Getting Home

G. K. Chesterton once wrote that: “There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.” In The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, author Rod Dreher takes the long way home, while his sister, Ruthie, arrives by the more direct route.

This divergence causes a rift between the siblings, one which isn't fully resolved until the book's final pages. Just as Ruthie was completing her first year leading a classroom as a teacher in their small hometown of St. Francisville, Rod was given a break: an assignment at the Washington Times. Ruthie was distressed, telling their parents: “He's way up there in the big city where we can't help him. What if he gets sick?”

Instead, it was Ruthie who got sick: she was diagnosed with lung cancer. She refused to inquire into the odds of survival; though they were overwhelmingly against her, Ruthie remained upbeat through it all. Her small town, the one Rod had left behind to pursue his dreams, rallied around her. People came from miles away to visit Ruthie, to pray for her, to raise money for her treatment and other family expenses. As an old friend tells Rod, “This is how it's supposed to be. This is what folks are supposed to do for each other.”

It would be difficult to do justice to Rod's tender treatment of his sister's battle with cancer. Suffice it to say that it would take Oscar Wilde's proverbial heart of stone to read this account and not be moved. It is always painful when bad things happen to good people; Ruthie's goodness is so evident that it pains us all the more. Yet despite it all—because of God, because of the way the people of St. Francisville could lean on one another—there is a strange peace, too.

So after a long journey, Rod returns; he and his wife pack up their three kids and move back home. He writes: “My friends and I talked a lot about the fragmentation of the modern family, about the deracinating effects of late capitalism, about mass media and the erosion of localist consciousness, about the consumerization of religions and the leviathan state and every other thing other the sun that undermines our sense of home and permanence.” Yet, “The one thing none of us did was what Ruthie did: stay.”

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming sounds many of the same notes as Charles Murray's recent book, Coming Apart. Through a largely analytical approach, Murray tells the story of small towns like St. Francisville: its best and brightest skip town for the attractions of the city. Murray emphasizes the dark side of small town American, its plight worsened by the flight of so many of its residents. As Rod tells it, his town had its problems, too: “poverty... drunkenness... drugs... meanness, and conformity, and lack of professional opportunity.” But there is something that Murray's statistics fail to capture. In our cities, we may bowl alone, but, in towns like St. Francisville, people come together for one another.

Many of today's books insist that the solution to the problem—whatever it is—involves ten steps, all of which are grandiose and implausible. Instead, Rod admonishes us to “seek reconciliation... and love people”; he recounts how he patched up things with the blogger Andrew Sullivan. There is something else, too. If, like Rod, we have left, we can consider making that journey back home.

UPDATE: Rod has kindly taken an excerpt from my review over at his blog.

The anatomy of a non-story

Although redoubts of conservatism do exist, the media is overwhelmingly leftist.  Sometimes, this is merely annoying, but it can be pernicious as well.  For instance, while the media occasionally covered Bush's wars, when the reigns of power were handed over to Obama, coverage declined--even as drone strikes increased. 

Recently, the right has been incensed over the paucity of coverage in the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell.  For a good write-up, albeit a gruesome one, see here.  Gosnell was illegally aborting children past the 24-week barrier set by the State of Pennsylvania, but his murderous run only comprises part of the story.  Descriptions of his clinic remind one Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or a Civil War hospital tent. 

The story itself is fascinating, although so ghastly that I can readily see why some would be reluctant to cover it.  Yet the flippancy of the media toward someone whom Terry Moran rightly describes as "probably the most successful serial killer in the history of the world" deserves a more serious investigation.  It's also worth contemplating the reasons such a significant story would be given short shrift.  So, in no particular order:

1) Unborn children are seen as far less important than babies.  Without a name, and a mother who weeps for her, an unborn child does not lay a claim upon at least the pro-abortion among us.  Which leads us to...

2) The line of demarcation that separates a child that can be murdered from one that cannot is very thin, often only a few inches.  Given that children born early in the third trimester still often survive, it is, at this stage, only the location of the child that makes murder permissible.  Shining a light on late-term abortions might cause us to point out this absurdity.

3) The left views abortion as somewhat embarrassing.  Smart people know to use their birth control so that this doesn't happen, but if it does, they take care of it quickly, they don't wait until 28 weeks into pregnancy.  I doubt that anyone will be so brash as to insist that the lesson here is that women need to be able to dispose of their children more quickly, but that's not to say that this isn't an angle some in the media would like to take.

4) Given the sanctity of abortion, its practitioners can get away with a lot.  One of the lessons of the Gosnell case was that the regulators who are meant to keep abortion "safe"--at least for the mother--failed completely.  This house of horrors had been running for years, and people knew about it.  But Gosnell was doing Moloch's work, and an investigation into his practice would have been the action of a turncoat.  Sure, women died in his clinic, but those lives must be balanced against the great good this man did.

5) There was no grounds for a leftist political program.  When children get mowed down in schools, it's horrible, but at least it provides an opportunity to talk about taking away guns.  Any takeaway here is bound to be bad for the abortion brand.  Everyone knows not all abortionists are like this, so let's just move it along.

6) Gosnell is black.  Perpetrators should be white, like Zimmerman, I mean the Duke lacrosse team that (practically) raped that stripper. 

7) Gosnell was racist--against blacks and Hispanics.  This one really irks the media, because if Gosnell was white, we could work the old racist angle.  But that dog won't hunt, even if it's another interesting aspect of this remarkable story.

8) A healthy percentage of the left knows that abortion is wrong, and they know that we know.  The parallel in terms of death is Nazi Germany, or perhaps Stalin's gulags, but there's a better example in black slavery, in this sense: just as slavery was indispensable to the south, abortion is indispensable in our society.  We're certainly not going to give up our illusions of sexual autonomy, and, although birth control is usually effective, we must be given recourse to abortion--just in case.  So you'll have to forgive us if we don't examine the issue too closely.  It's too important to do away with.

I actually agree with them in this regard, but if the price for maintaining one's lifestyle is millions of dead babies, that's a price I'm not at all willing to pay.  Eventually, we will dispense with our lifestyle, as the south did.  For now, we must be content to know that while we're not winning the cultural battle, the case against the evils of abortion becomes easier to make by the day--even if the media remains disinterested in that case.

Sliding down

In our age of unreason, people are quick to point out what they think to be logical fallacies.  But while they can name them, they are seldom so good at identifying them correctly. 

For instance, when traditionalists who objected to the silly contradiction known as gay marriage pointed out that this would lead to polygamy, the paragons of progressivism protested that this was a slippery slope.  And so it was; the kind that we would, sooner or later, be compelled to slide down.

Marriage, as is understood in sensible eras, is the binding of one man to one woman for life.  We have long since abrogated this last condition, as "til death do us part" has become "til one of us has decided we are unhappy."  This was lamentable.  It was also probably the source of all of our trouble.

Recently, the gays have clamoured for the right to get married. This "right" has been granted in some states; sooner or later it will be granted in all.  Which is to say that we have dispensed with the arduous necessity of insisting that a man be married to a woman. 

All that remains of this venerable institution, so far as I can see, is that two people, of whatever sex--I mean gender; one must never deign to notice biological reality--are joined together for some indeterminate amount of time. 

We wretched conservatives thereupon insisted that the two person requirement was likewise arbitrary and intolerant, and that, therefore, it too would be swept aside.  Strictly speaking, this is not polygamy, which actually has a precedent in the annals of human history.  It is more of a monstrosity, a twisted triangle of sorts, or, in my own state, a horrid hexagon:

The Legislature’s proposed allowance for up to six adults to claim biological parentage of the same child takes the marriage debate to a new level. No longer will people be asking whether every child has the right to a mom and a dad — or whether same-sex couples can raise children just as well as opposite-sex couples. Now a child can have up to six persons whom the law will recognize as “presumptive biological parents.”

Now, this is not marriage as such, but that is to miss the point.  None of this nonsense bears much resemblance to marriage; these pale imitations approach it only, perhaps, by analogy.  And while the six "presumptive biological parents" are not entering into a partnership with each other, there is no logical reason why they should be prevented from doing so.

Gay "marriage" could only become a reality in a culture which was hopelessly confused about the subject.  In this sense, then, it does not matter: for a nation that seriously contemplates such a thing is already deeply morally confused--at best.  The paucity of gays, as I have already pointed out, will ensure that gay marriage remains largely a symbol: a sure sign that those evil reactionaries have been ousted by the progressives.


I only wish they would wipe the smugness off of their faces long enough to properly identify a logical fallacy; or to open a dictionary.

Missing the point on gay marriage

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world - Yeats 

This pretty well sums up the conservative's gloom, at least at the moment.  Progressive victories have eroded away much that we esteem.  Indeed, at the moment, the Republicans, the closest thing conservatives have by way of representatives, seem to have given up trying to do much besides trying to maintain current tax rates and the military budget.  On other issues, they're almost totally useless.

Let's take the issue of gay marriage, both as an illustration of Republican ineffectiveness and anarchy, as per Yeats.  The two principle points about gay marriage at this point are that: 1) it is inevitable; and 2) the victory is largely symbolic, given the dearth of homosexuals lining up to tie the knot. 

On the first point, gay marriage was made inevitable when marriage was redefined to be exclusively about the happiness of the husband or wife.  Happiness here is subjective; we are certainly not talking eudaimonia.  So a man may divorce his wife if he can upgrade her with a prettier model; or, what is commoner, a woman can divorce her husband because she is not satisfied--and prefers to eat, pray, love, mostly eat, her way into happiness.

According to this new way of thinking, marriage was solely a contract between two people.  This was a mistake, first, because of the disastrous effect divorce can have on children, but also because, even if there aren't any children, the marriage took place in the context of a community.  The reason weddings are such grand affairs isn't just so that the bride can have her day.  The witnesses consent to the marriage and, implicitly at least, promise to help the married couple keep their promises to one another. 

Once this ship had sailed, it's easy to see why gays insisted that they, too, ought to be allowed to marry.  It's somewhat amusing to see gays clamouring for the right to be married just as heterosexuals are abandoning the institution en masse.  One wonders how long it will be until most marriages are either performed quietly in a small church--or flamboyantly on Bravo.

Anyway, the conservatives lost the case for heterosexual marriage once it became a contractual affair.  If we were really concerned for children, divorce, or at least remarriage, ought to have been banned, if not by our State, at least by our churches.  This would have been no more effective in the long run, but that is the battlefield on which we should have fought.

As to the second point, there simply aren't enough gays who wish to marry for this to matter all that much.  Certainly it matters to homosexuals and their friends and family, but from a societal perspective, the forty percent illegitimacy rate far outweighs a few marrying gays. 

I note too, the absence of criticism towards single mothers on behalf of Republicans.  Yes, I know, it's very unkind to shame people for anything--except for smoking, perhaps--but raising a child alone is, in most instances, a socially irresponsible thing to do.  This is not to say that the children should be aborted, but that adoption should be considered.  More importantly, women should be encouraged to be more discerning towards the men they... let's go with date.

As an aside, one might point out that with the illegitimacy rate so high, almost no one can criticize single mothers without running afoul of some acquaintance or family member.  This is depressingly true.  Once anti-social behaviour becomes so endemic, it become virtually impossible for society to curtail it.

This is all very sexist of me, of course, but since women bear the burden of pregnancy, they will always be the sexual gatekeepers of our species.  One can blame men all one likes, but, as the saying goes, why buy a cow if the milk is free?  If we cannot depend on women's discretion, we're certainly not going to be able to depend on that of the man.  That would be like giving up on building a democracy in Iraq so as to attempt one in Afghanistan.

There are a number of reasons this function hasn't been maintained by women, but that's a separate post entirely.

Instructive here is how strange and uncharitable these arguments sound, partially because of the infrequency with which we hear them, but also because they take for granted that the actions of men and women have ramifications outside of the scope of their temporary union, and that we therefore should judge accordingly. 

Yet it is this, and not bigotry, which is the real reason for the disagreement over gay marriage.  It is also the conversation we should have been having.  It is never too late to start.

Our murderous president

It doesn't seem that long ago that the left was justifiably upset with President George W. Bush, whose toughness on terror meant playing loose with civil liberties.  Then President Obama was elected, and since  politics is a team sport, we didn't hear much from the left about all those awful things Bush had done because, for the most part, Obama was still doing them.

One noble exception has been Glenn Greenwald, who has done an outstanding job cataloging the bipartisan consensus on violating the civil liberties of the American people.  Today's piece is excellent: it concerns a Justice Department memo providing legal justification for Obama's policy of assassinating American citizens using drones.  Although he's utilized a similar approach to the Bush administration in running roughshod over American rights, the despicable former president never went this far.

Greenwald highlights six points of emphasis from the memo:

1) "Equating government accusations with guilt": the government asserts that it will only kill terrorists, but the government is the only arbiter to determine if someone is a "terrorist".

2) "Creating a ceiling, not a floor": the government could kill other "terrorists", for other reasons not outlined in the memo.

3) "Relies on the core Bush/Cheney theory of a global battlefield": since "terrorists" could be anywhere, they can be killed anywhere--no matter what other host nations might think about our drone invading their air space.

4) "Expanding the concept of "imminence" beyond recognition": a "terrorist" can be killed even if we have no evidence that he was planning an attack--not that this matters, since all evidence is secret, so every "terrorist" will undoubtedly be in the final stages of planning an attack on U.S. soil.

5) "Converting Obama underlings into objective courts": the justification for these procedures is determined internally by DOJ attorneys; the watchers are watching themselves, don't you worry.

6) "Making a mockery of "due process": these policies apply to citizens, who are being stripped of their fifth amendment rights.

The right is correct that Obama is an awful president, but it's not because he's a Communist; it's because he's taken Bush's horrible policies and expanded them at the expense of our constitutional rights.  But on important matters like this, the Republicans and the Democrats agree: if you don't want to be killed in a drone attack, don't be a "terrorist".  The U.S. government has never wrongly imprisoned people before, so good citizens have nothing to fear.

Equality or bust

Sometimes a news story is more noteworthy when it comes and goes without drawing a significant reaction.  In a small town, murder is huge news; in Chicago, a single murder is a sign of a good day.  This was the case with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's decision to lift the ban on women in combat.  Sure, there were some pieces celebrating such an historic step, but on the whole, this incident passed without much notice.  The forces of reaction, of which I am a proud member, were mostly silent, as if this formality is just something we will have to accept--which, I suppose, it is.

But that doesn't mean it's a good idea.  Sending women into combat isn't just questionable desirable, it's manifestly stupid.  Let us count the ways.

1) We've already seen what happens when we place men and women in close quarters.  The women get pregnant--or sexually assaulted--and the men fight over the women.  The Army's reaction has been to create this helpful website.

It's interesting that while this has been going on for years, our rejoinder is to simply insist that it shouldn't happen, and leave it at that.  In the eponymous children's television program, Dora the Explorer tells Swiper: "No swiping."  Whereupon, he stops.  This is, so far as I can tell, our plan to prevent sexual indiscretions in the military.  We must not be saying it loudly enough.

Yes, men shouldn't rape women; but men ought not kill people either.  The civilizing force that prevents a man from raping a woman is very similar to that which prevents him from killing a man.  But the latter is required in war, and... not without reason are war and rape close companions in the annals of conquest.

It might occur to our utopians that if we can wish away all rape, we can probably do away with war, too.

2) The same things might happen at the hands of enemy forces.  If we could get Al-Qaeda to read Jezebel, I'm sure the terrorists would promise to play nice with any women soldiers they happen to capture.  On the other hand, if the terrorists rape enough of our soldiers, the feminists who comprise part of Obama's base might stop fantasizing about free birth control long enough to remember that President Peace Prize is still fighting Bush's War on Terror.

3) Standards will be lowered to compensate for the physical discrepancies between male and female soldiers.  Oh wait, we already did that.  In civilian life, standards are often just convenient ways to weed out undesirable candidates, but in combat, it can be important to be able to carry one's pack, or help lift a wounded soldier to safety.  Soon we'll be hearing all sorts of heroic stories about our G.I. Janes.  And this time the stories won't be complete fabrications.

One could easily satirize women's ineffectualness in combat, but this would require Oscar Wilde's proverbial heart of stone.  It might work better if a female firefighter proved unable to rescue a corpulent cat lady.  Okay, so that's not much kinder, but it's certainly more humorous.

Actually, the more practical result, comes courtesy of Steve Sailer:

If more co-ed combat degrades American military performance, it's not like the Axis is going to win WWII, it's that a few more brave Americans will get killed in some inconclusive puttering around in Mali or wherever.

One last point.  The reason societies don't allow their women to fight in wars--except in desperate circumstances--isn't just because men are stronger than women; it's because women are more valuable.  If you send off your men to die, the women will have to have more children to replace those the tribe has lost.  If you send your women off to die, it's very difficult to conjure new family members from the remaining bachelors.  Of course, a nation, such as ours, that cannot even be bothered to reproduce at levels sufficient to sustain itself isn't likely to appreciate this point.  But I like to think that, somewhere, the ancients are laughing at us.

On not thinking clearly

When we stake out a position on a particular issue, we would like to believe that we are drawn to it by the logic that supports the side on which we come down.  This is seldom the case, and not simply because humans can be led against reason by emotion.  Instead, it is because the positions we take stem from the values we hold.  This sounds tautological, but an example should illustrate what I mean.

Recent debates about gun control aren't really about gun control.  No appeal to statistics is likely to move minds because people are really arguing about something else.  Nor do the sides even really disagree about the final end: a reduction in violence is sought by all.  Disagreement concerns the means by which this end will be acheived.  So one side believes government can be trusted to regulate firearms, while the other puts its trust in a well-armed populace. 

These positions are ultimately derived from first principles, but, more importantly, within a tradition that tries to examine the ramifications of such principles.

As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre points out in his excellent book, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?:

It is a Cartesian error, fostered by a misunderstanding of Euclidean geometry, to suppose that first by an initial act of apprehension we can comprehend the full meaning of the premises of a deductive system and then only secondly proceed to enquire what follows from them.  In fact it is only insofar as we understand what follows from those premises that we understand the premises themselves.  If and as we begin from the premises, our initial apprehension will characteristically be partial and incomplete, increasing as we understand what it is that these premises do and do not entail. pp. 174-5

With this in mind, let's switch topics; instead of gun control, we're going to focus on the existence of God.  These discussions tend to be pretty fruitless; with MacIntrye's insight, we can see why this is the case.  After defining his terms, a well-informed theist might pull out his Summa and begin to cover Aquinas's fivefold proof for God's existence.  This isn't a terrible way to go about it, but it tends to fall short as the rejoinder to a discussion of an unmoved mover is: "Who moved God?"  It's not a ridiculous question, but it is rather unhelpful, in that we're thrust back upon the definitions of terms.

The genius of the Summa is not the fivefold proof, but the systematic way in which St. Thomas builds his system.  We shouldn't cede ground to the agnostics and atheists and admit that Thomas's proofs are mere formalities, quick jots to move us along to meatier matters.  And yet, if we pretend that this is the case, how many other things become apparent?  We can't get to God's simplicity if we don't get past His existence, just as we can't get to the Secundae Partis until we finish the Prima Pars; for one part of his masterpiece depends on another, and Thomas is nothing if not thorough.  His thought must be evaluated as a whole, which might not require that one read the entirety of the Summa, but it does require that one do more than reject his proofs and move on to something else.

Back to God's existence.  If Thomas--and others; I am a dedicated if hopelessly amateur Thomist, but there are other theistic systems of thought, most notably that of St. Augustine--if theistic philosophers have examined the ramifications of there positions, it's far from clear that atheists and agnostics have done the same.  Certainly there were philosophers who tried to do so, most famously Kant, who was not an agnostic, but philosophized like one.  He rejected tradition in favor of an attempt to concoct a moral system derived from unaided reason.  Yet Kant, for all his brilliance, failed, as MacIntyre pointed out:

In moral philosophy the central question which the participants in those debates had hoped to answer was: What are those principles governing action to which no rational human being can deny his or her assent?  Hume's appeal to rational consensus concerning the passions, Kant's formulations of the categorical imperative and the principle of utility were all attempts to supply an answer to this question. Yet each one of these answers turned out to be susceptible of rejection by the adherents of rival answers, whose claims to rational justification were as much and as little contestable as those of its opponents. p. 176

Even more frustrating than the cavalier dismissal of theism is the arrogance of many modern atheists.  Richard Dawkins is their pope, but he seems just as oblivious to the failure of the Enlightenment.  Granted, they do not like what the Church has to say about sex--and here at least Freud may have a point; it is usually about sex--God must not exist.  But they have not explains how we shall be moral--or what being moral will entail.  It is unlikely that Dawkins will succeed where Kant failed; in fact, as MacIntrye makes clear, it's impossible.  But they seem to have simply glanced over this dilemma, blithely confident that we can just take the good parts of an ethical code without all that awful shame over mild indiscretions.  Unfortunately for them, that's not how traditions work.

Following Rome again

Most of the stories which bemoan the declining birthrate are from thoroughly disreputable sources, Catholics and other subversive traditionalists.  But occasionally one will find a secular source that will, in the midst of a piece which celebrates the lack of fertility, note that there may possibly be some problems with a declining birth rate.  I shall leave, as an exercise for the reader, the task of coming up with a list of such. 

The proof of the thesis, however, lies in the fact that governments often pay married couples to have children.  Such policies have not, alas, been successful.  It was with great amusement that in this, as in so many other matters, we have followed the Romans:

It was next proposed to relax the Papia Poppaea law, which Augustus in his old age had passed subsequently to the Julian statutes, for yet further enforcing the penalties on celibacy and for enriching the exchequer. And yet, marriages and the rearing of children did not become more frequent, so powerful were the attractions of a childless state. - Tacitus, The Annals, 3.25

Pat Buchanan insists that historians will one day call the birth control pill the suicide tablet of the west.  In this, as in so many other matters, he is probably correct, but the simple fact is that those who do not wish to procreate, will find means to avoid it.  The Romans did not need fancy pills to be overrun by the German barbarians. 

On the other hand, knowledge of the means of contraception used by the Romans did not prevent the early Church from being fertile and multiplying.  So there is a definite bright side here, only, it probably comes on the other side of the decline and fall of our present civilization. 

2013 Reading List

And so it begins--again.

Read

Whose Justice? Which Rationality? - Alasdair MacIntyre
The Illustrated London News - 1917-1919 - G. K. Chesterton
The Annals - Tacitus
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower - Professor X
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Ugly as Sin - Michael S. Rose

Men at Arms - Evelyn Waugh

Officers and Gentlemen - Evelyn Waugh
Religion and the Rise of Western Culture - Christopher Dawson
Plutarch - Lives (Vol. I of II)
Eichmann in Jerusalem - Hannah Arendt
Unconditional Surrender - Evelyn Waugh
The Agony and the Ecstasy - Irving Stone
God's Revolution - Benedict XVI
Carry On, Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse
What's Wrong With the World - G. K. Chesterton
The Superstition of Divorce - G. K. Chesterton
Plutarch - Lives (Vol. II of II)
A Secular Age - Charles Taylor
Eugenics and Other Evils - G. K. Chesterton
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Folkways and Mores - William Graham Sumner
The Great Deformation - David Stockman
Literary Converts - Joseph Pearce
The Little Way of Ruthie Leming - Rod Dreher
The Painted Word - Tom Wolfe
The Corrections - Johnathan Franzen
Unknown Quantity - John Derbyshire
The Stripping of the Altars - Eamon Duffy
Peer Gynt - Henrik Ibsen
The Idea of Progress - J. B. Bury
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction - Alan Jacobs
Parliament of Whores - P. J. O'Rourke
Men on Strike - Helen Smith
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
The Rise of American Civilization (Vol I of II) - Charles and Mary Beard
Ireland - Paul Johnson
The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman
Salt of the Earth - Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling
Summa Theologica - Thomas Aquinas (Vol. IV of V)
The Rise of American Civilization (Vol II of II) - Charles and Mary Beard
Aquinas - Frederick Copleston
Gates of Fire - Steven Pressfield
Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile - Joseph Pearce
The Gulag Archipelago (Vol. II of III) - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Fourth Turning -  William Strauss and Neil Howe
The Cambridge Medieval History Series (Vol. III of VIII)
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man - Brett and Kate McKay
The Gulag Archipelago (Vol. III of III) - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Why Read? - Mark Edmundson
The Quest for Shakespeare - Joseph Pearce
The Inimitable Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse
Henry IV Part I - Shakespeare
Henry IV Part II - Shakespeare
Henry V - Shakespeare
Henry VI Part I - Shakespeare
Henry VI Part II - Shakespeare
Shakespeare's Kings - John Julius Norwich
Henry VI Part III - Shakespeare
The History of Music - Cecil Gray
Through Shakespeare's Eyes - Joseph Pearce
The Merchant of Venice - Shakespeare
Travels in Hyperreality - Umberto Eco
Lost in the Cosmos - Walker Percy
For Men Only - Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn
For Women Only - Shaunti Feldhahn
The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
A Jacques Barzun Reader
War in European History - Michael Howard
Lepanto - G. K. Chesterton (edited by Dale Ahlquist)
The Descent of Man - Charles Darwin

2012 book breakdown

Last year was the first year I kept track of all the books I read.  I was curious to know how many I managed to read.  If I did my math correctly, I read 75 books this past year, or about 1.5 a week.  It's not a bad pace, but considering how little time I devote to writing or socializing, I could probably do better.  Or else I could try to write and socialize more, though the latter especially strikes me as a desperate measure.

Only fifteen of these books were novels; a full third of that total came courtesy of George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones.  I should probably read more fiction, but if given a choice between a classic novel and a history book, I reliably choose the latter.  There's nothing especially wrong with this, but fiction, at least the good stuff, stimulates the imagination.

I thought about giving the breakdown by ratings like Vox does, but I don't feel competent to rate the classics, of which I read a fair amount.  Even if a Platonic dialogue strikes me as middling, it's still Plato, which makes it rather better than middling and me a moron.  So instead, here are some of my favorites that aren't already part of the western canon.

The first three come courtesy of Will and Ariel Durant's lifetime reading list:

Renaissance in Italy - John Addington Symonds - Seven volumes, about 2000 pages of small type in my version, but worth every page.  Symonds prose is strikingly beautiful.

A History of Ancient Greek Literature - Gilbert Murray - A short book that covers its subject rather completely.  I can see this being a valuable reference guide for many years to come.

Napoleon - Emil Ludwig - I'm loathe to sympathize with someone like Napoleon, but Ludwig manages to evoke this sentiment in the reader without denigrating to sycophancy.

Three mostly contemporary pieces of non-fiction:

Bad Religion - Ross Douthat - As Chesterton is said to have said, "When men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything."  American apostasy has not ushered in a new enlightenment, but has shed religion for nonsense which is worse in every conceivable way. 

The Revolt of the Elites - Christopher Lasch - He points out that our meritocrats have all of the vices of the aristocrats they have replaced, with none of the virtues.  Alas, Lasch passed away some years ago, as he would have had much to contribute to the current crisis caused by the meritocrats.

Family and Civilization - Carle Zimmerman - This book was actually first published in the 40's, but I read a recently republished abridgement.  Zimmerman draws on Greek and Roman history to demonstrate that, far from progressing towards a more enlightened way of (not) marrying, we're following in the decadent footsteps of our deceased predecessors.

And one novel, because I do so read fiction: 

Reamde - Neal Stephenson - I think the Baroque Cycle is still his best, but this is expertly planned and executed.  Stephenson is still very much at the top of his game, which is good, because if he loses his fastball, I'm going to need to find a new favorite living novelist.