46 More Books I Might Read in 2025 

Since I began writing Early to Rise in 2000, I’ve challenged myself to read at least 50 books a year. For a fast reader like my parents, who could easily consume books of 350 pages in a single evening, reading a book a week is par for the course. But for someone who has diagnosed himself with ADD and dyslexia, it’s an ambitious goal.

I don’t think there has been a year that I haven’t hit my mark. But I succeed by taking shortcuts and (some would say) cheating. I can skim through non-fiction books at a rate of about 600 to 800 words a minute by using a speed-reading method I invented years ago.

Since I read fiction primarily to enjoy the literary skillfulness of the authors, I don’t have the option of skimming. I must read every word. Consequently, I prefer short novels (200 to 250 pages).

At the beginning of each year, I usually spend an hour or so looking up the books that have been nominated for and/or won some of the major literary awards in order to put a few dozen prize-winning titles in my head. This year, I also looked at “best of 2024” recommendations from the newspapers I read (the NYT, the WSJ, The Guardian, the Washington Post, and The Times of India (Don’t ask!), as well as a few blogs I follow to get a gut feeling for new books that might be up my alley.

One thing I noticed: A large percentage of the books that won multiple prizes were authored by women or men of color – another example of what I would call the current “affirmative action award culture.” You may say, “It’s about time.” But it’s not a new trend. It’s been going on for decades, though it may have peaked in 2024. At least I hope so.

That said, here are 46 books (24 fiction and 22 non-fiction) that are on my list to “maybe” read in 2025. What you will find is the title and the author, followed by a brief comment on or critique of the book from one of the sources I consulted. (I’m sure that some of them will turn out to be dreadful. I apologize in advance.)

Non-Fiction 

1. King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
A revelatory portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. that draws on new sources to enrich our understanding of each stage of the civil rights leader’s life, exploring his strengths and weaknesses, including the self-questioning and depression that accompanied his determination.

2. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt 
Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, Postwar is thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details.

3. An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland by Kenneth Moss 
As a chronicle of how an embedded minority, buffeted by strengthening winds beyond its control, is forced to confront questions of belonging, identity, and illiberalism, the book has a disturbingly acute relevance for our current moment.

4. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe 
Easily the most compulsively readable entryway into Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” – an endlessly fascinating, and terrible, episode in 20th century conflict.

5. Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong and What It Means for Our Health by Dr. Marty Makary 
A high-profile specialist at Johns Hopkins University, Makary shows how the medical establishment promoted misinformation on a range of topics, ranging from childhood peanut allergies and hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women to a cavalier attitude toward antibiotics and the damage of excessive antibiotic use.

6. Building a Story Brand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller 
Whether you are trying to persuade a lawmaker to adopt your policy proposal or inspire donors to give to your local conservative club, compelling storytelling is essential to communicating conservative ideas effectively.

7. Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution by Mike Duncan 
A nobleman, motivated by the ideals of freedom and democracy in the time of the American Revolution, in search of adventure. Although the book is nonfiction, Duncan’s prose is easy to read with interesting facts and good pacing to move Lafayette’s story along.

8. Marlborough: His Life and Times by Winston Churchill 
George Washington once advised his friend James Madison that when the country faces storms, what it chiefly needs are “wisdom and good examples.” Marlborough provides both. More than that, it provides both twice-over, because in retelling the remarkable life of one of the greatest statesmen and generals in Western history, Churchill tells us a great deal about himself.

9. Nuclear Revolution: Powering the Next Generation by Jack Spencer 
The good life means clean air and affordable, reliable resilient energy. Spencer explains how to get there through nuclear power.

10. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke 
Written by a cognitive psychology graduate student turned one of the most successful female poker players of all time, Thinking in Bets examines the process of human decision-making and suggests ways to optimize it to achieve better results in all facets of everyday life.

11. Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult by Mary Margaret Olohan 
What happens when a young person “changes” her gender – and then realizes she made a mistake? Olohan tells stories the legacy media has largely ignored, describing exactly what happens in these experimental medical procedures and the effects they can have.

12. Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor’s Life at Sea by Richard Henry Dana Jr. 
In 1834, Richard Henry Dana Jr. dropped out of Harvard to sail on a small trading brig bound for California. Two Years Before the Mast recounts his time at sea, including themes of courage in the face of danger, the consequences of poor leadership, and the thrill of diving headfirst into a new way of life.

13. The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government by Tyler O’Neil
A very accessible read despite the fact that it deals with an enormous number of facts.

14. Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener
An aspiring writer making her way up the publishing hierarchy of the New York book scene, Anna Wiener suddenly decides to travel west and settle in the Bay Area, where she will enter the Silicon Vally culture and report back to us. 

15. A History of Money and Banking in the United States by Murray Rothbard
An interesting account of how government and the large financial institutions have been manipulating the economy by manipulating money.

16. Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De León
An intense, intimate and first-of-its-kind look at the world of human smuggling in Latin America by a MacArthur “genius” grant winner and anthropologist with unprecedented access.

17. Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church by Eliza Griswold
Part of a little-known yet influential movement at the edge of American evangelicalism, Philadelphia’s Circle of Hope grew for 40 years, planted four congregations, and then found itself in crisis. The story that follows is an American allegory full of questions with relevance for many of us, not just the faithful.

18. Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne
Manne examines how anti-fatness operates – how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person’s attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression.

19. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
A deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art – and finding the strength to stand up again.

20. Whiskey Tender: A Memoir by Deborah Jackson Taffa
Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed-tribe native girl – born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico – comes to her own interpretation of identity.

21. The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar
Transforming his personal quest for answers into a brilliantly told universal tale of hope and resilience, Matar has given us an unforgettable autobiography with a powerful human question at its core: How does one go on living in the face of unthinkable loss?

22. Serendipity: The Unexpected in Science by Telmo Pievani 
Pievani, a biology professor at the University of Padua in Italy, provides a catalog of serendipitous discoveries. For example, in 1941 the Swiss engineer George de Mestral was vacationing in the Alps and noticed that burdock seeds stuck annoyingly to his clothes and to his dog’s fur. Examining the culprits under a microscope, he saw many tiny hooks, whereupon he got the idea for… Velcro!

Fiction

1. The Book of Love by Kelly Link 
The prose is diamond-sharp. It’s hard to imagine Link ever writing a clunky sentence or a bad description. Her characters are all brilliantly fast-talking and fast-thinking, their conversations full of wordplay and in-jokes. As people, they are multi-faceted – charming and understandable and tragic, as well as a bit obnoxious.

2. A Dove of the East: And Other Stories by Mark Helprin 
The 20 stories here, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker and have since been anthologized throughout the world, are strikingly beautiful essays on enduring and universal questions. Pick this up, crease the binding, turn the page. You’ve never known anything like it. It has the benefit of being true.

3. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
You know from this book’s opening paragraphs that you are in the hands of a major writer, one who processes experience on a deep level. Kushner has a gift for almost effortless intellectual penetration.

4. Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino 
Through friendships, hardships, adolescence, adulthood, celebrations of life, death, and the publication of an alien’s musings on humanity, Beautyland is not only a story of remembering the difficulties and beauties of being different, but one of discovering life as a person every day.

5. The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
If you are looking to reengage with classic fiction but want something not too long or daunting, The Scarlet Pimpernel is a delightfully fun adventure. Set during the French Revolution, it introduces readers to a mysterious hero in disguise who rescues families from the daily executions by guillotine. There is mystery, intrigue, daring escapes, and just a little romance.

6. Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips
A beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl, and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal.

7. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Asimov’s short stories about the challenges of programming robots are extremely interesting in light of today’s AI policy debates. While this collection was written in the 1940s and 1950s, it offers surprisingly timely food for thought.

8. Long Way from Home by Frederick Busch 
Responding to a magazine ad that may have been placed by her biological mother, Sarah Barrett abandons her Bucks County family and runs slowly to disaster in this sedate, ruminative thriller.

9. Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel
A group of related short stories about Russia’s (the Red Army’s) war against Poland. It is considered one of the great masterpieces of Russian literature.

10. Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon
A strongly written, darkly viewed novel about a young man who decides to live a life of crime. Simenon is not well known, but he may be the granddaddy of this sort of noire fiction.

11. Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Charlotte Wood has been described as one of Australia’s most original and provocative writers. This novel, set in a convent in rural Australia, follows a woman who is feeling despair over climate change.

12. The Doomed City by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
An absolutely unique, unaccountably under-rated gem: Soviet-era science fiction written “for the drawer” (in the assumption that nothing so daring could be published in the USSR) by a wildly inventive pair of brothers who claim they wrote every single sentence collaboratively.

13. Zero K by Don DeLillo 
DeLillo is best known for his sprawling Cold War epic Underworld (1997), but this shorter novel feels more eerily relevant today. An emotionally stunted billionaire and his wife have locked themselves away in a state-of-the-art facility beneath Kyrgyzstan. Their goal is to be cryogenically frozen until technology has developed enough to enable them to forestall death.

14. Ghostroots: Stories by Pemi Aguda
A debut collection of stories set in a hauntingly reimagined Lagos where characters vie for freedom from ancestral ties.

15. My Friends by Hisham Matar 
A devastating meditation on friendship and family and the ways in which time tests – and frays – those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author working at the peak of his powers.

16. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Cyrus Shams, an Iranian American aspiring poet and recovering drug addict, wallows in a post-college malaise in a fictional Midwestern town. He’s working dead-end jobs and halfheartedly attending A.A. while grieving his parents’ deaths and, increasingly, fantasizing about his own. Cyrus is lost and sad, but this captivating first novel, by an author who is himself a poet, is anything but.

17. You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue
Hernán Cortés and his men have arrived at Moctezuma’s palace for a diplomatic – if tense and comically imbalanced – meeting of cultures and empires. In this telling, it’s Moctezuma’s people who have the upper hand, though the emperor himself is inconveniently prone to hallucinogenic reveries and domestic threats. The carnage here is devilishly brazen, the humor ample and bone-dry.

18. Havoc by Christopher Bollen
This abidingly wicked novel of suspense and one-upmanship is narrated by an 81-year-old American widow permanently installed in a hotel on the Nile catering to moneyed vacationers. The widow is driven to “sow chaos” by what she calls her “compulsion.” “I liberate people who don’t know they’re stuck,” she claims. But her routine is disrupted when an eight-year-old American boy arrives at the hotel and becomes wise to her machinations.

19. The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chang
Ambitious” would be a trite term for Vanessa Chan’s outstanding debut, a historical novel that thrums with the commingling tensions of its backdrop: the lead-up to the WWII Japanese invasion of what is now Malaysia. Chan writes her characters with a precision that neither flinches from the brutality of war nor ignores the humanity within.

20. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange 
Stories about the ancestors of characters from Orange’s celebrated first novel There There. Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, he traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous.

21. All the World Beside by Garrard Conley 
As Conley himself has described it, All the World Beside is a pioneering “queer Scarlet Letter,” revisiting the Puritan New England we remember from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic with a new cast of conflicted lovers.

22. Trust by Hernan Diaz
At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

23. The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
A study of two young marriages during England’s 1962-63 Big Freeze, The Land in Winter is a page-turning examination of the minutiae of life.

24. Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan
In a globetrotting tale that takes us from the black sand beaches of Hawaii to the skies of Marrakech, from the glitzy bachelor pads of Los Angeles to the inner sanctums of England’s oldest family estates, Kevin Kwan unfurls a juicy, hilarious, sophisticated, and thrillingly plotted story of love, money, murder, sex, and the lies we tell about them all.

Why I’ll (Probably) Vote Next Week 
My 50-Year Transition Towards Conservatism

Brett, the young man who cuts my hair every three weeks, was an early voter this year. We talked about his choices – the votes he cast for the presidency, as well as those he cast for propositions on the Florida ballot.

I was surprised by how much study he told me he did before voting on the propositions, but he said that he felt that if he was going to vote, he should know what he was voting for or against. And I was more than a little humbled by our conversation.

I know Brett as a person with strong sentiments about most of the issues that divide American voters – freedom, equality, taxation, welfare, war, and more recently inflation, immigration, social justice, and abortion. So, I assumed he would cast his vote the way most Americans do: along party lines.

The fact that he had gone online and spent hours studying the pros and cons of all the propositions on the ballot reminded me of something I had gradually come to realize over the 54 years I’ve had the right to vote: I had little to no idea about who or what I was voting for.

During my 20s and 30s, I was a regular voter. I never spent any time studying the candidates or the issues I was voting for. I felt that I knew all I needed to know based on what I knew about the inclinations of my parents and favorite teachers – which were very much on the left.

I was, like so many young people today, a professed Communist and a card-carrying Conscientious Objector during my college years. I continued to protest the Vietnam War until it ended. And even then, as so many of my friends returned from their stints as soldiers and told me their stories, I developed an uncomfortable and disappointing distrust of my government and politics generally, not just the politicians that supported that war.

I declared myself an Independent. And I described my political views as many Independents do today: fiscally conservative, but socially liberal. That felt good. Even virtuous. But it was never helpful in making voting decisions because the Democrats at the time represented social liberalism while the Republicans were the party of fiscal restraint.

I tried to find a solution for this dilemma by, among other things, reading both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. But that only made things worse. Because I felt that the most important political issue was the question of war or peace, it became clear to me that President Eisenhower had been right when he warned Americans against the Military Industrial Complex, and I began to see both parties as pilgrims marching to the same Holy Site, just wearing differently colored clothes.

This led to several decades of mostly not voting. I could see clearly that both parties were aligned in supporting and extending the Cold War that had started soon after I was born, and that, for the most part, social welfare spending and taxes were going up regardless of which party was in office and/or dominant in the legislature.

When my youthful goal of becoming a writer morphed into becoming a publisher, I was forced to understand economics as it operates where the economy takes place – i.e., in business, rather than in government and non-profit institutions and academia.

And that changed my perspective a third time. I was still a fiscal conservative. And although I was still a strong believer in the sharing of wealth (all forms of wealth), I no longer believed that government could ever do a good job of that. On the contrary, my beliefs about the effective way to share wealth were almost entirely opposed to the philosophy that drives the social welfare programs of government and even most of the largest non-profit charities.

I am thinking seriously about voting this year, but although I feel like I know enough to make the right choice for the presidency, I haven’t done any work on Florida’s propositions – as Brett has – and I feel obliged to get that done before I make my final decision.

And this brings us to three of the things that I hope you’ll pay particular attention to in this issue, all of which might influence your decisions (present and future) as a voter: a quiz, a video lesson on basic economic theory, and a book review (one of the four book reviews in this issue) about the ideas of one of the world’s greatest economists.

Who’s Controlling the Information You Get Online? 

Zuckerberg just emptied out the whole can of beans. Prior to the 2020 election, the FBI and the Justice Department intimidated Facebook into flagging scientific studies whose results were critical of the COVID vaccines as fake news and burying news negative to President Biden (including Hunter’s laptop story and that the president’s son was paid tens of millions of dollars by Ukraine, Russia, and China to influence his father during Obama’s tenure).

If you limit your news to the establishment press, you may have missed all that. But it’s true and it’s documented and eventually it will be accepted as true, as other social media insiders feel free to tell the truth and more of the facts from the X files are reported on.

But the gaslighting and censorship go beyond the big social media forums. Senior executives at Google are beginning to talk about the bias built into the search engine’s algorithms. And most recently, Wikipedia co-founder Dr. Larry Sanger complained about the drift towards the left in the platform’s information gathering and fact checking. He lamented that Wikipedia, which once “allowed people to work together and represent a global array of perspectives on every topic” now just represents the establishment’s point of view.

In the last four or five years, I’ve noticed this bias and noted that it’s been getting worse. I have noticed it this past year with Wikipedia, too. Data and stories that I found and read in the past are impossible to locate, and some of Wikipedia’s content is starting to sound like it’s been filtered through a DEI screen.

Read more from Dr. Sanger here.

The Greatness and Difficulty of English 

English is spoken in the big cities of just about any country an American tourist might visit. Do anything touristy, like check in to a hotel or go to a restaurant or go shopping, and you will find people that can speak to you in English – and it’s not only because it helps them relieve you of your American dollars.

One reason English is so widely spoken is, of course, because the US dollar is the world’s go-to currency and American tourists spend more dollars while traveling overseas than any other nationality.

But there is another reason that language experts say is equally or more important. Among the major languages of the world, English is one of the easiest to learn. Its grammar is simpler than that of the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian). And its diction is easier than German.

If you’ve ever compared the length of books written in English to versions translated into other languages, you may also have noticed that the English versions are usually considerably more compact. This is because English has a comparatively huge vocabulary due to its long history of readily incorporating words from other languages, including languages as diverse as Chinese, Japanese, Farsi, Hindi, and Native American dialects.

The worldwide acceptance of English is a benefit that English speakers that don’t travel abroad don’t have the opportunity to appreciate. If you want to say something and be understood in distant parts of the globe, English is always your best bet.

But there is a problem with English as a lingua franca that is seldom discussed. I’m talking about communication between English speakers with different accents. I’ve been to most of the world’s countries where English is at least one of its official languages. And I can tell you that communicating in some of those countries is not easy.

For example, I have great difficulty understanding the English spoken in northern England, Ireland, and Scotland. In parts of the Caribbean – I’m thinking of Grand Cayman, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the British Virgin Islands – I have considerably fewer problems than I have in northern England, Ireland, and Scotland. But I have more difficulty in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Tobago, as well as the Turks and Caicos. It may surprise you to know that, for me, the easiest English-speaking countries are in Africa, e.g., Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Kenya.

I’m thinking about this because of a short email exchange I had yesterday with CF, one of my three brothers. At the end of our discussion about his son’s birthday, he signed off, saying: “I am about to go into a meeting with my Indian programmers.”

I replied: “Have a good meeting… Hope you understand everything they say!”

He picked up on that and wrote, “Well, of course they speak English, and probably better than I do. But their accent is so strong that my most common response is: ‘Mahesh, you have a beautiful voice and I’m sure it’s just my aged hearing, but can you repeat that and say it a bit slower.’”

“I know that very well from my visits to our Indian office in Mumbai,” I wrote back. “My partners and I would be meeting with six or eight people – all smart, college educated, etc. But there was always one whose accent was so thick that I could not understand a word. Like you do, I would politely ask him to repeat what he had just said. And he would… exactly the way he had said it the first time. Because everyone else in the room had seemed to understand him perfectly, he had no reason to think my problem was his accent. He probably thought my mind had drifted. So I’d say something like, ‘I sort of see what you mean, but I’m not sure. Can you please say it again?’ He would look at me oddly, then repeat what he had just said – and again, I would comprehend nothing. At that point, thoroughly embarrassed, I would just smile appreciatively, nod, and say, ‘Ahah.’”

I am no longer directly involved in that business. But sometimes, when I think back on those conversations and the important issues we were discussing, I wonder what my embarrassment cost our business in profits. How many bad projects were approved by my “Ahahs,” and how many good projects were aborted?

How Much Do You Know About US Debt? 

Question: Do you know what the current level of US government debt is?

Answer: $35 trillion in national debt – which is $105,000 for every individual and $270,000 for every US household.

Question: Do you know how much of that debt was acquired during the last 12 months?

Answer: $2.3 trillion. That’s about $6.4 billion every single day, roughly $266.7 million an hour, and around $4.44 million a minute.

Question: Do you know how much of your income taxes were spent on interest on the national debt?

Answer: Last year, US Treasury net interest expense was $81 billion. That’s 43% of the $185 billion the government collected in income tax receipts.

I know. This is hard to believe if you trust the government. But if you trust the government, you haven’t thought seriously about it. The way our government works is that all the incentives of the political class favor endless borrowing and endlessly increasing debt. A debt bubble that will one day pop.

Here is Bill Bonner explaining why this is so.

Humanity’s Greatest Existential Threat 

From GM, a regular contributor:

“After witnessing the stupendous failure of the Secret Service in Butler, PA (and the press conferences), and not wishing to believe it was intentional, I sought to find another excuse. I believe I may have found the answer and am anxious to share. Many of you inherently know this, but even with non-life-threatening situations it is good to be armed (poor choice of words?) with this validating info. If you have ever had to call customer service, there is a 95% (my estimate) chance you will benefit by simply remembering (in advance) the following laws of human stupidity as laid out in an article from the Quartz website. My recent call to Comcast comes to mind.

In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley, published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.

Law 1: Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

Law 2: The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

“Click here for a full explanation of the above.” – GM

Caveat Intellectualis 

My brother, who is a serious academic, once mentioned that one of the things he does to keep au courant on the literary news outside his specialty (Greek and Latin philology) is to read Literary Hub, an e-zine that covers everything from Gilgamesh to The Great Gatsby to Gone Girl.

I can see how, if you were teaching literature of whatever time and genre at a top college today, you’d want to have something clever to say about the latest literary scuttlebutt. And I have enjoyed reading Lit Hub for that. But in the last year or two, I can’t bear to even look at it because of how Woke its editorial policy has become.

Woke cultural concepts and trends are tailormade for busy executives and their party-planning spouses because they provide topical and politically correct opinions and rationales for people that don’t have time to think for themselves.

And that is why 15 minutes spent with a Woke primer like Lit Hub could be helpful for any up-and-climbing academic who has given the great majority of his waking hours to a very specific rabbit hole of literature. There simply isn’t time to find out what’s going on in the rest of the literary world, let alone identify what news bits will be conversation topics and what sort of wry or witty comment might allow one to manage one’s way through a cocktail party full of professors and graduate students without risking looking like a fool. (Which is exactly what most of the people there are hoping you will do.)

So if you work or socialize inside the world of literature, you may want to subscribe to the Lit Hub website. But I must warn you that at least 50% of everything they publish are pieces like the following:

* Andrea Freeman on the impact of systematic oppression on indigenous cuisine in the United States. (“Frybread arouses passionate feelings in its fans and detractors… but everyone agrees that it is a far cry from the pre-colonial foods.”) Click here.

* Mathangi Subramanian on how understanding her own neurodiverse character helped her understand herself. (“I fretted that, despite my diligence, my story was riddled with errors that would, at best, disappoint or, at worst, traumatize my readers.”) Click here.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

By Ernest Hemingway
Originally published in 1940
480 pages

After reading The Hemingway Stories, the collection I reviewed on May 13, I pulled an old copy of For Whom the Bells Tolls from my home library, read it over the weekend, and was not the least bit disappointed.

I know a few smart people that don’t like Hemingway. One of them restricts his reading to non-fiction books and considers fiction largely a waste of his time. When I convinced him to read a Hemingway novel a decade ago, he complained that he found Hemingway’s style “irritating.”

An otherwise well-read woman friend says she doesn’t like Hemingway’s fiction because it is too “macho.” She equates his machismo to an aspect of toxic masculinity – i.e., talking endlessly about things (such as fishing and hunting and bullfighting) that are, from her perspective, “irrelevant and superficial.”

On the one hand, I am perfectly happy to excuse their Hemingway-phobia as a case of each-to-his-own. On the other hand, I secretly believe there is something missing in their literary sensibility that is worthy of condemnation or pity.

But never mind. I’m recommending For Whom the Bell Tolls to everyone that either enjoys Hemingway or is undecided because they have never read him.

The Plot 

For Whom the Bell Tolls tells the story of Robert Jordan, an antifascist American volunteer fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. It is based on Hemingway’s experiences as a reporter during that war for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

What I Liked About It

What I always like in Hemingway. His prose style, which includes his unique way of composing sentences and paragraphs. His characters and their development. The way he establishes the mise-en-scene. The precision of his diction, the detail of his descriptions, his discipline of showing not telling, and the way he is able to put the reader into the action as a sort of invisible eavesdropper. I even like the way Hemingway makes dialog spoken in Spanish sound foreign by using antiquated English adjectives and pronouns.

What I Didn’t Like 

As with all my favorite novelists – C. Dickens, M. Twain, J. Austen, W. Cather, Dostoevsky, V. Nabokov, G. Orwell, J. Conrad, F.S. Fitzgerald, D. Hammer, E. Waugh, R. Chandler, R.P. Warren, J. Steinbeck, G. Greene, and M. Amis, to name more than you wanted to hear – there is really nothing in Hemingway’s writing that I don’t like. (And I have a much longer list of novelists I like very much, but with reservations.)

Critical Reception 

“If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway after reading the manuscript, “no one ever so completely performed it.”

Widely considered to be one of the best war novels of all time, the Pulitzer Prize committee for letters unanimously recommended For Whom the Bell Tolls be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1941. The Pulitzer board agreed. However, Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University and ex officio head of the board at that time, found the novel offensive and persuaded the board to reverse its determination. As a result, no Pulitzer was given in that category that year.

Learning How to Forgive Yourself 

I recently delivered a video presentation to senior executives in a Japanese publishing company I write for titled “The Zen Secret for Never Regretting Your Business and Financial Decisions.” In that presentation, I spoke about how to set goals and be intentional about achieving them, but without attaching yourself emotionally to the results.

Following the presentation, I got a note from one of the attendees, who wrote:

As I was interpreting you confidently with my tone of “as if I’m doing it myself already,” I noticed I’m so not doing it. Suffering from what turned out to be the opposite of what I wanted it to turn out has been really big and I tend to blame myself.

But like you slightly touched on, it shouldn’t have been all because of me. There could have been some other natural forces that I couldn’t control that led to the unwanted result. When I think this way, I feel a little easier. I’d better detach myself from the result, and have Plan B.

was happy that I had communicated the thrust of my idea, but I was concerned about the statement that “there could have been some other natural forces that I couldn’t control.”

I realized that there should have been a Part II to my presentation: Learning how to forgive yourself without denying or diminishing responsibility.

So, this is what I wrote back…

What I Should Have Added to My Talk

After reading your note, I have another idea for you to consider. It goes something like this: “The moment you forgive yourself, the universe forgives you, too.”

Maybe that is too abstract – one of those statements that, while true, is nevertheless impossible to understand unless you have done it yourself or at least seen it done by others.

Your note inspired me to try to do a better job of expressing what I mean by it, so let me try again…

We must take responsibility for our actions. Trying to avoid that responsibility by blaming other people or other things cannot ease the pain we feel for something we regret doing.

So that’s the first step.

The second and perhaps more difficult step is to forgive yourself. For most people brave enough to take step one, this is not easy. We’ve all been taught as children to feel shame and regret. For all sorts of things.

And there is nothing wrong with having those feelings. They are part of the larger recognition that we are all part of an interconnected universe, and that everything we do has some effect, large or small, on everything else. We all damage things. We all hurt and/or damage other beings. We do it purposefully through action or accidentally through inaction. Feeling regret and/or shame about it is a natural response.

But then we must move on.

And to move on, we must realize that the only way we can forgive ourselves is to give up the egoistic idea that we have control over everything we do – whether unconsciously, accidentally, or purposefully – and how it affects others.

We must be humble enough to accept our weaknesses and vulnerabilities. We must understand that, as imperfect beings with limited powers, we are no match for nature – that we should strive towards improving our awareness and behavior, but, at the same time, acknowledge that, however much progress we think we are making, we are, from the larger context of nature, bit-part actors in a very short scene of a very long play whose recurring principal themes are of tragedy and comedy with only a single thread that connects them. And that thread is irony, whose essential insight is, to paraphrase Newton, that each truth has an equal and opposite truth.

I’m writing this, as I sometimes do, as a hypocrite. I grew up secretly blaming myself for everything that wasn’t perfect in my life. I mentally tortured myself for every failure, every stumble, every disappointing outcome.

Looking back, I see that, at some egocentric level, I was seeing myself as a sort of heroic figure in a great struggle for human perfection. Not just for me, but for the rest of the world. Now I try to see myself more realistically, as a bit player in a cosmic comedy of never-ending moments of achievement and failure, love and loneliness, happiness and hurt.

But the failures and the loneliness and the hurt do not have to be constant and continuous. If we can see ourselves and our actions in the larger context, we can forgive ourselves – not to rationalize our mistakes or our limitations but to accept responsibility for the harm and damage we cause – and we can move ahead with humility and hope.

And if we can do that – if you can do that, even once in a while, you will notice that the world will be that much more ready to forgive you, too.

The Decline of the Convertible 

Something is going on in America that is not especially newsworthy, but it is intriguing. Because it must reflect some sort of larger social or economic change that perhaps is widely known.

Did you know that…

* In 2004, Americans bought 315,000 convertibles.

* In 2010, that number was down to 144,000.

* Between March 2023 and February 2024, sales plunged to 70,000.

* Today, they comprise less than one-half a percent of car purchases.

Meanwhile, purchases of SUVs have been climbing. What’s going on?

One unconvincing explanation: David Lucsko, a car historian, says automakers now design vehicles for consumers to seal themselves in. “I think the car has become more and more a cocoon where we go to be isolated from the world,” he says. “Driving a convertible means being exposed to the world.”

Another unconvincing explanation: Convertibles are often seen as easy targets for car theft. A thief can easily remove items out of a convertible or access the ignition if the top is down.

I suppose the real question this brings up is this: Why am I spending a half-hour of a beautiful, sunny, Florida day trying to figure this out?