Well, another year is in the books. It feels like not very long ago I was sitting here thinking about who I hoped to be and what I hoped to read in 2025. What do I have to show for the last twelve months? How did I do? Pretty good. I’ve got a big stack of books that I've read and reflected on. I made some positive changes. I did some really hard things (like running the original Greek Marathon). But if I’m being honest, I also have some plans and intentions that went unmet. There were subjects I wanted to explore that I didn’t, books I said I’d finally get to and didn’t. I read a lot of wonderful books this year, but as always, I had told myself I would read even more (and spend less time on my phone).
Samuel Johnson, talking of his failed New Year’s resolutions, once lamented why he bothered to try to make them at all. “I try,” he explained, “because reformation is necessary and despair is criminal.” So once again, I am making resolutions for an even better reading year in 2026. This is why we always build some reading-inspired challenges intoDaily Stoic’s New Year, New You Challenge, which starts on January 1st (don’t procrastinate signing up). I’d love to have you in there with us. It helps keep me and my family accountable and pushes us to be better–I know it will do the same for you.
But before that, here at the end of the year, I try to narrow down all the books I read and recommended in this email list to just a handful of the best. The kind of books where if they were the only books I’d read that year, I’d still feel like it was an awesome year of reading. You can check out the best of lists from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011… I can’t believe it’s been 15 years of these roundups!
Montaigneby Stefan Zweig How much did I love this book? I literally bought 1,000 copies. Like, it was going to go out of print, so I bought up all the available stock and then when I wrote this article about how timely this timeless (published in 1942) book was, we immediately sold all of them at The Painted Porch in less than a week. Thankfully, the publisher relented and gave us another run, so I’m able to rave about it some more. I’ve read it four times now and have taken something new and different each time (sometimes I’ve been calmed by it, other times terrified). In 1941, the novelist Stefan Zweig–living in exile after the Nazis condemned him, as they had all the Jews, banned his work, and burned his books in the streets—chanced upon a “dusty old edition” of Montaigne’s essays, who himself had been writing in a time of religious persecution and violence and disruption. “Certain authors,” Zweig would later write, “reveal themselves to us only at a certain age and in chosen moments.” I first read Montaigne in 2016 (Montaigne lived through divisive political times). I read it again in 2020 (Montaigne lived through the plague). I read it again about a year and a half ago (Montaigne lived through technological disruption, economic instability, and a kind of mass hysteria Zweig would refer to as “the herd’s rampancy”). And then I read it again this year. It’s a very surreal experience to read a book about a man turning inward amidst the cruelty and close-mindedness of his time, written some 350 years later by a man fleeing the brutality and persecutions of his time…as modern society continues to experience (and inflict) the same horrors on itself. He is the primary character in the final book in my series of the Stoic Virtues–Wisdom Takes Work–and this book was one of the most powerful things I read while researching it. As Montaigne says, our primary task is to remain human in inhuman times.
Augustusby John Williams and The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault One of my all-time favorite novels is Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, which is a fictional memoir of the dying Hadrian (addressed to the future emperor Marcus Aurelius). Given this fact and the fact that I have talked about how much I love this book…why didn’t anyone tell me about Augustus? What kind of algorithm failure led to it not being suggested to me? It’s basically a book designed for me (and other people whose “Roman Empire” is the Roman Empire). It’s not an obscure book either, it won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1973. I thought it was beautiful and illuminating, especially on the themes of power and ambition and happiness. It’s a novel about the rise and reign of Rome’s first emperor, with a surprise appearance of Seneca at the end, but I won’t spoil it. Another historical novel I wish I had read sooner is Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine. It’s about the coming of age of a young boy, Alexis, in Periclean Athens and touches on many of the events Herodotus experienced or wrote about. Every few pages features a delightful appearance of someone (Socrates, Plato, Euripides, Xenophon) or some place or battle you’ve heard of (Marathon, Sicily, Thrace, Battle of Munychia). Sometimes fiction can get us closer to the truth than history and I felt like this was one of those books–Socrates can be hard to get into, but this puts a face to the name and allows you, I think, to go back and understand the philosophy better. It’s a reminder too that the past was not a peaceful place but scary and uncertain and violent and cruel (as well as inspiring and creative and hopeful) just as ours is now. I will recommend again Memoirs of Hadrian as well as Gates of Fire here, as they are all similar, great historical fiction.
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreckby Sophie Elmhirst andThe Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery by Siddharth Kara I don’t really like boats, but I love shipwreck books. I’ve mentioned some of my favorite must-reads through the years: In The Heart of the Sea (the real-life story that inspired Moby Dick), Dead Wake, Endurance, The Wide Wide Sea, and The Wager. I even made a whole video about it, which you can check out here. I was first introduced to A Marriage at Sea when Samantha read me a passage from her Kindle. A few days later, I saw it in a bookstore with a blurb from Patrick Radden Keefe, whose book Say Nothing I’d read and loved last year, so I didn’t need any more convincing. What a great book! And for the author’s debut, no less! The story is about a young couple shipwrecked at sea who survive for months on a tiny raft in the Pacific. And how did their boat sink? A whale! For real! It’s destined to be a classic of the shipwreck genre. More recently, I picked up The Zorg. Like most great narrative non-fiction books, this book is a riveting story first and foremost, and then a means of exploring both the darkness of the human condition and the potential in each of us. It takes a close look at the little-known true story of a slave ship in 1781 headed to Africa from the Netherlands that dumped dozens of slaves overboard in a desperate and evil attempt to recover their value in insurance money. It was the trial and later the publicity over this disaster that helped inspire Thomas Clarkson and the abolitionist movement. As dark and terrible as Robert Stubbs and William Gregson are, characters like Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp and Oludah Equiano give you hope and challenge you to do more.
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infectionby John Green Sometimes the perfect topic meets the perfect writer. I have long held up The Big Short as an example of this–a lifetime of financial journalism and character-driven storytelling (Michael Lewis) intersects with the global financial crisis and makes one of the most interesting and bestselling business books ever. John Green has been writing accessible and interesting fiction for many years (along with viral YouTube and social media videos about history). Then he gets obsessed with tuberculosis–a disease very few people know or care about–and produces this book, which deserves (and is finding) a huge audience. As he says in the book, we could live in a world without tuberculosis (which currently kills over 1 million people a year), but for some reason, we choose not to. Why? I remember, when I lived in New Orleans, passing an old, beautiful brick building that was closed up. I got closer and saw an old, fading sign above the entrance, “John Dibert Tuberculosis Hospital.” In 1936, it was so bad that they had to have dedicated hospitals. Yup! You don’t have to study much history (here’s a podcast we did on the Antonine Plague) to quickly realize that public health is one of our greatest inventions. You don’t have to be a data scientist or an ethicist to realize that people who undermine public health–or oppose basic public health funding or programs–have as much blood on their hands as any mass murderer. Anyway, this is a fascinating and heart-wrenching book I would love for you to read if you haven’t already. It’s short, which is good. There is one big flaw: I don’t think Doc Holliday appears once…and that’s inexcusable. Also, if you haven’t read The Great Influenza, it is also very good and you might like my interview with Dr. Katalin Kariko, who, as it happens, is also a big fan of the Stoics.
On Character: Choices that Define a Life by Stanley McChrystal This is the best new book I’ve read in some time. I actually read it as a galley last December, but I had to wait for it to come out before I could tell anyone about it. Perhaps the book struck me extra hard because I read it while I was at the White House at the end of 2024, giving a talk to departing staffers (you can listen to that here). Character obviously counts everywhere, but nowhere does it count more than in government and public life. The Stoics–who are quoted liberally in this book–believed that character was destiny. They believed that accomplishments and power mattered little if a person could not be trusted, if they did not hold themselves to high standards, if they did not work actively for the common good. McChrystal’s book is a throwback to an older style of book, a meditation on a theme in the form of short essays and stories. It is also a throwback in terms of its earnestness and vulnerability. There’s no performance here. It’s not designed to get speaking gigs or consulting opportunities. It is the thoughts of a man in the latter stages of his career and life, reflecting on what he’s learned, the mistakes he’s made, the future he hopes to leave his children and grandchildren. As I said, I just loved this book. General McChrystal was nice enough to come out to Bastrop to do the Daily Stoic podcast and I think that turned into one of the best podcasts we did this year. I was particularly interested in the stories he told about his mother (who was active in the Civil Rights movement) and his relationship with his own son, who was a rebellious punk rocker who challenged this buttoned-down general. We had a great chat as we walked through the bookstore and here are some of the titles that General McChrystal left with. I hope a lot of people read this book and more than that, I hope more people live by it.
Misc I understand it’s a tough sell (it’s a 1,040-page bio about a somewhat obscure and divisive right-wing commentator), but I started raving about Buckley by Sam Tanenhaus to my friends as soon as I first picked it up. I had dinner with my publisher last night, and he and I did the same thing–we both just could not get over how good this biography was. But as I always say, studying the past is the best way to understand the present and William F. Buckley was a brilliant, articulate, compelling thinker and organizer who–with the help of big-pocketed donors–managed to create a movement that not only galvanized a generation of young people, but helped elect (multiple) presidents and politicians…who then mostly did horrible things. The dark energy that Buckley channeled for (and at other times, purged) from his movement is not new or gone either. I also read and raved about Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare, about an ambitious and connected political advisor who finds herself in the English countryside during the pandemic. There, she discovered a baby wild hare and nursed it back to health. What ensues is a surreal and moving friendship made up of countless quiet hours with her unnamed friend, where Dalton learned to see the world through new eyes. I loved this book and have recommended it to so many people. And finally, I about fell out of my chair earlier this year when I saw that a new book from Joan Didion was coming out (a chair that, if you follow along on The Daily Stoic Podcast or have been a subscriber to this email for a while you will know, is the same chair that Joan Didion herself once wrote in). Didion’s Notes to John is a unique read, to say the least–it is the notes that Didion took from several years of therapy (preserved for her husband John) as their daughter struggled with alcoholism. If you haven’t read A Year of Magical Thinking or Blue Nights(do it now!), you can still get a lot out of these notes, which actually function as a deeply moving insight into family dynamics and the way that we all struggle, as parents, to help our kids. It’s a tragic and terribly sad story, but I learned a lot from it. While some critics have said they don’t think these notes should be published, it is obvious to me as a Didion fan that she very much wrote them with an eye towards publication. Honestly, they’d work even as a kind of epistolary novel.
Kids My nine-year-old and I loved reading Painting the Game by Patricia MacLachlan together. It rekindled his interest in baseball and I thought it had some great messages about courage and mastery and going after your dreams. As a family, we lovedDon’t Trust Fish, which is not only very funny but a subversive, subtle book about media literacy (at least in our interpretation). Always be on the lookout for untrustworthy narrators. No books made my kids laugh harder than The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of the Whole Stupid World and A Dumb Birds Field Guide to the Worst Birds Ever by Matt Kracht. Like they laugh so hard they can’t handle it. Is that because there are all sorts of cursing? Sure, but all I care about is that they love books and love reading and if this is what it takes, I’m all about it. I find those things funny, too and was especially pleased to learn they tricked their grandparents into reading it. It’s hard to remember a time before my boys got obsessed with Hamilton, but it’s been long enough that my 2025 Spotify Wrapped was taken over by the soundtrack. This year we not only saw the play (in Austin) and watched the movie (in theaters), but we listened to the Ron Chernow audiobook. And when I interviewed Ron about his new book, Mark Twain, my then eight-year-old popped in to ask some questions, which you can watch here (or listen to the whole episode here). And finally, as I mentioned in 2024, their love of the Greeking Out podcast (my interview with Kenny Kurtis here) and the books led us to reading The Odyssey (which we were just dipping in and out of again last week) and taking a big family trip to Greece over the summer. Here’s a video we did of some of the lessons of that journey (and what the Greeks can teach us). I highly recommend all those books. As far as parenting books go, I very much enjoyed Melinda Wenner Moyer’s Hello Cruel World (which apparently I helped inspire) and Samantha has been raving about Power On (more on that below), which I also liked. We’re doing a monthly book club for dads as part of Daily Dad Society, which I’d love to have you join. We also just launched The Daily Dad Journal, which has become a part of my nightly routine.
Recommendations from my wife, Samantha (whose recommendations I ignore always to my regret) The Art of Asking Your Boss For A Raiseby Georges Perec This book was written in French in 1968 and translated to English in 2011. It’s experimental fiction and really an adventure of a read. I’ve never read anything like this and am so impressed by the translator. It’s neurotic, the overthinker’s inner dialogue really comes to life.
Dog Songs: Poemsby Mary Oliver Our relationship with dogs is so complex and beautiful. This book is a must-read for dog owners and lovers—exploring the tenuous hold we have on their domesticity and how to respect and honor the wildness that exists within them.
Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Familyby Ash Brandin I’ve followed this Instagram account for a very long time and it was really foundational for our screen usage and boundaries in our house. The book is very good—probably the most practical general parenting book I’ve read, with strategies inclusive to neurodivergent families.
Before I go…
Every year for the last seven years, I’ve looked forward to starting The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge—a set of 21 actionable challenges, presented one per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. It's become one of the most transformative rituals of my year and this year, I believe, is our best New Year New You Challenge yet. I can't wait to kick off this challenge with you on January 1st. Don’t wait. Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge and sign up TODAY!
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As always, I appreciate you supporting my bookstore, The Painted Porch. Please note that because a lot of the books we sell are backlist titles, there can sometimes be delays in stocking/sourcing. And with that, I hope that you’ll get around to reading whichever of these books catch your eye and that you’ll learn as much as I did. Whether you buy them at The Painted Porch or on Amazon today, or at your nearest independent bookstore six months from now makes no difference to me. I just hope you read!
You’re welcome to email me questions or raise issues for discussion. Better yet, if you know of a good book on a related topic, please pass it along. And as always, if one of these books comes to mean something to you, recommend it to someone else.
I promised myself a long time ago that if I saw a book that interested me I’d never let time or money or anything else prevent me from having it. This means that I treat reading with a certain amount of respect. All I ask, if you decide to email me back, is that you’re not just thinking aloud.
Enjoy these books, treat your education like the job that it is, and let me know if you ever need anything.