But we're also now in April, which means we can do our tradition of reporting on the books I read the month before. So I want to report on the books I read in March 2022. As long-time listeners know, generally my goal is to aim for five books per month, and that's what I read in March of 2022.

I mix genres, I mix difficulties. I want a variety of different books. So let's go through it. Here are the five books I read in March of 2022 in order of completion. The first was Travels with George. This was written by the popular historian Nathaniel Philbrook. So Travels with George is an allusion to Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie.

So if you're a Steinbeck person, you know, Travels with Charlie, Steinbeck is traveling with his dog, Charlie. Well, in Travels with George, Nathaniel Philbrook, who's written a series of books about the Revolutionary Era in America, went on a travel with his dog. And in particular, the dog was not named George.

In this case, George is George Washington. And Philbrook and his wife and his dog trace the post-inauguration tour of the newly formed country of America that George Washington went on. So he did a tour all the way through New England, and then he later did a tour all the way through the South.

And Philbrook retraced the steps of that tour in modern times and then went to these went to the spots and then mixed it in like with Steinbeck-esque anecdotes about the journeys and his dog being a pain, etc. So, I mean, here's the thing. The book was fine. I think the contemporaneous pieces about the dog, I didn't care.

I mean, it's like two upper middle-aged people with a dog and the dog gets dirty and it's hard to find hotels for them to stay. It wasn't that interesting, but the history is great. I'm a big fan of Philbrook's history. I mean, I would have been fine if this book really was just about George Washington's post-inaugurational tours and just honed in right on that.

I kind of read pretty quickly in the in-betweens. I'm a big Philbrook fan. Here's what I like about Philbrook. I love writers who live in cool places and write full time. And Philbrook, who came to writing late. When I mean late, I'm talking about like Jesse's current decade of life.

I'm talking about someone in their 40s. Right. Jesse is all of one day being 40. So we're talking people who largely, we would rightly say, have very little productive life left. But somehow at that point, and it's hard for someone like me in my 30s, again, to really understand what that's like.

But somehow at that point, he began writing in his 40s. And his first book was Heart of the Sea about the ship Essex. So this was the ship that was the model for Moby Dick. So it was a fishing, a whaling boat that was rammed and sunk by a whale.

And what a great book. And some people survived in a life raft, like a boat, a whaling boat. And they were at sea forever. And they ended up on an island. It's all a true story. That's how he like burst onto the scene of doing historical fiction writing. But he lives in Nantucket.

And that's what I think is cool. He lives in Nantucket where he's just a writer on this windswept, you know, island. And I always found that very romantic. But he was a great writer because he's a good he's a good archive guy. And you get a little bit of insight in this book about his methods, because in the contemporaneous parts, he's often hanging out with librarians, historical society curators, and you get a sense into what life is like writing that.

It's all about finding primary sources, going to historical archives, going to libraries, pulling out these books that no one has seen in 75 years to try to piece together the context in which history happened. So I thought that was cool. So there you go. Good book. Guy lives on Nantucket.

If you're going to read any Philbrook, start with Heart of the Sea. I also thought Mayflower was very good. Valiant Ambition is very good as well. So there are some recommendations for you. All right. Now we get a little bit weird. Not weird, but fantasy. And so we got to be careful here, Jesse, that I get all the names right.

So I don't know exactly what path led me to this. I think because I had heard this book was appropriate for younger audiences, I might have been testing this out for my oldest son. But I have never read Ursula K. Le Guin, and I read her first Earthsea book, A Wizard of Earthsea.

So it's a fantasy book written in the 60s. It has a lot of prescience towards Harry Potter, right? I mean, there's a young boy who goes to a school for wizards, but it's much more it's much more psychologically astute and sophisticated. It's not the tale of a boy who's meant to be a hero and has to discover it.

It's actually the whole metaphor of the book is that through his pride, he unleashes essentially like a demon force in the world that is hunting him. And in the end, he has to hunt it down. So it's much more literary, much more using language and scene to try to convey a deeper reality.

Not so plot focused or expository as like a JK Rowling or like a George R.R. Martin. So actually like a really well crafted book in the fantasy genre. And I thought it was quite good. You know, I saw echoes of it. You certainly see echoes of it. To me, it wasn't Harry Potter.

I was thinking more of Love Grossman and the Magicians, which has a similar sort of literary metaphorical darkness where they sort of unleash this creature from the magical, I don't know, I forgot dimension or something that literally like kills one of the kids at the break beaks at the at the school for wizards.

And so clearly Grossman must have been channeling Ursula K. Le Guin. But it was I liked it. I'm not going to let my son read it. I think it's a little more too sophisticated and dark for him. He's reading Harry Potter instead. But, you know, it was a good change of pace.

I did. I did. And did enjoy it. Lots of good old fashioned wizard names. It's all like these weird, crazy Dungeons and Dragons names. All right. Copy refill. All right. Book number three. Let's dig in a different direction. Every Good Endeavor by Timothy Keller. So Timothy Keller is the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan.

And he's a public communicator, effective public communicator. He's written a bunch of books that have done pretty well. At some point, someone sent me a bunch of his books. So I have like a stack of his books. I pulled this off of the stack. The reason why I read it is every good endeavor is come from a Christian perspective, but it is a biblical perspective on work, the point of work, finding work that's significant to you.

And I thought this would be something I should probably know. Like I should probably have this club in my bag, understanding biblical perspectives on work and passion and vocation. Because obviously I've written about this in the past. I'm doing this work now on the deep life. And so I was like, let me get the Christian biblical perspective on work.

And so that's why I dived in that book. And there's some good things in there. I mean, it was the pick and choose, but I mean, I think there are some interesting threads of thought that I hadn't come across before. I mean, here's the most interesting. Here's the headline, like a headline idea that comes out of that book, which probably puts it at odds with a lot of sort of elite discourse around work right now, is Keller finds like a really strong biblical justification for work as an intrinsic good.

This is quite different than I think a lot of the anti-ambition, anti-productivity type philosophy that's going on now, which sees work as mainly like an exploitative activity to be tolerated at best and in a utopian society to be minimized. Keller comes at it basically saying God worked in Genesis, and that's an argument for work as important.

He also has a reading of Genesis that says the seventh day of rest. So God worked and then he rest is basically a biblical mythological recipe for human satisfaction in which you have the seasonality. You need to work, but then you need to not let work be all consuming.

You need to step back and rest and it's in that dance. And that's what God did during the first seven days. And that's supposed to be an instruction manual for life. And you see what Adam and Eve and like basically Genesis is like a whole manual for work. I mean, I think, you know, Karl Marx's head would explode if he read this because it's, you know, it's, it seems really different than a lot of sort of economic materialistic analyses from today.

But wait, cool. It's cool to see. I love people taking big, like big swing thoughts on things that are drawing from interesting sources. So that was an interesting one. Then I read the Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. It's arguable. This is a book. I thought it was a book I got on Kindle.

It's really a collection of three lectures delivered during the World War II. So it's pretty short, but let's call it a book. And I forgot how I came across this. I came across it somewhere. I was like, I should just read it. I just bought it and read it.

You know, it took me two days just sort of reading it. It's not a long thing. And it's interesting. So supposedly this is this book quotation marks collection of speeches is was very influential in the 20th century. It's an argument for values, basically having rooted values on which you build cultural social systems.

It's an argument against subjectivism. This notion of all value is constructed. So it's basically like a preemptive rejection of what 30 years later would emerge in French postmodernism before that even existed. So I'm sure this book is not well appreciated by the modern academy, but I think that's what made it interesting to read.

And it's it's it's jargon free and very approachable. But I mean, you can basically really crudely summarize the argument. I hate to summarize it crudely, but he's basically making an argument that we have to be careful of the heartless man. And by the heartless man, what he means is or no, the man, not the heartless man.

That's not the right wording. No, the right wording was the man without chest. But what he means by that is heartless. He says without. A foundation of values, which the heart is, so in other words, like the values that you have, these moral intimations about these moral intuitions that this seems right.

If you ignore that, you're just trying to use your brain to think through ethics and mediate like and control your gut, which is like, let's go. I'm mad. Let's go kill this person. I want that to have your animal instincts. And if you try to just tame that with just your brain, let's just come up with what makes sense from scratch.

Let's do that. Let's be like Kant and just try to construct a moral system from scratch. He's arguing that's not going to work. You have to ground it all in what you feel in your heart, this sort of these underlying truth. Lewis is a real obviously a Christian apologist, but he writes this book outside of the context of Christianity.

So he's trying to be religion agnostic. I mean, it's interesting. I mean, it's something for sure. I'm surprised we don't read it like it in a sort of standard, heavily postmodern influence academic culture. Be a nice thing to assign to people to is like in here is like a like a very straightforward standard critique.

And this is the this is the tension between those two, the tension between those two things. Of course, the postmodern view would say there is no underlying value system that you're picking up through your metaphorical heart. It's all just constructed. It's all just systems that are constructed to support various supremacies and power relations.

And C.S. Lewis, if he had been alive, would probably have an issue with that. So it's interesting to read, quick to read, no jargon, very approachable. All right. Final book. And I mentioned this last week in last week's episodes, I actually drew some insights from this book was John McPhee's The Fourth Draft.

So I'll point you towards last week's episodes, I think maybe one eighty five. I got in I got into some details of some things I learned from the book. It's great. It's a John McPhee book about writing. A little bit of memoir, a lot of craft, very interesting. You'll be impressed by McPhee after you read it.

You'll also be insanely jealous. Like, wait a second, you get to spend eight months just thinking about an article and and then, you know, maybe at some point write it when it all feels right. Like it feels like a very it feels like a very cool life. Like I can't be jealous.

I can't complain. I write for The New Yorker. They're very generous and giving me flexibility and timing when I need it. And so I'm not I'm not complaining. I'm saying it's awesome. And John McPhee's awesome. It's a cool book. So if you're into nonfiction writing, you can get a look inside the mind of a master.

All right. So, Jesse, those are my five books. People like to know what you read. Give us one book, Jesse. What's one book you've read recently we should know about? I'm almost done with 4000 weeks. Pulled it off your bookshelf, actually. Oh, yeah. All right. Well, what's your almost done with it?

Review. I like it. I've been, you know, thinking about it. I think about time a lot anyway. But it's it's good. I mean, you hear it mentioned all the time. Yeah. Ferris talks about it. You talk about it. Other podcasts talk about it. Yeah. Now, Berkman's Berkman's great. Ferris always forgets his name.

You know that he called it is always like 4000 weeks. And well, I messed up the book on Ferris's show. So I called it 4000, like 40000 days or something. So, Oliver, we're all sorry. I don't there's nothing particularly hard to remember about your name or that actually a book title.

That's a number can be difficult once you're like in the four digits. That could be difficult. So I'm going to give myself a give myself a break. But yeah, that's a great book. Blurbed by me. So, you know, it's good. Yep. That's how you can tell.