A Very Late Summer Reading List

A list of this sort is traditionally supposed to arrive at the beginning of the summer, so that everyone else in the world may succumb to your literary insights and read along with you. Given that I don’t have that kind of influence, this list is merely a recommendation going forward and a look back at the books I have enjoyed reading most this summer.

1. St. Augustine’s De Doctrina. Did you know that, contra Kant, we actually should treat people as means?

2. Roger Scruton’s The Soul of the World. The themes explored here are similar to those in Scruton’s magnificent The Face of God. It remains to be seen, however, if the conclusion offered is truly able to satisfy our search for meaning.

3. Vernon Staley’s The Catholic Religion. The Oxford Movement’s preferred manual of instruction for members of the Anglican Church.

4. Roger Scruton’s Notes from Underground. The search for meaning in a world of kitsch. To be read after Camus’s The Stranger. Also, you can never have too much Roger Scruton in your life.

5. Cicero’s Letters to Atticus. Reading only Cicero’s correspondence, the traditionalist feels a certain connection to the author: the last member of an old order writing for help to a friend who never responds.

6. Ronald Dworkin’s Religion without God. The legal philosopher enters the world of the supernatural and demonstrates how unimaginative the attitude of the modern mind is toward religion.

7. T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems. Eliot can be understood only when heard or read aloud. I recommend the readings of Jeremy Irons.

8. Prince Charles’s Harmony: A New Way of Looking at the World. Don’t let the media fool you. The prince is actually an imaginative conservative.

9. G.K. Chesterton’s St. Francis of Assisi. “His life was one riot of rash vows; of rash vows that turned out right.”

10. C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. Upon realizing how much you empathize with the main character, and how much you too deceive yourself about the nature of love, you will cry out in thankfulness that the gods are not just.