What We’ve Been Reading—Autumn 2025

R. R. Reno
Editor

I’ve come to recognize that our standard stories about America are too one-sidedly liberal. We fix on the ever-widening circle of inclusion: overcoming slavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights, and subsequent crusades for liberation. This focus ignores another side of the American story, which is not easily framed in liberal terms: manifest destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, Teddy Roosevelt’s “new nationalism,” FDR’s New Deal, and every mobilization for war in our nation’s history. With an eye toward informing myself of this American counterpoint to our liberal projects, I’m reading Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, by John Milton Cooper Jr. 

A professor before he became a politician, Wilson is the only American president to have earned a PhD. He made his academic reputation with Congressional Government (1885), in which Wilson bemoaned the immobility of the American political system. He preferred the English constitution, which unites legislative and executive power, allowing for more vigorous action to meet the challenges facing society in the new and tumultuous industrial age. First elected to the presidency in 1912, Wilson gained control of the Democratic party and pushed through legislation that laid the foundations in America for the twentieth century’s political solutions to the potentially explosive conflicts between labor and capital. All of these solutions involved one or another form of government regulation and control of markets, industries, and labor unions—by definition illiberal.

I’m reading Wilson’s biography because we are living through another period of liberalism’s failure, born of its excesses. Unfortunately, too many reflective conservatives turn only to Joseph de Maistre and Carl Schmitt, among other astute critics of liberalism. We need to recognize that our American tradition provides resources for reflection as well, indeed, better resources, because figures like Wilson governed rather than theorized.

As I finish Woodrow Wilson, I find myself eager to read a book about the New Deal that is alive to its illiberal logic. After all, FDR sought to consolidate, guide, and control—very illiberal ambitions. As we grapple with the effects of economic globalization—the grandest experiment in economic liberalism in human history—and face the disintegrating effects of moral deregulation and open borders—also unprecedented experiments in hyper-liberalism—we need to learn from FDR’s successes and failures. And more importantly, we need to keep before us FDR’s larger purpose, which was to save liberalism from its excesses.

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Dan Hitchens
Senior Editor

I have been relishing The Portable Medieval Reader, edited by James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin, which shamelessly cherry-picks some of the most vivid, personal, and entertaining (not, because this is a book for grown-ups, necessarily the most salacious) material from 1050–1500. In particular I have a newfound respect for the medieval chroniclers. On the one hand they make no pretense at impartiality: The London uprising of 1196 came about, Roger of Wendover tells us, because “the principal men of the city . . . wished to preserve themselves free from the burden [of taxation], and to oppress the poorer classes.” On the other hand, this doesn’t come across as annoyingly tendentious, because they generally write in an implicit spirit of resignation—basically taking for granted that there isn’t much you can do about human willfulness, and nothing at all you can do about the inscrutable designs of Providence. William of Tyre writes: “Wearied by the sad disasters which are occurring in this kingdom so frequently—indeed, almost continually—we had resolved to abandon the pen and commit to the silence of the tomb the chronicle of events which we had undertaken to write for posterity.” Openly and frankly committed, but aware that earthly events are always perched on the edge of chaos so there’s no point getting too self-righteous about it: this seems like a literary style that is due a revival.

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Veronica Clarke
Deputy Editor 

John Williams’s Stoner, which is not about a pothead but an English professor at the University of Missouri, is a perfect novel. As an undergraduate in 1910, William Stoner, the son of farmers, drops his agriculture courses and picks up philosophy, ancient history, and English literature after his soul is shaken awake by a Shakespeare sonnet. He pursues a vocation of teaching, at the heart of which must be love. “If you love something, you’re going to understand it,” Williams said in an interview. “The lack of that love defines a bad teacher.” 

It is not an easy vocation. Stoner must navigate both university politics and his disastrous marriage to a vain and self-absorbed woman. It takes him years to bridge “the gulf that lay between what he felt for his subject and what he delivered in the classroom. . . . Those things that he held most deeply were most profoundly betrayed when he spoke of them to his classes; what was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in its utterance.” But once he finally becomes “forgetful of his inadequacy, of himself,” he begins to see “hints of imagination and the revelation of a tentative love” in his students. “The love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.” 

The university is “an asylum, a refuge from the world,” as one of Stoner’s fellow classmates describes it before dying in World War I. Stoner becomes the university’s lone defender when a dishonest student, Charles Walker—a sophist, and thus a traitor to truth—challenges his decision to fail him in his course. Walker is questioned by a disciplinary committee, a scene that Williams elevates into a moment of existential reckoning. “We can’t keep the Walkers out,” his friend and colleague, Gordon Finch, tells him. Stoner replies: “But we can try.”  

As Williams said in the interview: “You’ve got to keep the faith. The important thing is to keep the tradition going, because the tradition is civilization.” Stoner keeps the faith, but not without cost. His is a hard life, yes—but it is a life well-lived, which is more than can be said of most.

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Mark Bauerlein
Contributing Editor

Fans of G. K. Chesterton will enjoy this inventive volume written—or copied or assembled—by Dale Ahlquist, head of the Chesterton Society. It’s called I Also Had My Hour: An Alternative Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton. The composition is uncertain because of the imaginative nature of the project. Ahlquist has put together the story of Chesterton’s life in a novel way: He combed the voluminous journalism and many speeches in which Chesterton speaks of himself and his times, pulled out the pieces, and strung them together into a linear chronicle of the man. We have Chesterton’s words and Ahlquist’s historiography, so to speak. The result is what we might expect: Chesterton’s wit and insight reorganized into autobiography by Chesterton’s most avid admirer. It is enlightening, astute, and a joy to read. One can open it to any page and hit sharp observations and sober admissions—“My country has reached a great religious crisis”; “I am a journalist and never believe the newspapers”; “I was not a great success as a schoolboy.” Much recommended.

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Jacob Akey
Associate Editor

November is the season of the poor souls in purgatory, a season of loss. Lately, I’ve been seeing loss in the things I read. In Holy Cross priest Stephen Koeth’s Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America, I see the loss of a thick Catholic culture to liquid modernity. Catholic schools were bursting in the mid-century—to the point that admissions were strictly determined by parish boundaries. And then, for decades, Catholics ceased to build new schools, closing many of the ones they had.

In Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, I see a lost unity. Carnegie assumes a shared culture, a sort of middlebrow Protestantism. He assumes that men and women have pride in their work, a communitarian vision of personal attainment. But smiles and earnest compliments are no longer cure-all motivators.

In Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, I see a lost print culture. The book was serialized and, consequently, has a recognizably episodic pacing. Today, the corner stores near me, if they carry any print media, do not carry the type of magazines that might hold novels in their pages.

This year, though, I followed a serialized novel by Ross Douthat. It was on Substack: The Falcon’s Children. I hear that others are embarking on similar projects. Americans seem to be waking up to their lost culture; conversations about high trust societies and “heritage Americans” demonstrate this. And classical education and Chesterton academies are booming where parochial education has faded. Perhaps through the fall and winter of loss a spring renaissance is already budding.

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Germán Saucedo
Associate Editor

I recently finished two noteworthy books, one fiction and one non-fiction. The first was Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which newsletter editor Virginia Aabram described to me as the perfect autumn book. Tartt is often compared to Dickens, which is both a compliment and a disservice. Tartt, in my opinion, has a somewhat tedious knack for “setting the scene,” for which she is credited with giving birth to the literary sub-genre known as “dark academia.” Dickens’s novels, on the other hand, never waste a sentence or plotline. 

To be fair, Tartt’s themes and motifs are just as ambitious as Dickens’s. They are imbued with the author’s Catholicism and her keen spirituality. The novel reminds us that aesthetics and knowledge, if separated from a higher purpose, often lead to destruction.

The second book was the exceptionally-titled memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All by German filmmaker Werner Herzog. This book is a must-read for Herzog fans; the audiobook is read by the author in his distinctive voice. Herzog offers little in terms of introspection. In fact, he openly avoids it. While he acknowledges that this may frustrate some readers who wish to gain some insight into the elusive director, Herzog believes that his life speaks for itself. Herzog embodies Gesamtkunstwerk, a concept popularized by his countryman Richard Wagner in which all aspects of an artist’s life and work become in themselves a work of art. His life is, by far, his most compelling work.

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Francis X. Maier
Consulting Editor

Surfing the web is a great way to avoid doing real work. It fills the black hole of writer’s block. It can even prove fruitful. Such was the case recently when stumbling on a YouTube audio clip of “Ti Ypermaho” (“To Thee, Champion Leader”), the ancient Byzantine hymn to Mary Theotokos. It’s sometimes billed, incorrectly, as the Byzantine national anthem (no such thing existed before the eighteenth century), but that hardly matters; it’s a profoundly moving song of praise to Mary for her protection of the imperial city, Constantinople. And it led me back to my bookcase to re-read John Julius Norwich’s terrific history of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire.

A condensed version of Norwich’s work is available, but the original, three-volume effort—Byzantium: The Early Centuries, The Apogee, and The Decline and Fall—is far more detailed, immersive, and elegantly written. For more than 1,100 years, from the founding of the “New Rome” by Constantine in A.D. 330 to the city’s eventual fall to Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Byzantine Empire stood as a bulwark of defense for Western Europe and a source of astonishing art, law, scholarship, literacy, technology, and Christian culture. Norwich captures it all: the genius of Byzantine diplomacy and military expertise; a cast of unforgettable characters like Justinian, Theodora, and Belisarius; the profound nature of the empire’s Christian faith; and the infighting, enemies, betrayals, blunders, and decay that ultimately led to catastrophe. Until the very end, in the city’s doomed but heroic defense, the Byzantine emperor bore the title of Basileus ton Romaion, “Emperor of the Romans.”

Edward Gibbon famously described the Byzantines as “the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed.” On that matter at least, he was both a fool and a bigot. Norwich proves, with exquisite skill, the real and very different fact of history: “the immeasurable debt that the Western world owes to a civilization which alone preserved much of the heritage of Greek and Latin antiquity during the dark centuries when the lights of learning in the West were almost extinguished.”

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Claire Giuntini
Director of the Editor’s Circle

This autumn, I reread Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Thanks to Emerald Fennell’s upcoming film adaptation, due to be released on Valentine’s Day, the book is on many minds. Word on the street is that it’s going to be quite graphic in a non-Victorian sort of way. For that reason alone, you won’t find me contributing to the box office revenue, but there are other reasons I have a dejected opinion of the film’s barren take. 

Alarmingly, according to the IMDb list of actors, the movie revolves solely around the first generation in the story, the tortured and psychotic. But the film-excised second generation are my favorite part of Wuthering Heights. For the most part, they bring sunshine and summertime to the wintery world of their elders. The fact that they don’t have roles in the movie is disappointing, but unsurprising. If it really does end up as aestheticized “adult content,” children and self-gift have no place.

Emily Brontë’s sister Charlotte wrote that the book’s most wretched and wicked character, Heathcliff, appears human only when dealing with the two individuals who are in a sense his proxy child and, I’ll venture to claim, proxy mother. Wuthering Heights demonstrates, intentionally or unintentionally, that as much as children need their parents, it is insalutary for parents to disregard their children. In our day and age especially, we could use more movies with that message.

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John Varacalli
Data Specialist

Peter L. Berger’s 1974 book Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change is not only a forgotten gem and a particularly useful book for a polarized country, it is also a centrist and moderate book that can speak to just about anyone. Written during a period of uncertainty during the 1970s, Berger tries to weigh the costs and benefits of both socialism and capitalism. In his book, he compared Brazil, a country representing capitalist development, with communist China, a country that obviously represented an extreme form of socialist development at the time. On the one hand, he observed that Brazil was indeed creating real wealth. He observed, however, that unemployment rates were also rising, and pointed out that the lower classes were not really benefiting from its new wealth. China was also experiencing substantive economic development, but at the price of both brutally repressing its populace and deadening its political culture. 

Berger recognized that the price of unfettered capitalism was usually hunger, and that the price of socialism was usually revolutionary violence. Berger proposes a “third way,” namely that countries should have both markets and interventionist governments. 

One has to wonder whether Berger’s proposal might actually incentivize opportunistic state bureaucrats to grow the size of their respective governments. It is worth noting that Berger actually became more pro-capitalist in his later work.

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Abby Silva
Intern

My decision to take on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time was met with intimidating reactions from friends and bookstore clerks alike. Despite John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson’s admirable work in creating the authoritative English translation, the book remains infamous for its dense, technical jargon and obscurity. Having neared its end, I will readily admit that it is no beach read. Heidegger is hell-bent on redeeming ontology from its fallen state. This already monumental task is further complicated by his distaste for traditional terminology (words such as “mind,” “body,” “subject,” and “object”), leading him to employ vocabulary like Dasein—literally, “being there”—his alternative term for the human being. 

To neglect this seminal text would be to pass over the innovative analysis of man’s being-in-the-world. Far from a detached set of ideas fit only for the ivory tower, Heidegger’s philosophy presents a useful, ecstatic view of living with ourselves and others. Since starting the book, its insights have enlightened many aspects of my everyday life. My professor, Simon Critchley, released a podcast series called “Apply-Degger” in 2020 which provides clear and applicable paragraph-by-paragraph explanations of Being and Time. It’s been an invaluable companion to my reading, and I urge the Heidegger-curious to consult it if they wish to dip their toes in the water.

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Nina Tarpley
Intern

E. B. White is best known for his book Charlotte’s Web. Less well-known are his essays about the workings of everyday life. Visiting a very old bookstore on the east side of Manhattan, I spotted a small book on top of a very large, almost toppling stack on the floor. Its title read Here Is New York. I was curious to know E. B. White’s thoughts on the city, in which I had been for only a few weeks and which I had found difficult to understand. 

The book, essentially an essay, was written in 1948 during a returning visit to New York. If you’ve never been to New York, it gives a good sense of its essence, and if you live in New York, it fills places with history (such as the pathway down 13th between 6th and 7th Avenue, where White would walk and remember the “giants,” the great writers of his time). 

You cannot help but notice how much New York has changed. White himself feels the place has changed since his time in the city thirty years before he wrote the essay. He makes a particular note of televisions and how they have changed people and the nature of coffee shops. You wonder what he might say about the city now. Something here remains, constant and changeless. And yet, I sense that the “portable television” is changing people ever more, continuing what the television started.

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Noemi Osvath
Intern

Existential dramas are always the best. When I first read The Tragedy of Man by Imre Madách back in high school, I could hardly believe that a human mind was capable of creating such a masterpiece. In the ten years since, I’ve reread it at least once a year. I can even recite entire passages by heart. This fall, I started my annual reread after convincing one of my colleagues to watch the animated film adaptation. Now there are two of us in our little fan club.

The main characters are God, Lucifer, and Adam (Man). This alone tells you that the work deals with the most pressing questions of existence. Nothing can prepare you for what unfolds on its pages, however. Madách undertook to guide Adam from the cradle of humanity to its eventual grave. Adam is searching for the meaning of life. What else could he be looking for? His companion on this journey is Lucifer. Who else? God, for the most part, is present through absence.

This is not a black-and-white moral fable where Lucifer is evil, God is good, and Adam is the frail human who learns his lesson through his mistakes. We don’t get off that easily, and the message (or messages) isn’t spoon-fed. I recommend it to anyone who’s craving a touch of existential crisis to get them through the fall.