the moral and political questions raised in the fictional The Children of Men now, thanks to declining birth rates almost everywhere in the world. James's book is a nostalgic post-WWII take on how to handle those enormous questions. I suspect that many younger people reading this book today would find her choices baffling--and that, in a nutshell, is the dynamic at play in the world right now.
Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder by Evelyn Waugh
This is another book that is better known as a movie. And like The Children of Men, this book is quite different from the film. Where Waugh's Scoop was rollicking and funny, Brideshead Revisited is slow and sober--an elegy to a time and civilization that died with WWI. The main character, Charles Ryder, becomes a close companion of the wealthy (but inconveniently Catholic) Sebastian Marchmain at Oxford, but the two men fall apart, and then Ryder develops a relationship with Sebastian's glittering sister, Julia. In many ways, Charles is a foil to Dorian Gray. Ryder makes similar choices for a while, but then turns away from that path. This is not a redemptive American novel, though. Charles's choices lead him to the army in World War II and to a Catholic chapel.
This is the first book I've ever read that manages to capture my own father's difficult-to-describe spirit, in the form of Charles's father.
The Problem of Pain
The Great Divorce
The Abolition of Man
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Everything that can be said about C.S. Lewis's nonfiction writing about Christianity has already been said. It holds up. These books are pearls. The only thing I'll add here is that it's shocking to me that the BBC asked Lewis to give the talks about the basics of Christianity that now make up Mere Christianity as a regular show during WWII. Times have most definitely changed. And the world is about to turn.