My top 9 reads of 2023 — and what you should read this year

Many people start the new year with the resolution to read more books that deepen their understanding of the world around them. I am often asked for reading recommendations, so I have habitually collected and shared the most thought-provoking books I encountered in the previous year. These are not books that were published in 2023. In fact, many of them are rather old. These are simply books I read during the year and found insightful. I hope you will, too.

'Skin in the Game' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Skin in the Game” is a book about many things, but primarily, it is a book about what happens when you separate the cost of a decision from the people who actually make the decision.

What does transferring the cost of a decision to another group of people do to the incentive structure of your society? This is a vital question because it speaks to what happens when you scale a civilization when a society becomes too large and starts to entrust certain institutions and bureaucracies with key aspects of its decision-making process. Those institutions may be specialized and professional, but they are also far removed from the concerns of the communities they supposedly serve.

The bureaucrats operating such institutions no longer have skin in the game. They are incentivized to do what is best for their own careers and not what is best for the communities they serve because their lives will not be affected. Taleb also explains why the intolerant minority beats the more-accepting majority. This is counterintuitive for many people who believe that the big tent strategy is the key to winning political battles.

Taleb is a good author who writes in a very entertaining style, which makes this a quick read.

'Return of the Strong Gods' by R.R. Reno

This tome does a great job explaining why forces like nationalism and populism are taking hold in our world today. Reno points out the shortcomings of enlightenment liberalism and why the attempt to put away many of the key aspects of human identity ended up causing significant problems, damaging social cohesion and the search for meaning.

Reno discusses the emergence of the postwar consensus starting in 1945, which stressed the need to stop any form of authoritarianism. Many leaders believed that the core of authoritarianism was a connection to larger forces of identity — a connection to meaning, purpose, and the transcendent. It became very important to these new modern states to limit their population’s access to these forces.

Reno is honest about his own difficulty in parting with certain liberal precepts, but at the same time, he recognizes that these realities about identity, nationalism, and populism are not going away.

Our ruling class can wring their hands with concern if they like, but that will not change what is happening. We are transitioning from a time of liberal ideology and returning to the things that have been true about social organization for a very long time. Reno understands the failure of our elites to contain these changes and knows we cannot prevent the return of the strong gods, so we must channel those forces in a positive direction that is healthy for society instead of creating an ugly backlash.

'The Clash of Civilizations' by Samuel P. Huntington

Samuel Huntington was an international relations guru and professor. The author and scholar Francis Fukuyama was one of his students. Fukuyama famously developed the “end of history” model in opposition to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.”

This book was written in the early 1990s, just after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Huntington attempted to envision what the post-Cold War world would look like. This shift away from a bipolar world was very important because many nations and alliances had been held together simply because only two major forces dictated international relations.

While Fukuyama’s model looked to be the winner early on by predicting a monopolar Western hegemony that would produce a universal culture and political form, we are starting to see events tip in Huntington’s favor.

Huntington predicted that different civilizations would attempt to modernize while simultaneously de-Westernizing, separating two phenomena that were previously thought to be interlinked. It is interesting to see what Huntington got wrong and what he got right from our chronologically advantageous perch in 2024. He certainly fails in some of his predictions. But his most important prediction is the phenomenon Reno observed decades later in “Return of the Strong Gods.” Huntington believed we would see the end of the age of secular economic ideology that dominated for so long and see the resurgence of more traditional cultural identities linked strongly to religion.

'The Ancient City' by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges

This was my favorite book of the past year because Coulanges does not just review the events of ancient Greek or Roman history but rather takes the reader to the beginning of those cultures and treats them as if they are entirely alien civilizations.

Coulanges focuses on religion as the core of the ancient identity, creating a way of being that is entirely foreign to modern secularized individuals. Religion was the water in which the ancients swam, the way they sought to understand every aspect of life, and the doctrine that dictated everything from laws to family formation.

When Coulanges discusses the ancient Greek or Roman religions, he is not really discussing the pantheon we think of with Zeus or Jupiter. Rather, he’s referencing the even more ancient religion of ancestor worship and the sacred hearth.

Coulanges also explores how religion and the strength of the family limited the power of the state. Each of the Genes, or patrician families, had a religion that was unique to their own domestic practice without some kind of overarching belief that tied them together. This particularity of worship gave the families an incredible degree of power over every patron, freedman, and slave that was connected to them, limiting the demands the government could make without risking pushback from one of the Genes.

The author documents the state’s need to alter the religion and create a belief system that would connect the families before they could be stripped of power. The tribes formed a city-state, and the city-state grew into an empire. But at each step, the families had to be weakened, and the religion altered. “The Ancient City” is a fascinating read back to front, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

'On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History' by Thomas Carlyle

This book began as a series of lectures given to university students, and it retains that form. Carlyle believed that hero worship was the foundation of society, which is why it is one of the most recurring themes throughout human civilization.

In each lecture, Carlyle discusses a different archetype, the hero as the divine, prophet, poet, priest, man of letters, and king. Each archetype also comes with a few examples, including Odin, Napoleon, and Mohammed.

Many will suggest this book as an introduction to Carlyle, but I do not think it is the best place to start. It is, however, a critical book that helped introduce the “great man” theory of history. Carlyle is always a challenging read due to his style, but he is always rewarding, and I fully endorse this one.

'A Conflict of Visions' by Thomas Sowell

If you have never read Sowell, this is a great introduction to his work. Sowell investigates the two basic moral visions of the world: the unconstrained or utopian vision and the constrained or tragic vision. Those with the unconstrained vision see humans as lumps of clay that can be molded and shaped until the perfect society is achieved. Those with the constrained vision understand that humans have a set nature that is imperfect and cannot be removed through social engineering.

When you have two groups that approach politics from these radically different directions, you will get conflict over how you try to resolve political questions.

'The Problem of Pain' by C.S Lewis

I love to reread some of Lewis’ work every year because a different insight always jumps out at me. This book does what you would expect from the title, addressing the issue of theodicy, or why bad things happen if there is an all-good and all-powerful God. This remains important because there are still a bunch of Reddit-tier New Atheists who run around pretending that no theologian has ever addressed this question.

To be clear, this is not the definitive work on theodicy. Lewis’ books are always more of a primer, an introduction to complex issues and the higher thinking ordered around them. But “The Problem of Pain” is a great place to start.

'State of Emergency' by Patrick J. Buchanan

With the possible exception of Ron Paul, no single figure in contemporary politics deserves a bigger apology than Buchanan.

Buchanan was the unwelcome prophet in his own town, ostracized from the mainstream conservative movement for correctly predicting ... well, everything. His platform is basically the playbook that was photocopied for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

In “State of Emergency,” Buchanan warns about the invasion that was already underway in 2006 at the southern border. The nice thing about Buchanan is that he is unafraid to go after difficult issues. He addresses not only the economic or criminal problems associated with immigration but also the cultural impact, how it would transform American identity, and how it would alter democratic participation.

Buchanan also addresses the problems of legal immigration, not just the criminal variety, and explains why the Republican Party is willing to be complicit in a transformation that harms its voting base.

'America’s Cultural Revolution' by Christopher Rufo

Rufo is the most effective conservative political activist around, so when he writes a book, you should pay attention.

“America’s Cultural Revolution” is about the ideological roots of wokeness and traces the movement from the 1960s to today. Rufo stops to look at key pieces of ideology advanced by thinkers like Herbert Marcuse or Derrick Bell.

The most powerful and useful part of this book is how it shows the reader how everything was there in the 1960s. Rufo does not hold back when he explains the vile and violent ideology advanced by a movement willing to use terrorist bombings and rape to achieve its goals. All the anti-family, anti-Christian, and anti-white hatred was baked in at the start.

I disagree with Rufo’s characterization of and need to return to the Civil Rights Act when it seems clear that the law worked exactly what was intended. Purging the DEI regime and returning to the CRA seem like opposing goals. But, all disagreements aside, the book is a valuable read, and I highly recommend it.