Summer Reading 2026

From late June through the first day of autumn, my reading moved from Greek epic and nineteenth-century sea novels to political science fiction, modernist fiction, satire, and Nietzsche. Six of these books prompted reflections long enough to deserve essays of their own; I have summarized them here, but you can read my full thoughts in their respective notes.

The Voyage of Argo by Apollonius of Rhodes

Read June 26, 2026

I began the season with one of the old black Penguin Classics I had found at Amazing Books and Records: E. V. Rieu’s translation of Apollonius’ The Voyage of Argo. Despite my interest in Greece and Rome, I knew Jason and the Argonauts mainly through Euripides’ Medea and later retellings. I expected another disappointing post-Homeric epic. Instead, I found an extraordinarily entertaining voyage, moving from the political origins of Jason’s expedition and the assembly of its famous crew to Medea’s intervention in Colchis and the long, meandering return through the Mediterranean. The poem never achieves the depth of Homer or Virgil, but its scale, momentum, and strange geography delighted me. It also renewed my interest in Colchis and the Caucasus, a region in which myth and history remain unusually intertwined.

Redburn by Herman Melville

Read June 28, 2026

My return to Melville began with Redburn, the first novel in the Library of America volume which also contains Moby-Dick. Who has not dreamed of adventure like the young Wellingborough Redburn? Like most who dream so grand, I have never been brave—or foolish—enough to embark. The novel quickly strips its young sailor of romantic expectations: he leaves New York hoping for a vibrant experience and finds boredom, cruelty, fraud, and disappointment. Melville transforms material from his own life at sea into the kind of colorful social world that later reaches its fullest form in Moby-Dick. The book did not displace that great novel in my affections, but it confirmed that I should continue to read beyond it. I finished Redburn resolved to continue through Melville’s other works before attempting to spear my white whale once again.

The White Rajahs by Steven Runciman

Read July 10, 2026

Runciman’s history of the Brooke dynasty fascinated me as a study of individual will transformed into political responsibility. James Brooke began as an adventurer, received authority in Sarawak from Bruneian rulers, and made the country the obligation of his life. His legitimacy rested neither upon his Britishness nor upon civilizational superiority alone. He demonstrated it through mediation, reform, personal restraint, and the loyalty he inspired among Sarawak’s divided peoples.

The Brookes’ foreignness proved useful. Standing outside the rivalries of Malays, Chinese, Muslims, Christians, and indigenous communities, they could serve as arbiters and attempt to create a common political allegiance above ethnic and religious difference. Yet their achievement remained incomplete. They created deep loyalty to the Rajah without fully creating a nation capable of acting independently of him. After the Japanese invasion, the dynasty never returned to effective rule. Sarawak remembered the Brookes, but could not continue their project.

The book is therefore more than an account of imperial adventure. It asks how far an exceptional person can give political form to history, and whether a state created through personal responsibility can survive the disappearance of the person at its center.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Read July 16, 2026

I reread Heinlein’s lunar revolution for our July book-club meeting, chosen to coincide with the 250th anniversary of American independence. Its politics persuaded me more than I remembered. The Warden is not a spectacular tyrant; he mostly leaves the Loonies alone while ensuring that grain continues to flow to Earth. His failure is indifference. He exercises authority over a people whose future he neither shares nor regards as an obligation.

Manny begins as an ordinary repairman content with private life. Mike’s warning that Luna cannot survive its present course makes that contentment impossible. Together with Wyoming Knott and Professor de la Paz, they direct a revolution which the population could not have organized spontaneously. Heinlein presents this concentration of leadership as a political necessity rather than a betrayal of liberty.

The line family supplies the novel’s deeper model of freedom. A family, and eventually a nation, becomes an inheritance joining past, present, and future members. Mike enters that inheritance through friendship, gradually becoming a Loonie whose intelligence has become attachment and care. After independence, the founders disappear: the Professor dies, Mike falls silent without being known, and Manny retreats from power like Cincinnatus. Their withdrawal proves that the revolution was an obligation fulfilled rather than power seized for its own sake.

The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra by Paul S. Loeb

Read July 28, 2026

What can I begin to say about this book? It is my fifth time reading it since I was introduced to Loeb by my friend and former professor, Dr. Patrick Lee Miller. I read it again as part of my ongoing reread of Nietzsche’s corpus this year, in preparation for Loeb’s translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra which came out on August 14. With eleven major works, I needed one to fill the gap—and none is more important for understanding Nietzsche’s most important work than this.

In The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Loeb treats eternal recurrence as the fundamental conception of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, not as an optional thought experiment or an ignorable piece of mere cosmology. His central claim is that Nietzsche designed the narrative itself to embody recurrence: Zarathustra’s death and return to his identical life are part of the teaching, and the book’s literary form cannot be separated from its philosophy. This makes Zarathustra’s task more severe than merely affirming life in general. He must will the return of every detail, including the small human being and the failures that disgust him.

I will not attempt to explain Loeb’s thesis here. All that I can say is that if you wish to understand Nietzsche, you must read this book and grapple with Zarathustra as Loeb does. I only discover more with each reread. A very select few understand what the demon meant when he appeared to us in our stillest, midnight hour.

Typee by Herman Melville

Read July 30, 2026

Hot off my previous Melville book, Redburn, I again plunged into the American Renaissance. This time I decided to start at the beginning with Melville’s first “novel,” an account of his genuine experience living among the cannibals of the Marquesas Islands in the Pacific. This was his greatest success, and was considered his most acclaimed novel until Moby-Dick acquired its immortal status long after his death. Now, it is not spoken of as much as even White Jacket. Nevertheless, it is a gripping novel. Already you can see the germ of what made Melville great, although here it is born from true rather than fictional experience; in Typee, as in Moby-Dick, some of the slowest but most rewarding portions are the long digressions on anthropology, history, and other seemingly mundane topics. In Moby-Dick, they feel deliberate, apportioned appropriately to give the reader a full-view of life at sea. Here, it is similar, but somewhat more meandering. As Melville himself stresses, he was incapacitated—his leg injured, largely immobile—for much of his time among the Typees. This gave him the opportunity, and justification when writing, to observe their unique cultural practices at long length. Frankly, it was not an entertaining novel—but it was a highly entertaining work of anthropology and autobiography from one of the paramount American authors, if not the paramount.

On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Jünger

Read August 4, 2026

Jünger’s 1939 novella presents an unnamed narrator and his brother, Otho, living as botanical scholars above the peaceful Marina while the Chief Ranger slowly extends terror over the surrounding country. It is commonly read as an allegory of Nazism, and the date makes that reading unavoidable. Yet I found the novel’s deeper question in the scholars’ retreat into study. They recognize tyranny, but their contemplative distance also leaves them passive until the world they love is already burning. The peasants and nomads act from custom, loyalty, and honor; the scholars observe, classify, and finally flee. Their library and specimens cannot save the Marina. For me, the book asks whether inward freedom is sufficient when one’s cultivated detachment shades into complicity. That question makes it more troubling, and more interesting, than a simple political parable.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

Read August 13, 2026

Dick’s novel surprised me because Blade Runner had almost completely displaced it in my imagination. The film concentrates its reflections on mortality in Roy Batty’s final scene; the novel distributes its argument through a ruined earth, the Voigt-Kampff test, Mercerism, Deckard’s encounters with humans and androids, and the prestige attached to caring for animals. Humanity is less a stable biological category than a need to give and receive sympathy. This culminates in Deckard’s discovery of a toad in the desert. His wife identifies it as artificial, but the revelation does not empty the creature of value. They simply begin ordering artificial flies and equipment for it. Deckard, whose profession depends on separating real life from imitation, has failed the distinction—and perhaps discovered that the distinction matters less than the care it calls forth.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima

Read August 23, 2026

Published in 1956, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is Mishima’s fictional treatment of the real 1950 destruction of Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto by a young Buddhist acolyte. Its narrator, Mizoguchi, is isolated by his stutter, his sense of ugliness, and an increasingly consuming idea of the pavilion’s beauty. The temple becomes less a building than an absolute standard against which ordinary life, desire, and action appear inadequate. His obsession finally turns destructive: he can imagine freedom from beauty only by annihilating its object.

It has taken me quite a long time to get to this story of Mishima’s. With it, I have certainly read all of his best-known novels. It did not make much of an impact on me. That is not to say that I did not enjoy it—it was beautiful, as all of Mishima’s writing is—but I found the protagonist far too insular, the supporting characters largely shallow, and both the sexual and personal aspects hardly incisive compared with Confessions of a Mask and Forbidden Colors.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche translated by Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley

Read August 26, 2026

Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra combines philosophical teaching with a fictional and highly symbolic narrative. Zarathustra descends from solitude to announce the death of God and the Übermensch, but his teaching repeatedly turns back upon its teacher. From Paul Loeb’s perspective, the doctrine of eternal recurrence supplies the book’s fundamental structure. Recurrence is not merely a test asking whether one could affirm life if every moment returned. Zarathustra must confront it as the truth of his own death and return, learning to will not only joy and greatness but every smallness, failure, and pain bound inseparably to them. The Übermensch therefore cannot be reduced to a stronger future type. The figure belongs to Zarathustra’s attempt to overcome revenge against time and to create values capable of affirming the earth without appeal to another world.

This new translation by Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley is especially valuable because it renders Nietzsche’s recurring words and images consistently. After reading Loeb’s The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra again in preparation, I found the book’s narrative architecture more visible than in earlier translations: the speeches, songs, silences, departures, and returns form an argument that no paraphrase of Nietzsche’s doctrines can replace. Especially valuable, as in all of these new Stanford translations, are the footnotes which draw parallels to Nietzsche’s notes and other works. Because I accept Loeb’s interpretation of the text, I wish that they were further utilized to offer commentary on the text itself, but I understand such not to be the purpose of translation itself. His afterword is, unfortunately, from the perspective of a translator rather than a philosopher offering his own thoughts of the material—but I suppose Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra gives me exactly what I want in this regard, and I have no cause for complaint regarding the translation itself.

Mysteries by Knut Hamsun

Read September 10, 2026

First published in 1892, two years after Hamsun’s (as always, in my opinion) greatest work Hunger, Mysteries belongs to the innovative early period in which Knut Hamsun helped turn the novel inward. Johan Nilsen Nagel arrives without explanation in a small Norwegian coastal town carrying a violin case that may not contain a violin. He displays wealth, humiliates the respectable, defends the town’s scapegoat, falls violently in love, proposes to another woman, contradicts himself, and gradually reveals a mind divided between performance and desperation. The plot never resolves the stranger into a stable character. Nagel remains a poseur, madman, and perhaps genius whose gestures are designed as much to mystify himself as everyone around him.

The novel is less controlled than Hunger and less sensuous than Pan, but its instability is also its fascination. Hamsun’s subject is not a mystery that the reader can solve. It is the frightening opacity of personality: the possibility that a man may speak endlessly, act theatrically, and still conceal no coherent self behind the performance.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Read September 23, 2026

My friend Mr. Fitzpatrick suggested John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces for our September book club. I found it simply hilarious. Each character is unique, like something out of Gogol, and funny in a different way. Although the story centers upon Ignatius J. Reilly, the other characters pursue plots of their own which gradually intersect with his and converge at the climax. It was a joy to read.

Beyond its hilarity, however, the novel offers pointed commentary on the life of an intellectual. Ignatius is intensely modern, yet archetypal: highly educated, genuinely intelligent, pretentious, lazy, unambitious, contemptuous of everyone around him, and incapable of sustained action. He lives with his mother, has never held a job, and locks himself in a filthy room to contemplate Boethius and medieval theology while scribbling fragments of supposedly grand thought across Big Chief tablets. These pages accumulate in an incomplete and impenetrable heap. Their incompleteness protects him from judgment. So long as he produces nothing finished, his imagined genius can never be tested.

The problem is not that Ignatius lacks intelligence. His mother never denies the value of the education for which she dearly paid, and even those who find him repugnant initially respond to his bullying intelligence with a kind of awed terror. Eventually, however, terror becomes sneering contempt. Ignatius has memorized the meaning of Fortuna and the philosophy of fortitude without genuinely struggling against fortune. Patrolman Mancuso, whom Ignatius despises, actually endures humiliation and bad luck until he earns public recognition. Ignatius simply gives up whenever reality becomes difficult. Study which never survives exposure to the world has accomplished nothing.

Forced at last to work, Ignatius fails at one simple job after another. Even when he finds an audience for his genius, his plan to secure world peace through a homosexual political movement is ridiculous and incomprehensible. Each scheme is another vain attempt to exert his miserably weak will upon the world. In the end, his mother attempts to have him committed, and he is saved only when Myrna Mink—the woman he has blamed for so many of his problems—arrives at precisely the right moment and drives him away. His gratitude hardly survives the escape. From the back seat he begins pestering her again, confident that he has outwitted fickle Fortuna and may return, unchanged, to the fantasy of his own importance.

Toole’s life makes the satire especially painful. After his suicide in 1969, his mother, Thelma, persisted in seeking publication until she persuaded Walker Percy, then teaching at Loyola University New Orleans, to read the manuscript. Percy helped bring it to Louisiana State University Press, which published it in 1980. It is difficult not to see in Ignatius some satirical reflection of Toole’s own fears, although the novel should not be reduced to autobiography. The fear itself is familiar to me. I sometimes lock myself in my study and type for hours, telling myself that I have made progress when I have merely reread work produced in a better state of mind and added a few pitiful sentences. Some degree of self-deception may be necessary if one is not to lose hope. The danger begins when one believes the sustaining lie more than the truth and uses it to avoid judgement—to inhabit a fantasy rather than face the blinding light of naked truth.

Conclusion

Looking back over the season, I recognize a thread which was not created by these books, but which they brought into clearer view. I have always been drawn to the point at which inward life passes into action. Knowledge has never seemed sufficient as mere accumulation. Its purpose lies in what one creates from it: a work, an obligation, a transformed life, or an order capable of enduring beyond oneself.

The books approached that problem from opposite directions. The scholars in On the Marble Cliffs preserve their inward freedom through study, yet remain detached until the world they love is burning. Mizoguchi’s consciousness closes around the beauty of the Golden Pavilion until destruction appears to be his only possible act. Nagel in Mysteries performs one self after another without discovering a coherent purpose beneath them. Ignatius supplies the final, grotesquely comic form of the same failure. His intelligence is real, but masturbatory and impotent: it exists to satisfy and defend him rather than to create anything which might be exposed to judgment. These are not failures of intelligence. They are failures to give intelligence a worthy form in the world.

Other figures discover themselves through responsibility. Deckard’s recognition of empathy matters because it becomes care, even for an artificial animal. Mike becomes a person as intelligence develops into friendship, belonging, and obligation. Manny is an ordinary man until knowledge of Luna’s future makes ordinary contentment culpable. James Brooke converts the will of an adventurer into responsibility for a country and its posterity. Zarathustra faces the most severe version of the same demand: knowledge of recurrence must become the will to affirm every detail of existence.

This does not require every thinker to become a conqueror, ruler, or revolutionary. Creative action may take the form of scholarship, art, friendship, or the patient construction of a life. Nor does failure itself make thought worthless: any serious attempt may fail. The decisive distinction lies between submitting one’s thought to the resistance of reality and protecting it forever within the imagination. The inward life must bear fruit rather than consume itself. Thought must eventually produce something more than the private satisfaction of possessing it.

Writing these reviews is, at most, an attempt to move in that direction. Reading can easily become another form of accumulation: one more title completed, one more interpretation understood, one more private judgment added to the rest. Writing can become another deception if the identity of a writer substitutes for finished work, or if incompleteness protects one’s conception of oneself from judgment. I would like reading instead to become material for creation, but that remains a goal rather than an achievement I can claim. If this season clarified anything, it was the standard itself: knowledge must pass into creative action, and the value of an inward life is finally measured by what it enables one to make of the world.