Merry Christmas, dear listeners! We hope you are enjoying the hygge of the season, which for us always includes curling up with a book or two (or more…). Since this is the holidays, you don’t have to do your homework! But DO read for pleasure. And remember C.S. Lewis’s words: “Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
Here’s a list of all the books we’ve read together for this podcast, recommended, or quoted from, starting with our earliest forays and continuing up to the present moment.
In case you’ve got a little extra Christmas money to burn, or if you like a little nudge next time you’re wandering through the stacks of your local library, take a peek.
Gender by Ivan Illich
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl Trueman
This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences, by Sarah Hill
Feminism Against Progress, by Mary Harrington
Right Marital Living, by Ida C. Craddock
Hags: The Demonization of Middle-Aged Women, by Victoria Smith
The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan
Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, by Barbara Ehrenreich
Sex and the Single Girl, by Helen Gurley Brown
The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, by Louise Perry
The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Love Making and More Joy of Sex, by Alex Comfort
Liturgy and Personality, by Dietrich von Hildebrand
On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, by Thomas Sowell
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010, by Charles Murray
Feminist Fantasies, by Phyllis Schlafly
Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, by Andrea Dworkin
Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton
What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas Frank
Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back Again, by Norah Vincent
A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor
The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Lovingkindness, by Pema Chodron
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice, by Shunryu Suzuki
Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters, by Erica Komisar
We Believe The Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, by Richard Beck
The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence, by Gavin de Becker
The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, by Melissa Kearney
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
On the Incarnation, by Saint Athanasius
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume
Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi
The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas
The Children of Men, by P.D. James
Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race, by Shanna Swan
The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis
Begotten or Made? by Oliver O’Donovan
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond
Submission, by Michel Houellebecq
Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings of Renaud Camus, ed. by Louis Betty
Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, by David Cayley
Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health, by Ivan Illich
Principles of Catholic Theology, Book 2: On the Rational Credibility of Christianity, by Thomas Joseph White
The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, by Neil Postman
The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality, by David Goodhart
Congrats on scanning through the whole list of fifty books! If you’re wondering where to begin, I (Acton) think these five carry the most bang for your buck and aren’t too long:
Gender (Illich)
The Abolition of Man (Lewis)
The Children of Men (James)
Self-Made Man (Vincent)
Feminism Against Progress (Harrington)
Happy Reading!
“You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” (C.S. Lewis)
Off the Shelf features book ruminations, recommendations, and reviews.