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Choosing Books for a Young Conservative
This is my son’s last free summer. Next year, he’ll be 16, when driving and working will distend the umbilicus connecting him to home. So, acting on a long-held, half-baked impulse, I’m going to spend this summer discussing books with him.
Since he never reads on his own the books I hand him, I’m reading the assignments right along with him. Here’s my (insanely) ambitious list:
- From Bauhaus to Our House (Tom Wolfe) completed
- The Abolition of Man (C.S. Lewis) current
- The Conservative Mind (Russell Kirk)
- Architecture: Form, Space and Order (Francis D. K. Ching)
- Poems: Wadsworth Handbook & Anthology (Main & Seng)
- Anatomy of Thatcherism (Shirley Robin Letwin)
- Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
- From Dawn to Decadence (Jacques Barzun)
- Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman)
- City Comforts (David Sucher)
- How the Irish Saved Civilization (Thomas Cahill)
- The Timeless Way of Building (Christopher Alexander)
- Introduction (W. H. Auden) to The Protestant Mystics (A. Fremantle)
- The Painted Word (Tom Wolfe)
- The Weight of Glory (C.S. Lewis)
- The Great Divorce (C.S. Lewis)
- Leadership & Self-Deception (The Arbinger Institute)
I don’t expect to read every word of every book. Certainly, in the case of Kirk, Letwin, and Barzun (at least), I’ll select a few representative chapters.
What do you think of my list? What book by Roger Scruton should I add? Should we skip the Kirk and take our Burke straight-up? How about some Klingon poetry?
Published in General
Interesting. I wasn’t aware of this.
Rocky IV taught me to hate commies.
Someone mention Arthur Conan Doyle, may I suggest his poetry? He reminds me much of Kipling, but one generally doesn’t hear of his poetry as it’s far over-shadowed by that Holmes fellow.
In many ways, it should not be surprising. The two were writing popular fiction, and were not historians. Nordhoff’s grandfather had been a sailor. (He wrote several books on the sea, including an excellent memoir of his cruise on USS Columbus as a ship’s boy.) But grandpa’s experience was in the United States Navy of the middle of the 19th century, not the Royal Navy of the late 18th century. There were almost as many changes in the 70 years between the Bounty mutiny and when grandpa Nordhoff sailed as in the 80 years between Nordhoff senior’s experiences and when the books were written.
The two realized they could not rely on his experiences, but the type of research resources available today were not available in 1920s and 1930s. So they went with popular works of the type available in large public or small college libraries. Maesfield was a better poet and mariner than a historian and Barrow related to some of the mutineers.
It’s great fiction though.
Seawriter
Don’t forget The White Company and Sir Nigel. Two first-rate adventure novels by Doyle.
Seawriter
I would second Poe. Once, in college, I confessed my love for Poe to an English professor. I was half embarrassed, knowing that Poe is not taken seriously by many serious people (Harold Bloom e.g.). He told me never be ashamed to like Poe. Over the years he had known countless students whose entry into the world of letters, of adult/classic literature, was through reading Poe in their early to mid teens. And no less a figure than Yeats (!) called Poe “always, and for all lands, a great lyric poet.”
Based on a completely general stereotype of adolescent boys, I would be careful about attempting too obvious an indoctrination – BUT, he’s your son. Ergo, I’m not going to add anything too heavy, although I will second Barzun and Gaddis.
Anything by Lewis is great, but I would throw in The Screwtape Letters and the Perelandra trilogy. Chesterton is dubiously conservative, but a great writer and thinker nonetheless; perhaps try The Man Who Was Thursday. Then: Animal Farm, A Clockwork Orange, Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, all of which have the advantage of being fairly short. Many more upon request.
Just as a sidebar, one of the in-built advantages of the Left (again speaking generally) is that it can make immediate emotional appeals to sympathy, justice etc, which is why the Left will always be rather more effective on stage and screen.
None of these suggested readings, excellent as they all are, will help this boy, or anyone’s boy, unless he as done a job of work, preferably manual or physical labor, for an employer. Has he? If not, can you help make that happen?
Judging by the post, that’s the agenda for next summer:
Lots of trigger warnings in these recommendations.
Before I list a bunch of books 2/3 of you know (and 1/3 have read), let me add one you don’t. My father reads a lot. His favorite genre: hunting stories. I, who don’t read much, especially realistic nature stories, asked once for his top pick:
Jock of the Bushveld (free)
It’s the story of a hunting dog (Jock) in South Africa (1880s). Poking around on Amazon, I see that it is a classic, widely known in Africa, common on school reading lists. I have only finished a quarter of it but already I can see wisdom hidden in the plain prose. The stories of training the dog, for example, illustrate the exciting world available to a well-trained dog and the the poorly trained dog that had to be shot. (Warning: slow start)
Also, Non-Fiction:
PJ O’Rourke, Eat the Rich, Wealth of Nations (Quotes and commentary on Smith)
Rational Optimist (helpful tonic after Steyn)
Fiction:
Screwtape Letters
Poetry:
Ozymandius
Kipling: The Gods of the Copybook Headings, If, Tommy
Movie Versions:
The Man Who Would Be King
A Man for All Seasons
Reading should be fun so you should definitely cross out The Conservative Mind which is dull. Also, Witness (not on your list but is in the comments) is quite the doorstop. I have been chewing on it for months and have not caught on yet. If I hear one more description of a dour communist Chambers knew for 4 months, I think I will not be able to take it.
I would recommend The Prize by Daniel Yeargin. Not political, it is the rip roaring true history of the formation of the world’s oil industry. Very interesting and subliminally conservative.
People are different, aren’t they?
Once I started Witness I couldn’t put it down.
Yeah, I can see where some people have had Ross’ reaction Witness — Leigh’s reaction is pretty common. The book also has quite the reputation for captivating people despite it’s length.
Though I agree Russell Kirk is pretty dull.
May I add my vote to P.J. O’Rourke’s Eat The Rich. It is fantastic.
OK, so I enjoyed Kirk too. But it was a few minutes a day, at a busy time when I was short on intellectual stimulation, and the ideas resonated. I also read it on the Kindle. This is a plus because you turn pages frequently and don’t notice how far you are from the end.
Oh, if we’re including poetry:
Rudyard Kipling – If (read by Dennis Hopper)
AWalter D. Wintle – It’s All In A State Of Mind (read by Harvey Keitel)
Edgar Albert Guest – The Spirit of Buffalo County (read by Harvey Keitel)
Exactly. Our government, in its wisdom, is making employment of teens ever more difficult.
Maybe leaven your list with a little light libertarianism: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Heinlein.
How about The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons? http://mises.org/books/RoadtoSerfdom.pdf
Not meant as a joke; maybe The Road to Serfdom itself is too heavy….
Outstanding ideas!
I, Pencil, by Leonard Read: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html
Reader’s Digest condensed version of The Road to Serfdom, if the original is to dense: http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/upldbook43pdf.pdf
I agree that some of this is too heavy for a 16 year old. And lots of other good suggestions nonetheless. But given that a long list would take a few years to burn through, I’ll add a few more (some formidable) but serious and foundational books for a religious conservative (which you clearly are) most of which would be appropriate from 18 – 22 :
Paradise Lost by Milton
The Everlasting Man by Chesterton
Chronicles Of Narnia
How Shall We Then Live by Shaeffer
The Cost Of Discipleship by Bonhoeffer
The Theology Of The Body High School Edition by John Paul II
Animal Farm by Orwell
The Gulag Archipelago by Soltzhenitzen
A Return To Modesty by Shalit
Big mistake: not reading every page, every word of Barzun’s Dawn to Decadence. It’s a masterpiece. It should not only be read cover to cover, but twice. I just reread it after a period of about ten years. Truer now. Great book.
Hmm, it’s been around ten years when i read it. Might be a good idea to reread it myself. I concur, it’s a great book.
Building A Bridge To The 18th Century – by Neil Postman
Honourable Mentions for other Neil Postman books:
– Technopoly
– Amusing Ourselves To Death
– Teaching As A Subversive Activity
– How To Watch TV News
If you think he can correctly process it, in conjunction with discussions with you: Grendel by John Gardner.
And here’s a “telling on myself” vignette: This book was part of a great controversy at my high school when my older sister was a junior or senior … and yet, somehow, I only read it for the first time in the past few years. When I read it, I ended up appalled at the nihilism of the monster-given-a voice (and a graceful voice, at that, John Gardner is quite good at aesthetically pleasing prose) – and horrified by the idea of assigning the book to teenagers.
Apparently I missed the point when I read the book. I only recently came across a Grendel study guide by Michael Segedy – here is the first sentence from the Amazon review: “This scholarly essay examines John Champlain Gardner’s attack on existential nihilism in his satiric work Grendel.”
So: I trust that if the two of you read it together, your son will be more perceptive than I was.