Recently I finished reading Anna Karenina, arguably Tolstoy’s best work and one of the greatest novels ever written.

Here are my brief and scattered and half-finished impressions:

• One of the best opening lines of all time: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

• I don’t think I’ve ever resonated…

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One of the questions I get asked most often is, “What are you reading?”

I’ve created this page to share the books I’m reading every month.

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1- The path to virtue gets less steep as you climb

“This mountain is such, that climbing it

is harder at the start; but the more one climbs,

the less one feels the effort.”

— Purg. IV.88–90

The first steps in Dante’s path to purge his sin and ascend the mountain to heaven are the steepest. But as …

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Everyone reads Man’s Search for Meaning, but almost no one reads Yes to Life.

While it doesn’t have the same powerful account of life and death in the Nazi concentration camps, Frankl’s ideas on taking responsibility, finding meaning in suffering and the uniqueness of the individual are pure and profound.

In the fa…

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Will Durant spent four decades studying human history and distilled everything he learned into a series of 13 essays, spanning a mere 119 pages. It’s one of the most insight-dense books I’ve read.

The premise is simple: You can understand the present and see into the future by studying the past.

You c…

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Viktor Frankl was a Polish psychiatrist who survived concentration camp imprisonment during the Holocaust, but lost his wife, and went on to found logotherapy, a practice focused on finding meaning in life, even in the face of great suffering.

Man’s Search for Meaning is as timeless in its…

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Brother Lawrence was a 17th-century Carmelite monk who served in a low-status role at a monastery in Paris. He wasn’t suited for a life of manual labor and endured severe pain in his legs and feet. But Lawrence did not try to escape suffering. Rather, he learned to dwell with God in the midst of it.

His messa…

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1- No good deed goes unpunished.

Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind.

When Zeus wanted to wipe out the whole race of man to begin anew, Prometheus believed in man’s near-infinite potential for goodness. He gave them reason and rationality at a time when violence reigned—a turning point in c…

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This is one of those spirituality books that should be a hundred times more popular than it is.

Potter, an ex-Buddhist monk turned Christian pastor, distills every spiritual worldview into three categories—monism, dualism, and trinitarianism—in a way that just makes sense.

He’s one of the healthiest modern Christian writers I’ve come across, somewhat re…

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1- Reason can only take one so far. Faith must carry them home.

Dante’s reason—physicalized in Virgil, his guide through Hell—rescues him from the dark wood he’s lost in. Reason helps him order the chaos of his moral confusion. Reason strengthens his understanding of sin. …

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1- Love demands perfection. Kindness only cares to make us feel better, but real love demands refinement. The modern narrative that relationships shouldn’t change us, or that we don’t have to change, is wrong.

Love, by its nature, wants to change us. Love should change us. If we let it, love will shape us …

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1- Reading will never be enough. No amount of knowledge will ever fill the deep recesses in my heart.

Faust spent his life locked in his study in the quest for knowledge, only to find himself empty and utterly unsatisfied. He didn’t grow until he put his books aside and plunged into the messy, joyful, and tragic rea…

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Below is a collection of books I found joy in reading and often recommend to family and friends and strangers on the street.

I will continue to add to this page as I read more.

Literature

Good literature will teach you more about human nature than any work of non-fiction. School taught us to despise the classics, but you can a…

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Several friends have asked for a reading list of books and essays that I personally enjoy.

In this post, I’ll share what I’m currently reading as well as a list of my favorite all-time books and essays that shaped my thinking and I continue to reflect on and revisit.

If you’d like to bookmark or check back on this post as I update it, you can view the online version here.

Happy reading.

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