Eventually all things are known. And few matter.

 

Before I went off to college, I read Gore Vidal's Burr. I had read a friend's review of it and loved the idea of a book that really takes it to the founding father hagiography. Of course, at that time, I was very stupid, though, and I sort of thought that the book reflecting the enlightenment pioneers of the revolution as just massive pieces of shit was good enough. Like Leo's character in One Battle After Another, I sort of gestured to the founding fathers and said things like "he was a slave owner, you know". This struck me as brilliance.

You can imagine an early college student clinging to this concept, trying it out on all sorts of people so they could laud me for how smart I was. One day I tried it on a friend, an upperclassman majoring in US history; "the founding fathers were terrible people, obviously the fabric of our country is deeply corrupted, incomplete," etc. He shrugged. Retorted that just because they were bad people didn't mean their ideas were bad. So ended my deployment of what I thought to be Vidal's core point. So ended the utility of the novel Burr.

As I was weighing what all I wanted to reread this year, it originally didn't make the list, but I decided to revisit Burr almost two decades later because, beyond anything I remember it teaching me, I remember it being a really enjoyable read. Nothing has changed there; Vidal is hilarious, capable of believably transforming lauded historic men of philosophy into the pettiest of bitch. Normally, I roll my eyes at classical or literary writers who slip in jokes about asses or farting (thinking of Melville), but Vidal writes about things like George Washington's ass in poetic flurries; it fits, it's funny, and it's quick. I genuinely laughed out loud several times. Particularly when he was tearing apart Jefferson.

But the utility of a novel like Burr has also been transformed. I'm no longer trying to IRL shit-post arguments with anyone and everyone; reading in my early 20s was about leveraging books in a way that made me look cool, reading in my 30s is about understanding the world. And Burr ended up being a perfect read to understand what feels like a uniquely hideous moment in American politics.

As Vidal's protagonist Charlie navigates the election between Van Buren and Harrison, he also works on the memoirs of Aaron Burr, one of US revolutionary history's notorious villains. Vidal's portrayal of Burr is incredible: he is biting and has dirt on everyone; no one is safe. The pockmarked, powdered, familiar faces are there: Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Washington, Benedict Arnold, Hamilton, and more. While only Hamilton was physically killed by Burr it feels like he murdered all of them; the pace and timing of these insults truly keeps this book feeling so alive.

You can tell Vidal pieces the narrative together with primary sources, weaving in effortlessly with characterization and dramatization that is intense in its believability. Vidal's choice not to write a work of non-fiction is an important one and not just for entertainment. The novel feels contemporary in a way that lends itself to making it abundantly clear that our political moment is not unique. American politics was born partisan; politicians have always been empty vessels of power, they have long abandoned or adopted positions or even entire belief structures to simply win elections and gain/keep power. I was wrong in that our founding fathers might have had correct ideas in spite of being terrible people, the right lesson to take is that terrible people will get into politics and lie about having the correct ideas.

I find this comforting in a way. You are not only reading about Thomas Jefferson you are experiencing him as a character. The way we experience Donald Trump is as a character.

And this may make people mad, but reading about Jefferson as a character doesn't feel that dissimilar from reading about Trump as a character. Jefferson was an attempted agricultural mogul who was better at branding himself as such than doing the work; for Trump, it's the same, but with real estate. Both fancied themselves men of the arts; they were both credibly accused of rape and pedophilia. Both are wildly egotistical. Jefferson had Monticello, Trump had Mar-a-Lago. Jefferson, no doubt, was a better writer, but he was also a pamphleteer; Trump is a tweeter. Jefferson wrote eloquently and spoke of the rights of man while owning slaves, Trump button mashes about the working class while shitting on a literal gold toilet.

This is all to say that we are not living in the worst of times. Everything is dark, but familiar. Burr is a fantastically entertaining ghost of Christmas past; demonstrating the depravity of our present politics is not new. And there are no more quick or cute arguments to be made, the ultimate takeaway from Burr is to kill the heroes in your head, Aaron Burr can be your second 🔫.

Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

 

By total accident I finished Slaughterhouse 5 on Veterans Day, so it especially sank in as a great anti-war novel. This was my second reading of the book by Kurt Vonnegut and yet another exercise in rereading books that I only read in my youth to make me look cool.

The story is told by a US serviceman who was a prisoner and survivor of the bombing at Dresden, though he is primarily narrating the life and times of Billy Pilgrim; who himself was there at Dresden. We watch Billy's life in fragments, because as an alien abductee he learned to time travel. From the sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout to the alien Tralfamadorians, Billy learns that our conception of time is self limited, and to really experience time is to be in all moments at once.

So suffice it to say that Slaughterhouse 5 certainly made me feel like I looked cool, and more importantly that I thought about things in a cool way. I read it in college, and was taken by a lot of the overt text. Back then, the book actually didn't register as a work of anti-war to me, instead I would quote the lines about never dying, riff on the conceptions of time, and would talk about some of the fun sections like when they play the war movies backwards and they look like a massive clean up operation. I approached the novel as though it were written by Kilgore Trout; which is to say I ignored subtext and took it on the nose.

What started as a reread quickly transformed into a realization. Over a hundred-thousand killed at Dresden, most of whom were civilians, and this was America's heroic war. Vonnegut writes the tragedy as inescapable; while time travel is real in the universe of this novel it cannot change the course of things that happen. For all the niceties of the Tralfamadorians who believe no one is ever truly gone and Vonnegut's famous refrain "so it goes", every portrayed death in this novel is still shattering. Because the reader knows this is not how you really experience time, it is only how you experience novels. 

The "cool way of thinking about time and our existence in it" was a parody; that we cease to exist when we die is the reason why horrific acts like Dresden are considered crimes. Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 is concise, it is itself a Slaughterhouse of a book; an efficient conveyor of death. Even the much vaunted "so it goes" after every death starts to sound mechanical. There are no truly great lines of dialogue or even entirely compelling characters (Billy Pilgrim himself is hardly endearing in any meaningful way), but as a work of fiction it is moving and impactful. 

As you travel through time with Billy and the Narrator, you move through a perverse range of settings; war torn Germany to pleasant, upper class American Suburb to a human zoo on an alien planet. You start to get the sense that Vonnegut, despite the misery and death, is having fun. A true "comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable" type of novel. I'm grateful I returned to it, I probably will again and again.

God Keep Me from Completing Anything

 "For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught - nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash and Patience."

I've mentioned before that when I was younger, I struggled to read books in a way that wasn't just playing them as movies in my head. I think this is the natural default setting a lot of people operate under when they read. Which is actually fine, but if you are only reading for plot and character, you are closing off an entire experience of the art form. The book I credit with teaching me how to truly engage with text as a work of art, which is why it's my favorite book, is Moby Dick.

I first read the book in my senior year of high school. A classmate and I had chosen to read it from a list of books you could read and write a critical theory essay on in our AP Literature class. This is a class I had struggled in exactly because I wasn't grasping that I needed to read for form over content. 

Knowing this, I should have hated Moby Dick. Instead, I found I loved it. While the plot and characters were sparse, sprinkled between large walls of technical writing about whale ships or scientifically postured (and incorrect) musings on whales, I found it endearing. I didn't understand everything I read but I could gather that I was engulfed in some truly great writing as a craft. Which is not to say there are no enjoyable plot elements either; I distinctly remember standing up, reading the last three chapters of the book (having re-read it, these chapters hold up, absolutely incredible action-packed end, think of when you finally saw the dragons in action in the penultimate season of GoT). I did really well on my essay; the teacher nominated me for student of the month for challenging myself with a difficult book, doing well on the essay, and just generally turning my trajectory around in the class.

At that time though, I couldn't articulate why I liked it. I knew many others who did not. A really formative American Lit teacher I had despised the book, said it was boring and violent. When I got to college a year later, I became an English major right away. I signed up for an American Lit class taught by Professor Jeff Insko. 

Insko was, and I imagine is still to this day, a titan in the classroom. He could take a group of students who were already passionate enough about literature to show up to class and get them thinking about what they were reading in ways that never occur to even the most avid readers in their entire lives. His favorite book was also Moby Dick.

This is why in making 2025 the year of my reread journey, I have not only chosen to read Moby Dick, but to read the version with an introduction written by Jeff Insko. Reading his intro transports me back to his office hours, the first one I attended, I asked him about Moby Dick. I told him I loved it, but was confused why exactly I did, why other readers I really respected did not (like my HS American Lit teacher). The sentiment he expressed was exactly the same as he writes in his introduction to the text: Moby Dick is "a love letter to the English language".

Insko taught us that when approaching a work of literature, understanding it was an act of war. You must research the time the piece was written in for crucial context. You have to engage with the form; how is it written, what tools of the craft have been employed and why? It was important to close-read sections; unpack metaphors, think about why grammar and punctuation were used formally or informally. Torturously think over the use of a given word. 

Moby Dick was the perfect conduit for learning how to love the learning of a text. The book is densely poetic, it is packed with the political and social contexts of when it was written and allusions that might as well be lost to history, and can be read as a response to similar fictional novels of its time that would try to appear real with a copious amount of minute detail. It is a challenge to read. This is why I love it, because it is not easy. It is not like "watching a movie in your head", it forces you to dwell with the actual words on the page. Some chapters take small physical objects - a cup of chowder, a piece of rigging, a gold coin - and blow them up to massive philosophical proportions. As Insko says, while tedious, these are often the most enjoyable parts of the book.

To demonstrate, I picked a chapter at random: 69. The Funeral. As far as plot action goes, the only thing happening in the chapter is that the crew cuts loose a dead whale's body after extracting the oil from it. Yet the description of this action is two pages long. The first is a deep description of the action; "The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk....Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls." It goes on like this for at least a page talking about "beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair faceof the pleasant seas...that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives".  And it's not over; once thoroughly described, a thing or an action is then philosophically mused on at length. The chapter concludes with a wriff on ghosts, clearly haunted by the visage of the whale carcass and the "horrible vulturism of earth". 

And here I am in 2025, over 15 years since I first read it (I've read it twice in between), 3 small children, a challenging and mentally taxing white collar job, reading it again. Yes, I was dragging ass and losing focus while reading it, but then there were times - usually I'm sitting by my two-year-old's bed waiting for him to fall asleep or rocking my 6-month-old - where I would be feel incredibly moved by the language. Not even so much what was being said, but just the combination of words used to say it.

A writer and podcaster I admire once said that writing is just trying to pick the most beautiful words to say what you're going to say. And Melville does not miss. Reading books like this is important. We are all constantly consuming content, much of it video-based, and especially now in the age of AI where social media sites have turned into baby YouTube for adults, algorithms have curated easy viewing programmed to trigger chemical addictions in your brain. So to be moved by written words again, even as difficult as it can be to fully engage after a full day of life, feels refreshing. Like getting out of a cold plunge pool.

I'll always be grateful to educators like Insko for gifting me not simply an appreciation for words, but a ravaging passion for truly understanding what I'm reading.

Eternal and Without Name

 

I first read Cormack McCarthy's Blood Meridian in the summer after I graduated from college. I had abandoned my dream of being a secondary education teacher and hit the job market with nothing but that world-renowned-for-employability English degree. Which is all to say I kind of had a lot going on. 

At that time, I didn't have a sense that my degree prepared me for much of anything. I couldn't see the transferable soft skills, the ability to pick up hard skills quicker than most, until I realized later in life that's exactly what I was afforded in my 4-year education.

When I approached Blood Meridian, I think I was tired of reading. I had gone through a complete revolution in my ability to read complicated texts and college awarded me lots of opportunities to do this, but post-college did not. As a result, the book challenged me; I came close to not finishing and quite a bit of it was lost on me. Picking it back up was even a struggle until I began engaging with the first chapter and the haunting, beautiful prose, and when I re-encountered, probably the most blood-chilling literary villain, Judge Holden. Then I couldn't put it down.

I've read The Road and Pretty Horses by McCarthy, his task is to bring his readers to the cusp of civilization and explore what cruelties lie behind the line. The Road is just beyond an apocalypse event, while Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian are set in the frontier west. While thematically similar, Blood Meridian stands apart as entirely more hopeless than the other two novels.

In The Road, despite the sickening and depraved things the protagonist witnesses with his small son, McCarthy seems to recognize a transcendent goodness in people that can survive civilizational collapse. So too in All the Pretty Horses, the bond the two protagonists have as friends and with their animals stands as a pillar against the violence and savagery they experience. These are not happy novels, but there is some shimmer of goodness in them.

There is no such shine on Blood Meridian. Here, McCarthy shaves his protagonist right out of the landscape; known only as the kid, he runs from home as a young teenager and embodies the frontier. McCarthy drags the Kid, and by proxy the reader, through the landscape. His writing is so beautiful it feels like you are somehow reading a breathtaking painting. Yet the depths you will witness are also vast.

On the other side of civilization, in the frontier lands newly wrenched from Mexico, there is murder, rape, pedophilia, scalping, massacre, genocide, infanticide, and any number of horrors that you cannot and frankly should not imagine. The kid falls in with a psychotic imperialist army, a serial killer, and a group of Apache hunters (scalpers), and the reader is forced to witness it all, punctuated only with "they rode on". Simple transitions stitching together horrible acts, with occasional flourishing of beautiful landscape prose. 

But civilization is coming to these parts and is personified by Judge Holden, known as the Judge. Physically gigantic, off-puttingly hairless, philosophical, and cruel. His duty in the novel seems to be to judge all that is worthy of the new world and purge the rest;

"Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth."

From his introduction, it's impossible not to be fascinated and genuinely terrified of this character. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is fiction that has the capacity to disturb in ways that are typically reserved for real-life events. This sounds hyperbolic. I'm telling you it's not.

If there is hope in McCarthy’s other novels, the Judge stomped it out of Blood Meridian. There is no hope on the horizon, only blood (heh). Holden’s neurotic documentation of every detail, the way he takes pity upon children or animals before brutalizing them, his overwhelming worldliness; the Judge is both out of place and perfect in the setting. 

My favorite part about him is as a member of the scalper gang or just around town or even talking to the kid is when he drops some deep, euro-philosophical psycho-babble that only a deeply annoying author type could produce and the slobbering frontiersmen (including the kid) that he is speaking to will respond something like “what the fuck is you talking about”. These little things amount to an experience that is not enjoyable, but is highly engaging and designed to challenge readers. Which is why it's good.

Reading is very much Back for me as a hobby and thing I enjoy doing. Blood Meridian had failed to shock me at a time when I was experiencing the burnout that I think persists in most young professionals first entering the workforce. If nothing else, it stands as a reminder that you should always revisit what challenges you in a particular moment. I’m sure I’ll give it a read a few more times.

Heavy from the Vintage

 

In the summer of 2007, my AP literature summer reading project was to read a great piece of literature, watch the/movie version, and write a comparative essay on the two. The novel I read was The Grapes of Wrath. The essay I wrote prompted the teacher of the course to have a private conversation with me about whether I was really "ready" for the class. 

At this time, I was very early in what would be a much longer exploration into real literature. Coming off young adult novels like Harry Potter, I was reading novels like The Grapes of Wrath as though they were movies. Picturing the characters portrayed by movie actors, getting enthralled by the action of the scenes. It's why I am always revisiting the classics; my first go around was not an engagement with the words on the page, only the pictures that they painted in my head. 

This is really easy to do with Steinbeck and especially with The Grapes of Wrath in particular. He is a master at painting pictures, and it is fully on display in this novel. Characters both minor and major are practically drawn on your brain in detail, as is the landscape, and he's able to do so not with copious amounts of description but rather with the small, almost insignificant components of his subject. Entire universes of characterization in mere snippets of dialogue. If I were a playwright, I would weep with envy.

The traditional components of the plot can read like a movie. The Joad family has been uprooted by ruthless capitalists who own the land and do some finance trickery to boot them. They pack up a beat-up truck and go to California on a dream in the form of a handbill promising jobs and possibilities. When they arrive, it's exploitation and Hoovervilles.

It was Moby Dick that taught me how to engage with literature as literature, not just actions but the poetry of the motions. Ironically, my first pass at Moby Dick was in that same AP Literature class. Like Moby Dick, the plot of The Grapes of Wrath zooms in and out; we're given the Joad family as a zoom in, but the story zooms out to tell the larger story, vignettes of life from other families experiencing the same thing, maybe told through the lens of a used car salesman or a waitress at a diner. It will zoom out further into philosophical flurried ruminations on the very concepts of what it means to own land.

These are some of the most beautiful passages in the book, and even perhaps that I've ever read. These do not translate well to the movie that plays in your head when you read, which explains why I probably don't remember them. But here's an example for you:

"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And the children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates - died of malnutrition 0 because the food must rot, must be forced to rot."

At its heart, the novel is about the breakdown of social norms caused by the exploitation of our fellow humans. A truer treatise that there is nothing natural about capitalism. Today I watch our nation's own attempts to dehumanize immigrants or Palestinians because ownership requires a permanent, exploitable underclass. I think that effort fails because of novels like The Grapes of Wrath; reading books like this is becoming increasingly important. 

To Those Few Who Know

 

A podcaster I really enjoy once referred to having cool older siblings as "playing the game on easy mode", referring to high school. I have no idea how true this is; I'm older than my brothers by 10 years. However I do count myself really lucky to have had friends with cool older siblings. One of whom might be reading this now and scratching his head at the "cool" label, but can trust that to me at 16/17 there was no one I admired more.

He remains the sole inspiration for writing about every book I ever read, he was doing the same back when we were in high school. His was the first time I was ever so taken with a book review I had to rush out and buy the book. The subject of the review was the Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers.

I remember feeling a ringing truth in that review, and the first time I read the book, it rang even louder and for a long time. I have always counted it as a very formative experience to have read the novel, but with time (it's been almost two decades), it became hard to pinpoint exactly how, other than just kicking off a deep love of suffering fiction set in the south.

Having just finished for the second time, it is now abundantly clear. The book features four people with radical love in their hearts and no one to give it to. Jake, the alcoholic socialist who loves his fellow underclass, Mick whose coming of age story is all love of music and her little brother, Dr. Copeland the black doctor with fierce love of his people, and Biff, who kinda sucks honestly but loves children and sees in them endless hope.

While the cast is very lovable themselves, they struggle to articulate the love they hold to the people around them. This seems largely due to the fact that the South is an incredibly hostile place. Everyone is constantly beset by racism, violence, alcoholism, exploitation, and perhaps the most crushing of all; not being taken seriously by the stupidest people imaginable.

And McCullers can walk (drag) you through the frustration with the characters. You are very present as Doctor Copeland learns the atrocities committed against his son by racist cops, you feel Mick's starvation and fear for her siblings, Jake's sobbing bar fights, Biff's...weirdness. The great irony is that while no one quite understands these people, McCullers is making damn sure the reader understands.

The glue holding all of these people together is a deaf/mute resident of the town, Mr. Singer. The reader alone knows Mr. Singer's painful story, but to everyone else, he's their lone confidant. Mainly because he is kind and unassuming, he does not speak and only listens. His experience of the other characters mirrors the reader's as heaps of their soul is piled into him week over week.

On the second reading, I'm reminded of the power in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Whether it's scorched earth socialism and racial justice from Jake and Dr. Copeland (who comically hate each other despite both being avowed Marxists because of a disagreement on tactics, classic American leftists!) or the quieter moments of deep personal growth amidst despair that Biff and Mick undergo, it all packs heat. 

It's one of the novels you finish and look around and wonder how nobody walking around in your life seems to have just been affected in the way you were. And like the characters in the novel, today it seems impossible to translate that feeling to anyone. Maybe that was always the point.

The Real House Guys of St. Petersburg

 

Books like Crime and Punishment make me genuinely despair that Americans don't read anymore. When I was in high school, I was a disaffected youth; didn't apply myself, didn't feel I had a real identity, and was just perpetually angry about something I could never put my finger on. As a side note, I think young men experience this all over American suburbs and today it's called "the male loneliness epidemic". 

Then a friend of mine handed me a book by Fyodor Dostoevsky and said "Here, read. Open your mind". My interaction with reading at that moment in time was books read in school and Harry Potter. The book I was handed was Notes from Underground. I can't profess to have understood the book well, but I could resonate with the anger, the helplessness, the desire to both hide and shine. I was obsessed with Dostoevsky from that point forward. 

I next read Crime and Punishment, and while I enjoyed it, I unfortunately took all the wrong lessons. Raskolnikov seemed cool. I liked the idea of being a vain, smart guy. 

(Hope everyone I knew at that time can forgive me for being insufferable, it was high school. I've read a lot since then, and that's far from who I am today.)

At any rate, Crime and Punishment is just a parade of men who are massive pieces of shit., socially isolated men. There are womanizers, charlatans, life-ruining alcoholic fathers, murderers, and pedophiles. All of them leaving behind a trail of disabused women. And leading the parade is Raskolnikov, a murderer who fancies himself Napoleon because he killed an old pawnbroker and her sister.

In the context of the modern Male Loneliness epidemic, it's hard to really square whether it's comforting that being consumed by vice and anger in Men is an age-old problem or even more concerning. Dostoevsky is pretty hostile to the idea that one's environment causes moral decay (the character who holds this view, Lebeziantnikov, is hilariously lampooned, although despite his foolishness might actually be one of the few decent guys in the novel), he seems to believe there is something dark in the heart of every man that needs taming.

And while I think he's wrong, his characters are painted with such vivid dimensions in order to demonstrate his point, I almost don't care. From the way they look, their mannerisms, their convictions, or lack of, it's so well constructed and entertaining. The clashes the characters have are brutally real; they oscillate between awkward and painful to heartwarming and life-affirming. 

Also, the book is funny as hell. It's witty and clever and Dostoevsky can stick it to his constructed assholes in satisfying ways that avoids cartoonishness.

I would explain plot elements to my wife, and she coined the phrase "the real house guys of St. Petersburg". It really is that fun. All of the above is why I think it is tragic that classics like this, with books in general, have fallen out of style. There really is a rich experience and modern parallels to be seen here. If a pissed off high school me hadn't resonated with the deep anger in this book and make me seek out social interaction I'd be a totally different man. I wish more young people could experience the same.