I always knew I should like reading. The idea of it always attracted me. Flipping pages, setting aside time to ponder and learn, immersing myself in someone else’s thoughts — what was there to dislike? Beyond these experiences, I’d always associated a certain spiritual essence with reading. Perhaps it goes back to nostalgic experiences reading short stories in the 3rd and 5th grades with some of my best friends and greatest teachers.
No matter the source, there was always something irreducibly attractive about reading. I can’t quite describe it with words, beyond associating it with the experience of sitting in an old library or an ancient building, sulking in one’s imagination of great people and ideas shuffling about, up and down the annals of time. Perhaps the building is cold without modern heating (in fact, it most certainly is, unless you’re imagining an ancient library in the tropics — which, if so, good on you, I’d love to join you), but you sit comfortably, next to a warm fire. That’s what reading was in my mind. And that romantic, spiritual feeling continues to resonate with me.
Despite this attraction to the idea of reading, for most of my childhood and throughout high school, I rarely read. It sounded great, but man did it get boring when I sat down and actually tried to slog through a few pages. I could be doing homework, or checking Instagram, or responding to texts, or eating snacks, or going out with friends. There were always so many other sources of sensory input that the slow and steady satisfaction that comes from reading was lost — worse yet, never achieved — in the noise of a world full of distraction.
It was not until April 2020, or so, when I made a concerted effort to read. I had received East of Eden by John Steinbeck as a gift from a friend as he cleaned out his house and discarded what he could in order to downsize to an apartment, and the pandemic had just hit the world in stride. I was home, with little hope of visiting friends, and I had little else to do. Twitter kept me distracted, and I began a motley workout routine that at at times included short runs, weight exercises, and hiking. I was lost without regular interpersonal interaction. I decided to muster the will to commit to reading 50 pages of East of Eden per day, and to complete the 450 pages-or-so the novel contained.
Embarrassingly, I still have 50 pages left in that book. But the daily commitment to reading — despite setbacks, and falling short — began to direct my will more consciously. I enjoyed the book at times, and the writing was outstanding, but slogging through hundreds of pages of Steinbeck was the result of pure will. Thoughts of social media, friends, YouTube, and every other piece of noise in my life continued to rattle in my brain as I bush-whacked through that jungle. It was more than worth the trouble.
This problem of reading frustrated me. To paraphrase a favorite line from a James Bond film: it was so close, but yet so far. But isn’t that everything ultimately satisfying in life? To be good seems so simple, yet we often find it easier to be rotten. To be decent seems so basic, but perhaps that’s why it eludes us. Good habits — those that cultivate virtue — require will. And refining will does not come easy. It takes discipline and the cultivation of virtue over time, with conscious direction of everyday efforts towards certain good ends.
It’s very easy to endlessly scroll on Twitter. It’s very easy to go out with friends every night. It is very easy to live your whole life on autopilot, never recognizing that you were born with a will, and that its exercise — however painful at first — is the stuff of a life well-lived. Up until that pandemic summer, I’d loved this quote (misattributed to the late Pope Benedict XVI): “The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.” It took that first step towards the conscious formation of my will, towards the cultivation of virtue, to lead me down the path of understanding what that quote really meant. I hope I’m still on that same road today.
The seeming ease of reading but its practical difficulty taught me, then, far more than how annoying reading can feel at first. It illumined for me one of the small pieces of wisdom I’ve accrued during my 22 years on God’s green earth: good in life doesn’t come easy, but you can achieve it if you put your mind to it, and direct your actions towards it. The “default” setting for life is easy. In internet terms, it’s being an NPC. But to live a full life, one must seek the good through discipline and the exercise of the virtues. And all it takes is a first step, however many times you stumble. So stumble on, weary traveler. Stumble on.
A quick side note: I view this moment as one of those “GLORY” moments Steinbeck describes in East of Eden. If you haven’t read the book, here’s a not-so-quick-but-very-gratifying quote:
Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then - THE GLORY - so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
This experience with East of Eden propelled me down the path of seeking virtue, and also of reading more. I’ve really enjoyed reading in the past 6 months or so, and continue to enjoy it the more I invest time in it. So, I thought I’d sit down and compile my reads in 2022. I hope to read much more in 2023, so I am more than open to suggestions — please do reach out.
Here is a (possibly incomplete) list of the top books I read in 2022 (& here’s to a new year of even more reading!):
Dune, Frank Herbert — as you’ll see from reading the rest of this list, fiction is not my favorite genre (so far). Dune, however, was an outstanding read by a fascinating author (seriously, Google Frank Herbert — there are very few former political speechwriters who did shrooms, voted for Nixon and Reagan, and wrote sci-fi novels).
After Virtue; Alasdair MacIntyre
The Need to be Whole, Wendell Berry
Pensées, Blaise Pascal
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Rene Girard
The Quest for Community; Robert Nisbett
Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam
The Way, Josemaria Escriva
Our Kids, Robert Putnam
Alienated America, Tim Carney
Coming Apart, Charles Murray
Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen
The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin
The Alchemist, Paulo Coehlo
Books I’m about to read/just began reading:
Dune: Messiah, Frank Herbert
Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle
I hope to read a book per week in 2023.
In addition to these great reads, I committed to a modified version of the Exodus 90 challenge, which includes the following parameters:
Cold showers
No social media
Minimum of 20 minutes of prayer per day
Limited technology use (work and school) (hope this counts, ha)
Only listening to music which lifts the heart to God
No alcohol, desserts, or sweets
Fasting on Wednesdays and Thursdays
No meat on Wednesdays or Fridays
No snacking
7 hours of sleep per night minimum
No major material purchases
My exodus (forgive the poor pun) from social media has likely spurred my increased reading habits, and my writing of this column. I hope to continue to use social media far, far less, even after I complete the Exodus 90 challenge.
Stay humble, friends. I wish you all a Merry Christmas, a blessed New Year, and a Happy Hanukkah!
P.S. I traveled to Europe with my friend Arjun before Christmas. Here are some pictures from our travels. We visited Ireland, Austria, Germany, Croatia, Slovenia, and France… all in 10 days. I highly recommend using Google Flights.