The Library 📚

A large collection of books on tables and the floor in a cluttered arrangement, surrounded by two chairs and a corner of a room with a electrical outlet on the wall.

(With links) Periodically updated as videos are created

Here you will find the titles I mention in each of my YouTube videos, organized by topic, with Bookshop.org , Better Wor ld Books, and/or Amazon links where to purchase them.

Companion Essays

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Why Classic Literature Feels More Erotic Than Pornography

A black and gray cat lying on a teal carpet, next to a black smartphone with a charger attached. A black pen is suspended in the air above the phone.

Here is a troubling set of facts about contemporary life:

People are reading fewer books than ever
The books that people are reading are primarily ‘romansty,’ aka smut, aka not literature
People are consuming more pornographic images than ever

yet

People, especially and specifically, gen-z, are having less sex
And they feel more uncomfortable watching sex scenes than previous generations

These trends don’t obviously belong together. Or do they?

A drawing of three sun faces at the top with fiery yellow hair and three sets of contemplative expressions. Below, a chaotic mix of books, papers, and red tentacle-like shapes are intertwined, creating an abstract, surreal scene.

There’s No Such Thing as The Odyssey

Most of us think we’ve read Homer. But almost none of us have. We’ve read Chapman. Or Pope. Or Fitzgerald. Or Fagles. Or Wilson. There is no “The Odyssey.” There are only Odysseys.

Painting of a train moving through snow at night, with headlight and smoke, crossing a railroad signal with lights.

Ancient Incan terraced agricultural site on a hillside with concentric stone terraces surrounded by dry grass and shrubs.

The Paralysis of Postmodernism

Postmodernism is both important and destructive. On one hand, its theories about the instability of language, its suspicions about the totalizing narratives developed prior to the 20th century and its acknowledgement of the relationship between knowledge and power dismantled ideologies that seemed to previously pronounce absolute authority. It championed multiculturalism and subjective experience, and it profoundly influenced how we critique power structures today. However, deconstruction is also by nature destructive. And postmodernism’s heavy use of irony and extreme skepticism has led to a point where progress in literature has seemed to stagnate.

The Most Important Idea Literature Ever Discovered (An Ode to Reading)

Reading is a strange thing: we’ve discovered that when we look at black marks on white paper, we can hallucinate images and scenarios that become so resonant that they can deeply move us.

Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century said that “most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered.” (Letters to a Young Poet).

Why You've Never Heard of Brazil's Greatest Writers

“Viver - não é? - é muito perigoso. Porque ainda não se sabe. Porque aprender-a-viver é que é o viver, mesmo.”

“To live – right? – it’s very dangerous… Because learning-to-live is in fact what it is to live.”

The line comes from João Guimarães Rosa, one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. Yet outside Brazil, very few people read him, or even know of him. Why is that?

why modernism matters more than ever

Although it’s been over a century since the first modernist works came into existence, the feelings we’re having about the world in 2026 and the feelings that writers like Woolf, Kafka, and Lispector were having during and after the first World War are eerily similar. And that’s because the moments that we’re living in are moments where it feels like “things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” as Yeats writes in his 1919 poem, “The Second Coming.”

Lenz: Of Madness, Solitude, and the Paradox of Consciousness

It’s 1839, and a 21-year-old Georg Büchner is writing a novella called Lenz. This scene, this image––a guy walking through the woods, looking for the sublime perhaps––typical, hackneyed even by this point in literary history. That is, until, as the 1988 English translator puts it, “without warning, comes a sentence almost like a blow” (Rappolt 49). A sentence that some critics claim ushered in the period of modern European prose. It is the same sentence that led me into a years-long, profound love affair with this novella.