Happy New Year!
Welcome to the December edition of the Hardihood Books Newsletter. Thank you for reading and for supporting my work. I hope you had a happy Christmas or Hannukah.
Housekeeping:
No announcements at the moment.
Next Month and Beyond:
Next week, we will be publishing our second guest submission, and our first guest submission of a short story. Please be on the lookout and please share it with your friends.
Year in Review of Books: What I Read This Year
Longtime subscribers will know that my yearly tradition has been to reflect at the end of each year on many of the books I have read in the previous year. I enjoy reading other people’s lists of the books they read (or movies they watched, or places they visited) in a year, so if you’d like to share your own list, you can do so in the comments on the web version of this newsletter.
This is a non-exhaustive list. I read twenty-three books this year (cover to cover; not including audiobooks, or books started prior to 2023, or books I have yet to finish) – a decent number, but less than I’d like. Some of those books were very short and others were quite long, which I think evens out in the end. I try to read a mix of fiction and nonfiction, and as you may remember from past lists, I try to read in a variety of genres and on a variety of topics.
Many of the books I read this year were quite good, but far and away the two best were Arthur Metlzer’s Philosophy Between the Lines and Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions. Each book was highly complex, and each in its own way changed the way I look at the world – not in the sense that reading them changed any particular position or set of positions I hold, but in that I found each in its own way explanatory at a deep and fundamental level about the world.
The former makes the case that Leo Strauss was correct about esoteric writing, and attempts to educate the reader about what esoteric writing actually was (and what it was not). Meltzer addresses directly the arguments marshalled against the theory of esoteric writing, and demonstrates (convincingly to me) why they are wrong.
The latter is an analytical work about the deep and enduring political divide between two competing worldviews (which often maps onto left and right, but not in all cases), which precedes and runs beneath the debates of any particular moment. Although anyone familiar with Sowell’s name will know that he comes down strongly on one side, in A Conflict of Visions he does not pass judgment or comment on the rightness of any position held by either side, nor does he show favoritism
Longtime readers will recall that once I year I read an ancient Roman historian (i.e., a primary source, not a modern historian). I began this year with Suetonius’s The Lives of the Caesars (or The Caesars). This year, I was rewarded in September to find out that I am not alone in my fondness for Roman history – although unlike some I prefer the republican Rome to imperial Rome.
Suetonius’s portraits of the Julio-Claudian and Flavian emperors are, for the most part, not flattering. Technically, some will quibble, questions regarding the veracity of certain claims made by Suetonius disqualify his as a work of “pure” history. However, this allegation would have to color all ancient historians, even Tacitus. Is Livy writing a work of pure myth,1 because he himself admits the origins of Rome were lost to time and he includes stories which everyone knows were mere legends? Are we supposed to assume Sallust fabricated Catiline’s War because he includes quotations which clearly could not have been verbatim? Ancient historians were more concerned with capturing the spirit than with strict factual accuracy. As long as you read with that in mind, you can get a quite accurate picture of the period in question.2
This summer, I read Jack London’s semi-autobiographical Martin Eden and also The Valley of the Moon. I enjoyed both, although the latter is long and difficult to like in the middle. Surprisingly, it has a very uplifting ending, which made it ultimately satisfying. What I found most interesting was the depiction of San Franciscan working-class life at the turn of the century, a depiction which is neither laudatory nor condemnatory. One notable aspect of this life was the widespread view among the characters that the American dream was dead (since the frontier had closed), and the opportunity their parents and grandparents had enjoyed no longer existed. The protagonists (a young married couple) have an impossible dream: some land to call their own, a thriving enterprise that supports them and their future children and raises their standard of living, and a happy life together.