What We’ve Been Reading—Spring 2026

R. R. Reno
Editor

Some years ago, I read Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford. It’s a four-volume novel that follows a Tory aristocrat’s estrangement from his wife and the society that emerged from the ashes of World War I. Recently, I picked up Ford’s most well-known novel, The Good Soldier. It, too, weaves together the agonies of marriage with the social dislocation of traditional English elites. In Ford’s literary imagination, personal vulnerabilities, willfulness, and self-deception shipwreck intimate relationships in a social world that is at once stable and hollow. “Good” and “respectable” are empty containers, into which the rich and powerful pour their damaged and unhappy lives.

Ford made a mark with The Good Soldier. It takes the form of one man’s narration, which is as much a confession as it is a tale. The novel moves in circles, as the narrator fills in detail without disciplined attention to the sequence of events. The literary technique draws the reader more and more deeply into the horror of various loves thwarted, exploited, and consummated, always at great cost to others. It is as if the reader has boarded a bus, slowly to discover that its driver is mad, and he is piloting it toward a terrible abyss. The title is meant ironically. The good soldier is the narrator: Like a junior officer who obeys misguided orders from his superiors, he dutifully accompanies the other characters in their futile journeys.

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Dan Hitchens
Senior editor

I recently returned to Jesus in His Time by Henri Daniel-Rops, one of those figures who raises hack writing to the level of near-genius. Daniel-Rops churned out seventy books in various genres, only turning to history because a friend asked him to contribute to a series; it was 1941 in Paris, so he wrote a history of ancient Israel—published just in time for the Gestapo to destroy it. Thus commenced a back-breaking series of books on Christian history, full of sweeping generalizations, deep learning, and the kind of dramatic detail that leaves the reader thinking, “Why did nobody ever tell me this?” All of it is filtered through the author’s gentle but unyielding orthodoxy and piety. Hats off to Cluny Press for republishing this titan of a popular historian.

Twenty years late, I have got round to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The McCarthy style—which could be uncharitably categorized as Pretentious Macho—so openly invites parody that even attempting one feels like a cliché. The premise, of father and son pressing through a post-apocalyptic landscape, has an archetypal force; but the actual plotting is vaguely unsatisfying, like a triangle with a missing corner. And yet it still blows you away. Those McCarthy words, as relentless and thrilling as a hailstorm falling on your roof; the author’s patient excavation of human feeling, searching, searching for bedrock. “There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn’t about death. He wasn’t sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all.”

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Virginia Aabram
Newsletter editor

When it comes to popular works about religion, most focus on the initial leap of faith, the “to believe or not to believe” questions that are approachable to the secular masses. On the other hand, memoirs and television shows about cradle believers who deconstruct and leave their received religion abound. It’s harder to find stories about the people who are settled on the “what if” of God, but face the intense struggles and questions that the life of faith entails.

Chaim Potok is one of the few popular authors who operated almost entirely within this framework. I’ve read three of his books over the last few weeks: The Chosen, The Promise, and now The Gift of Asher Lev. I also read My Name Is Asher Lev last fall. Potok reminds me of Willa Cather, who also excelled at coming-of-age novels that interweave the history of very specific people and places, especially the West where she grew up. Potok does the same with his Orthodox Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn. He’s able to present the beauty and frustrations of coming into your own within a deeply religious environment.

For all his protagonists, the question is always how to live and move and grow within their Judaism. In The Chosen, it’s Hasidic Danny Saunders’s vocational angst over breaking from his hereditary path to the rabbinate. In The Promise, Reuven Malter grapples with the implications of using critical theory in Talmudic study and the rifts this creates in the scholarly community. In the Asher Lev books, it’s his calling as an artist in a culture with a limited visual tradition. The important thing is that everyone, including the antagonists, is trying his best to live faithfully. I agree with George Weigel when he says that American Catholicism could benefit from such a nuanced and loving portrayal of the struggles within its tradition.

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Jacob Akey
Associate editor

I’ve been working through the sort-of-canceled Steve Sailer’s Noticing: An Essential Reader (1973-2023). The type of “noticing” that gets Sailer in so much trouble is picking up on trends among populations, group pattern recognition. For example, black male-Asian female and black male-white female relationship pairings are more common than the reverse. Another example: Lesbians are highly represented in women’s golf, and American Jews, despite punching above their weight as a percentage of the golfing public, have produced few notable golf course designers. Sailer tends to back up his observations with data and is usually modest in establishing his causal relationships. That, plus his peppy prose, has made Noticing an enjoyable read. 

Since I enjoy contrast, I also read Richard John Neuhaus’s Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on The Last Words of Jesus from the Cross over the course of Holy Week. This gorgeous little book is organized by the seven sayings of Christ on the cross, and so I read one of the chapters each day, concluding on Holy Saturday with, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

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Germán S. Díaz del Castillo
Associate editor

Although I’ve never been a fast reader, I read through Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair in a couple of sittings. It’s not a perfect book. Much of the plot relies on unrealistic epistolary sections. And the novel’s insistence on framing its characters’ religious encounters as specifically Roman Catholic feels forced. All that aside, I found the novel moving, depicting the drama of the characters’ hearts with relatable honesty. The book is a wonderful illustration of how God turns sin into sainthood or, as the poet Francis Thompson put it, “makes much of naught.”

I have also started reading Mark Z. Danielewski’s horror novel House of Leaves, mostly because I am very excited for Backrooms, the upcoming film directed by the twenty-year-old YouTube filmmaker Kane Parsons. If horror reflects the fears of the generation that produces it, the “backrooms” phenomenon is essential to understanding Gen Z. While “backrooms” content is not adapted from Danielewski’s novel, the phenomenon certainly owes a lot to him, such as the concept of infinite and absurd space as horror, in which the monster is only alluded to.

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Mark Bauerlein
Contributing editor

I have two books on subjects and people far from academic/intellectual habitats. The first is End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers, by Gord Magill. If you remember the Freedom Convoy protest of truckers in Canada and were infuriated at the Canadian government’s response to it (which included a smear campaign impressive in its mendacity), especially after witnessing the indulgence of street protests and violence in the summer of 2020, this book will deepen your understanding of what happened and why. Magill calls Justin Trudeau and the bureaucrats in Ottawa a “decrepit political class.” He says that they and their American counterparts have targeted truckers and trucking for decades (the “war” of the title), starting with the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 and proceeding today in the race to get “Robotrucks” on the road, driverless rigs that Magill calls “Truckzillas.” Magill mingles his personal story with the national one, takes us to the annual Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, describes the popular TV show Ice Road Truckers (a “work-porn reality series”), recalls the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on the industry and what happened to the leaders of the Convoy, and notes the influx of unprepared immigrants into driver’s seats. It’s a fascinating tale and a frustrating one—Matthew Crawford says on the back cover, “This may be the most enraging book you have ever read.” The final chapter is called “The End of the Road,” that is, the disappearance of truckers, which for Magill means the loss of citizens who prize their independence, who bristle when pushed around by desk-jockeys, and who preserve the spirit of, precisely, the open road.

The other book is Of Roughnecks & Riches: A Start-Up in the Great American Fracking Boom, by Dan Doyle. It opens with the author in bed, sleepless and anguished. “I was in trouble, real trouble, and had no way out,” he says. A deal was falling apart. His company, Reliance Well Services, was just starting up, but two brothers who were supposed to be providing equipment and to whom Doyle had already paid a deposit of $250,000 were acting funny, one brother, Andy, fearing that his older brother might kill him if he knew Andy were communicating with Doyle. The rest of the book goes backward and forward—a confrontation with the knife-wielding older brother, oil prices going up and down, struggles to understand the psychopathology of conmen, more characters from the wildcat world of Oklahoma and Texas, lawyers and bankers and mechanics, well sites and fracking, pipes and sledgehammers and no-nonsense crews, and lots of self-doubt and recrimination on Doyle’s part. It’s a very good story and I won’t tell you how it ends.

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Claire Giuntini
Director of the Editor’s Circle

The lion-decked main branch of the New York Public Library sits right around the corner from the First Things office, and during the year often sports a couple of banners alongside its yawning columned entrance that say deprecatory things about banning books. But our office boldly differs from this architectural monolith and does not hesitate to issue taboos on books for review. One of these is The Lord of the Rings. 

“Why?” readers might gasp. The truth is that those drawn to America’s most influential journal on religion and public life tend also to have many opinions on this great epic, and out of the abundance of their affection, a great quantity of essay submissions overflow. When the name of Tolkien flashes out from the blue-lit glare of a desktop, editorial spines sag. 

Which is why I am glad that I have been given a back door. What have I been reading, you ask? I’ve been reading The Lord of the Rings. In my previous two reads, I mostly nodded through The Fellowship of the Ring and got invested when the action picked up later on (and was covered more substantively by the movies). Not so these past several weeks. 

The plot of The Fellowship certainly does not rush. The background lore is extensive, but the prose is elegantly simple. For example, Tolkien tends to use the same descriptors for beautiful things: They’re silvery, like starlight, like glass, to name a few. If any other thousand-page epic employed the same limited image bank, it would put whoever makes melatonin out of business. For some reason, however, Tolkien’s words do not stale. They flow through the mind like cool water down a throat scratched by heat and thirst. 

Folks say “you are what you read.” Maybe you’ve read this trilogy a million times, or maybe you’ve been repeatedly scared off by its vociferous, fervent, often over-nerdy or over-preachy fanbase. Regardless of your particular circumstances, if you too find yourself wearied by the whip-top pace of contemporary society, I recommend finding a copy and settling in.

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Sarah Berk
Intern

Scripture and statecraft are older companions than the modern mind likes to admit. I picked up Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States: A Sourcebook at my university’s book sale because that intersection has always been irresistible to me. The book traces the American story—from the Revolution to the Civil War—through the Hebraic ideas that gave it form and purpose. Open it to any page, and you will find the Hebrew Bible’s language of exodus, covenant, and chosenness running through speeches, letters, and legal arguments. It is enlightening, discerning, and a must‑read for anyone interested in the religious currents woven into America’s birth and growth.