Each day, too, acquire something which will help you to face poverty, or death, and other ills as well. After running over a lot of different thoughts, pick out one to be digested thoroughly that day. —Seneca 

Today, we largely associate daily “devotionals” — short, reflection-spurring texts — with religious scriptures and faith-themed books which feature musings, challenges, and brief bits of inspiration for each day of the year. 

But as Seneca proves above, for millennia, devotional-type exercises have been engaged in not only for religious purposes, but for philosophical ones as well. The devotional habit is really for everyone, and is more important than ever in a time of uncertainty and existential stress.

If you’re part of a faith tradition, you probably already know of some popular devotional books to study. Below, we’ll highlight some spirit-edifying but secular devotional texts that men of every stripe may enjoy and find uplifting. 

First, however, let’s dig into why you should consider making devotional reading part of your daily routine, and how to get the most out of this practice. 

The Benefits of Daily Devotional Reading 

While the effort needed to sustain the devotional habit isn’t onerous — reading just a few pages of text for a few minutes each day — the benefits it will accrue to your life are significant: 

1. Maintains a deeper element in your life. When you were a teenager and in your twenties, perhaps you read religious and philosophical books with some frequency. Maybe you even had a daily devotional practice back then. You thought big thoughts. You pondered big questions. But then you got a real job, and got married, and had kids. And that soulful reading and reflection dropped out of your life. You started living on the surface of things, metaphorically “paycheck to paycheck,” in that your thoughts only extended to taking care of life’s basic necessities from one day to the next.

A daily devotional practice restores a more existentially profound element to your life, so that you don’t lose track of life’s deeper dimensions amidst the more mundane stresses and urgencies of day-to-day living.

2. Keeps your focus on the most important things. While we like to take a kind of “one-and-done” approach to life’s great truths — believing that once you learn and know something, you never have to think about it again — the reality is that we need constant, daily reminders of who we want to be. Daily devotionals keep your most important values at the forefront of your mind, where they can actively influence your decisions. 

3. Injects a bit of ritual into your day. The power of ritual is undeniable, especially in a chaotic world. There are a number of ways to add spirit-centering structure to your routine; a daily devotional reading is one of the most powerful. 

Some Guidelines for Your Daily Devotionals 

1. Morning is best. You can do your devotional time whenever it works for you. But, there’s a case to be made for scheduling it for the a.m.

For a lot of people, the morning starts with a handful of stressful emails or some social media/newsy doomscrolling. But given that how you start the day will influence your mindset during the rest of it, it’s hugely beneficial to kick things off with something that’s more uplifting than such mind-muddling noise.

Reading a devotional doesn’t have to be the very first thing you do after getting out of bed; if you need a shower and a cup of coffee right after rising, that’s just fine. But make it happen before getting into the real meat of your day — whether that’s before anyone is awake and the house is quiet, or in the first few minutes that you sit down to your desk for your workday (if your job allows for that sort of thing). A morning devotional practice gets your whole day off on the right foot, centering your soul before you wade into the weeds of “worldly” cares and providing edifying grist to chew on in the hours to come.

2. Write down something to think about. What’s the benefit of doing intentional morning readings if the thoughts it provokes just leave your head the minute something stressful encroaches on your day? By writing down a note or quote, you’re further cementing these insights into your consciousness, and even more so when you regularly return to your notebook/journal throughout the course of the day (to add additional thoughts/review past musings) or the next morning. 

3. Consider reading it aloud. Much poetry was intentionally written to be read aloud, and prose can benefit from oral recitation as well. Abraham Lincoln preferred this practice, observing: “When I read aloud two senses catch the idea; first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I can remember it better.” In addition to writing it down, this is another way that powerful words can lodge themselves in your memory. 

4. Don’t fret if you miss a day. Don’t beat yourself up about missing days of devotional reading; life’s too short for that crap. Cut yourself some slack and just move on ahead the next day. 

You can find more tips for deeper spiritual study here.

10 Ideas for Daily Devotionals

Some books are specifically structured for devotional reading; that is, they’re made up of short entries, meant to be read one day at a time, often over the course of a year.

But other kinds of books, even if they’re not explicitly designed for devotional reading, can work too. Anything with short chapters or easily digestible sections that move your spirit can be used for the purpose. Essays, poetry, letter collections, even some of the great novels work well. 

Below we offer 10 recommendations of non-religious texts that can serve as worthy reflection-generating fodder for a more edifying daily routine: 

Manvotionals by Brett and Kate McKay

The second Art of Manliness book, published in 2011, is a collection of philosophy, self-improvement, and wisdom texts, ranging from Aristotle to the success books of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the speeches and writings of Theodore Roosevelt. The myriad poems, quotes, and essays contained within — centered around 7 primary virtues — are designed to inspire men in particular to cultivate the highest ideals of character and live a truly flourishing life. You won’t always be familiar with the authors of the ideas, but you’ll always be vigorously renewed in your energy for the day’s tasks. 

Meditations on the Wisdom of Action by Kyle Eschenroeder 

In 116 short, pithy, gut-punchingly inspiring chapters, Kyle Eschenroeder expounds on the meaning of action and what it looks like in our modern world. Kyle possesses the soul of a philosopher in the body of an entrepreneur. If philosophy doesn’t lead to action — to answering the question of how to better live this thing we call life — what good is it, really? In this book, Kyle takes the best action-oriented philosophical nuggets from a wide variety of authors and luminaries and riffs on them to create his own unique set of proverbs and calls to . . . action. Supping daily from this book will continually push you to turn your abstract intentions into concrete realities. 

The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday

In The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday grabs an inspiring Stoic quote for each day and adds his own ideas and questions to ponder on and use as grist for becoming a better person. It’s a great collection, though I must mention that the original sources also lend themselves quite well to daily reading: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Letters from a Stoic by Seneca, Epictetus’ writings, etc. Regardless of the source, Stoic philosophy will leave you better prepared to meet the day, and its attendant, inevitable annoyances, with patience and perspective.  

In general, philosophy is a great fount of daily devotional reading. Ancient wisdom is often easier to digest in small chunks than en masse. 

Essays of Montaigne

Brett has called Montaigne the first blogger; it’s an astute observation about a man whose 107 essays from the late 16th century cover a range of topics from the philosophical (“On sadness,” “On the length of life,” “On prayer”) to the more practical and mundane (“On smells,” “On drunkenness”). Even within the essays, Montaigne goes from subject to subject, eventually coming back to the titled topic . . . most of the time. He displays the full range of human feeling, logic, irrationality, and hypocrisy, which is exactly what makes his essays so interesting. He’s clearly processing ideas while writing them, and going back and forth between various conclusions. You’re guaranteed to find something to think about within each chapter. The essays average about 12 pages, making them easily digestible at the pace of one per day.  

A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy 

While Tolstoy is deservedly most well known for his epic, door-stopping novels, his daily reader, A Calendar of Wisdom, should get some love too. Compiled over the course of about 15 years, Tolstoy heavily researched this collection of quotes, proverbs, and sayings which spans religious traditions and schools of philosophy. Though a deeply Christian man, Tolstoy understood that great ideas which resonated within the soul could come from anywhere. Organized by subject and with an entry for each day (using 3-4 quotes/sayings plus a short thought from Tolstoy), the compiler and author himself used it for a good portion of his life.

War and Peace, often listed as the greatest novel ever written, is also particularly well-suited to daily reading over the course of a year, given its 361 short chapters.

The Secrets to Power, Mastery, and Truth: The Best of William George Jordan

This anthology contains the very best personal development essays of Gilded Age writer William George Jordan. All of the chapters are short and certainly devotional in nature; they’re rich in incisive, edifying insights, including vivid metaphors that help the reader see his life through a transformative lens. The real benefit of Jordan’s work is that you can tell he was pushing back against the individualistic, get-rich attitude of his era and fought to instill in folks the less flashy, but more meaningful values of compassion, service, honesty, forgiveness, and the value of a daily fresh start. 

Walt Whitman’s Poems

Poetry, in general, is a great way to consume a bit of daily wisdom and beauty; sometimes the most transformative insights are those that waft through your mind indirectly, rather than being hammered home head-on. It can be an intimidating genre to dive into, though. Admittedly, I don’t really get most poetry, and it often leaves me feeling more confused than inspired. There are a few exceptions, in my opinion, which resonate with just about anyone: Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and most powerfully, for me, Walt Whitman. His soul-stirring poems capture the spirit and vigor of the American ideal and experience better than anything I’ve ever read, and each poem finds some line or two worth remembering and chewing on — “I contain multitudes,” “Be curious not judgmental,” “Let your soul stand cool and composed,” etc. 

The Works of Thoreau and Emerson

Thoreau and Emerson, those great American transcendentalists, are in the same vein of thought as Whitman, but with more concrete ideas and nuggets of wisdom than is to be found in the latter’s poems. Self-reliance, nature and the outdoors, self-improvement, philosophy — these themes and more abound in the pages of these great thinkers’ journals, letters, essays, and other written works. Though full of spirit and calls to transcendence, they’re never opaquely mystical nor dogmatic, and have spoken to the deepest cores of human longing and our perpetual search for meaning for the last 150+ years. Nearly all their content is suited for daily reading, but Jim Mustich, author of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, recommends three in particular for this devotional purpose: The Spiritual Emerson, First We Read Then We Write by the late Robert Richardson, and The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. I might also add The Daily Henry David Thoreau, compiled by biographer Laura Dassow Walls.   

Calling It a Day by Robert Larranaga

If you’re someone who struggles with being a workaholic, or perhaps, in our work-from-home era, the delicate task of balancing work time and home/spouse/kid time, Robert Larranaga’s daily meditations draw from both spiritual principles and sound business ideas in order to give readers the permission they need to put down their phone or laptop. As hard as it is for some men to admit, more work does not necessarily equate to better work. This is a book that helps to remind you of that on a daily basis. 

On the Threshold of Transformation by Richard Rohr 

Franciscan friar Richard Rohr has a number of daily meditation works (as well as a great daily email), but by far the best of the bunch is his collection aimed specifically at men. While he admits coming from a Judeo-Christian tradition, he acknowledges that there are other viewpoints and doesn’t lean solely on Christian ideas in this set of daily meditations. The first line of Day 1 really sets the tone: “At some point in time, a man needs to embark on a risky journey.” Each day, after a couple paragraphs of a virile main idea, Rohr asks a simple question that’s sure to stir up big questions and honest, if scary, reflections. This book is my favorite title on this list. 

Combine any number of these books, use them alongside a daily journaling practice, read them in communion with loved ones or friends — wherever your devotional practice takes you, may it serve to challenge, enlighten, refreshen, and inspire. 

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in November 2020.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

If you went to high school in America, you probably read Moby-Dick — or, more likely, you skimmed the CliffsNotes and wondered why this dense, whale-obsessed novel was considered a classic.

That was me in 10th grade.

But earlier this year, I decided to revisit Moby-Dick in midlife, and it hit me completely differently. What once seemed like a tedious story about a guy chasing a whale revealed itself to be a profound meditation on free will, perception, self-reliance, leadership, and obsession. It’s now one of my favorite novels.

To help unpack why Moby-Dick endures — and why it might be worth picking up again— I’m joined by Mark Cirino, a professor of American literature. Today on the show, we discuss why Moby-Dick was initially overlooked, the novel’s major themes, and the timeless mystery of Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal quest.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Mark’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #786: The Writing Life of Ernest Hemingway
  • Episode #922: For Whom the Bell Tolls
• One True Podcast
• The Norton Library Podcast
• Mark’s Norton Library Edition of A Farewell to Arms

Connect With Mark Cirino

• Mark’s faculty page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you went to high school in America, you probably read Moby-Dick, or more likely you skimmed the Cliff Notes and wonder why this dense, whale obsessed novel was considered a classic. That was me in 10th grade. But earlier this year, I decided to revisit Moby-Dick in midlife and it hit me completely differently. What once seemed like a tedious story about a guy chasing a whale revealed itself to be profound meditation on free will perception, self-reliance, leadership, and obsession. It’s now one of my favorite novels. To help unpack why Moby-Dick endures and why it might be worth picking up again. I’m joined by Mark Cirino, professor of American Literature. Today on the show we discussed why Moby-Dick was initially overlooked the novels, major themes and a timeless mystery of Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal quest. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/MobyDick.

Alright, Mark Cirino, welcome back to the show. 

Mark Cirino: 

Thanks so much, Brett. Great to be back. 

Brett McKay: 

So you are a Hemingway scholar and we’ve had you on the show before to talk about Hemingway as a writer and For Whom the Bell Tolls. But you also teach a class about Herman Melville’s, Moby-Dick, which is your favorite novel. So if you are an American, you went to high school in America, you probably read this book, I dunno, right around 10th grade. That’s when I read it. It’s when we did American Literature. And if you were like me in 10th grade, you probably used the Cliff Notes a lot. And I wanted to talk about Moby-Dick because I recently reread it earlier this year as a 42-year-old man, and I absolutely love this novel. It’s one of my favorites now. And I hope with our conversation we can inspire some listeners to either pick it up for the first time or revisit it if the last time they read it was in high school English class. So let’s talk about big picture. Let’s talk about this guy Herman Melville, who wrote Moby-Dick, who was this guy when he wrote Moby Dick. What’s his story?

Mark Cirino:

Herman Melville was born in 1819, so he was born into the era that we really call American Romanticism, which began around that time. And he was a fairly prominent writer of seafaring narratives, type P Omo, just kind of romps in foreign lands. And with Moby Dick, he became more interested in writing in an abstract way. So in other words, he kept with the maritime adventures and ships, but instead he began to write in an allegorical and abstract way where he began to be all encompassing. And when this book was published in 1851, people just weren’t ready for it. Some people noted that it was an impressive book and so forth, but it wasn’t like it sold very much. It wasn’t like Melville became this unimpeachable bard of American letters. Melville would go on to write a lot of abstract work, philosophical, political, psychological, and then he really became more of a poet later in his life before he died in 1891, to the extent that when he died in 1891, his obituaries didn’t really say that he was the author of Moby Dick.

First and foremost, he was more the author of Typee, Omoo, these early romantic yarns. And it was only until later, maybe the centennial of Melville’s birth, so 1919 where people began to rediscover Moby Dick and say, wow, this is actually worth reading. If I can tell you really quickly, Brett, there’s one particular scholar named Raymond Weaver who taught at Columbia, who was prominent in what is now known as the Melville Revival, which is kind of the rediscovery of Moby Dick and the rediscovery of Melville himself. And my grandfather was a student at Columbia for Professor Weaver. And so he was one of the students reading this book that nobody had ever heard of or nobody thought much about, but this guy was like John the Baptist when it came to Melville. So now years later, Moby-Dick is celebrated as an unequivocal great American novel, and it just goes to show, it might get us to think about that the American literary canon is as subjective as anything else you think of Moby-Dick dropped down from the heavens as sacred text. It really wasn’t that it was discovered by some literature professor.

Brett McKay:

It reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby. 

Mark Cirino:

Same thing, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he was convinced Gatsby was a failure. Gatsby was out of print and it had to be reintroduced. And then now of course it’ll never go out of print.

Brett McKay:

It’s interesting, Melville had written a lot and he was well known for his writing before Moby Dick, but today, I think most people, if they’ve read Melville, the only thing they’ve read from Melville is Moby Dick, or they might’ve read Bartley the Scrivener, and that’s about it. What do you think that is?

Mark Cirino:

So I’ve read several other Melville novels to try to answer exactly that question, Brett. I was like, why? Everyone would say Melville is one of the great American novelists of all time. Everybody would say that. And then you could ask those people who say that, okay, so name two Melville novels. And they would say, well, Moby Dick and Bartley, the Scribner, okay, Bartley, the Scribner is the short story, right? So what does Moby Dick have that the others don’t? Especially since they’re kind of covering the same terrain? And if I can just be reductive and try to figure this out, the first thing it has is Ishmael. And Ishmael is this singular narrator. He’s funny, he’s imaginative, he’s enthusiastic, he’s discursive like he goes on tangents here and there, and he’s very insightful about human behavior. So Melville had never done that before, create such a perfect narrator.

The second thing it has is Ahab, this enormous figure, this mad captain determined to get vengeance on this monster of the sea. So he’s almost godlike or royalty, he’s just larger than life. And Melville had never created such a larger than life protagonist. And also Moby Dick himself, the whale, this creature that is the object of so much fury and so much scrutiny. That is the great quest that Ahab is on. And so triangulating these three unbelievable characters within this novel creates such an alchemy, such power and mystery that none of his other books ever approached this kind of structure.

Brett McKay:

Why do you think this novel is so intimidating? I think some people, they have Moby Dick on their two read list or they remember reading it from when they’re in high school and they’re like, Ugh, Moby Dick, I can’t do that. What is it about this book or the way it’s written that makes it intimidating?

Mark Cirino:

Well, you’re going to have to tell me about how you felt about it as a 10th grader. I mean, it’s kind of long. It’s not long as 19th century American novels go necessarily. I mean, there are lots longer novels. I think the writing is pretty dense and poetic and Baroque Melville writes in a very intense way. So it can be very hard to kind of unpack some of the poetic imagery, some of the philosophical ideas. Absolutely, some of that can be difficult to unpack. Ishmael also goes on digressions as I mentioned. So there’s the very simple story, which is Ahab has been wounded by this one particular white whale named Moby Dick and has now determined to set out and avenge it. And our narrator, Ishmael happens to be on that ship, the P quad. So that’s a very simple story, just a very simple story of vengeance and actually also a holy grail story trying to reach one particular object. But at the same time, Melville layers on top of this very simple, straightforward, linear story discussions about religion and politics and commerce and law and history and psychology and philosophy and nature. So it goes on and on and on. And I think that can be very either frustrating or disorienting for lots of readers.

Brett McKay:

I think when I was in 10th grade and I was reading this book the first time I remember I’d get to the chapters where Melville would just inject these almost pseudoscientific textbooks about Whales chapter 32, where you just see it’s just basically the scientific name of the whale and the description of the whale. And I remember in 10th grade, like what does that have to do with the story? So I’m just going to skip this. What do you think is going on there? Why did Melville do that? I mean, he does that several times there at the book. I remember there’s one where he just talks about the anatomy of the sperm whale head. What does this have to do with Ahab getting Moby Dick

Mark Cirino:

On the surface? It has nothing to do with it. And chapter 32, which is called Cytology, probably has caused more additions of Moby Dick to be turned into Frisbees and launched across dorm rooms all across the United States than anything else in American literature. So Ishmael takes us on a really convoluted taxonomy of the different kinds of whales and the way they looked and their behavior. And I think this is part of Melville’s vision, of course, I’m only telling you what its effect is to me as a reader. I can’t tell you what he was going for, he never proclaimed it. But I think in addition to this narrative, he was trying to say everything about whales all at once. So he was trying to come at it from an adventure point of view. He was trying to come at it from a metaphysical point of view, a historical point of view, and in this case a scientific point of view.

I’ll tell you a couple of effects that Chapter 32 has on me. The first thing it does is it shows how engrossed and enthusiastic Ishmael is as a narrator. And that’s no small thing, Brett, if you’ve ever been talking to somebody, even if you’re not inherently interested in what the person’s talking about, if they are so obsessed and hyped up on what the story is, sometime that’s charming and engaging. And I definitely find that with Ishmael, you don’t really need to be as excited about whales as Ishmael. You just need to know that Ishmael is very excited about whales. So Ishmael is eager to tell you everything that he’s learned about whales. And the second thing that I would offer about the ology chapter is as Ishmael is offering an organizational system of whales based on how they look and how they behave, this book comes out in 1851 and in 1851, weren’t we doing the same thing about human beings? We have a hierarchy of human beings that we valued depending on how they looked and how they behaved and where they were, where they lived. If we don’t in 2025, we certainly were in 1851. And so when I mentioned earlier that the Wailing adventure is kind of an allegory or a metaphor for larger things, that could be something that’s a cytology chapter suggests.

Brett McKay:

I think for me, the effect it had on me whenever he goes into these scientific digressions about whales, it made Moby Dick the whale — I understood it more, and it also made him even more impressive in a way. I don’t know if that was the effect he was going for, but that’s what it did for me. It made the whale more impressive.

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, because he’s saying, you have to understand this thing from all its vantage points, how big its head is, what its tail is like on and on. There’s even the chapter about a whale’s penis, only to show that we have never really encountered monsters like this before.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned the big picture outline of the book. It’s this guy named Ishmael. He hooks up with this ship called the Pequod, and he’s the book’s narrator and the ship’s captain is Ahab, who’s been injured by this whale named Moby Dick. And the book is all about Ahab trying to find this whale, essentially. That’s what it is. And then along the way, they’re doing some welling, then there’s some other things going on. But let’s talk about the main themes of Moby Dick. You mentioned some of them earlier, science, philosophy, religion. What would you say are the big themes you see throughout this novel?

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, there are a lot of themes. I think Melville touches on a lot of things. One of the elements that he’s addressing is the difference between free will and determinism, which is simply do you have control of your own actions? In the very first chapter, which is called Loomings, Ishmael is describing a kind of magnetic pole that he has to the sea. So it’s almost like he doesn’t choose to go. The sea draws him. And he’s saying that happens all the time that we’re drawn to certain places, we’re kind of sick of society and we’ve got to go into nature. And by the same token, the reason that theme is so important is because when Moby Dick injured Ahab, Ahab believes that Moby Dick sought him out personally to injure him like you, I want to get you. And so Ahab is personally insulted that one particular whale injured him.

Meanwhile, I think maybe most common sense readers and certainly Starbuck in the novel, they’re like, Ahab, that’s what whales do. It was instinct. Why would you take it personally? God designed this whale to defend itself and to attack potential threats. You just have to accept that. And so you see there’s a distinction between did Moby Dick act intentionally with a human motivation or was it just mechanical instinct? And that question gets turned around when Ahab is suggesting his act of vengeance on the whale is also instinct. He’s drawn to it magnetically, almost like the whale was drawn to him. So this kind of gets at a lot of questions about human behaviors. When do we act according to our own consciousness versus when do we act kind of programmatically? And so that’s certainly one of the themes.

Brett McKay:

So what do you think was going on in Melville’s time where he was thinking about free will versus determinism? What was happening in America at the time?

Mark Cirino:

Well, I think one of my favorite sentences in the novel is when Ishmael says, “Who ain’t a slave?” And I think that’s one of the most courageous sentences in that novel. In 1851, he says, who ain’t a slave? And some people actually were slaves, but he’s talking about something a little larger. He’s saying, okay, is slavery a legal issue or can it also be a psychological issue? Are there things that even free people in 2025 are slaves too? And then as one of his contemporaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, well, what if you’re a slave driver to yourself? What if you are imprisoning yourself through limitations or habits or prejudices or small-mindedness or things like that?

Brett McKay:

Another theme that you talk about and that you see in the book is this idea of objective versus subjective.

Mark Cirino:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

What’s going on there?

Mark Cirino:

Yeah. So basically there’s a juxtaposition between subjective perception, how an individual sees the truth of something and objective reality, what the empirical facts are. And this is really set up in so many ways, and I think the best way to analyze this idea is the Dublin chapter where Ahab nails up a single coin and says, whoever can spot Moby dick first. This one particular well gets this very valuable coin. And then there’s an extraordinary chapter where Ishmael describes several people starting with Ahab, going up to the delo, looking at the shapes and the figures and the symbols on this coin, and essentially interpreting it or reading it. So we might think of an inkblot test. Well, an inkblot test objectively is an ink plott. But subjectively, there might be an image or a memory that it calls up to you individually, and that the same is true for the dub. So it ends up revealing more about the person than about the coin itself. So Ahab looks at it, and you remember what he says when he sees the coin. He says, you see that that’s Ahab. Those things over there, that’s Ahab, everything, Ahab, Ahab, Ahab. So it’s the greatest expression of solipsism and self obsession, self absorption, because Ahab sees himself in everything. He’s self-obsessed.

Brett McKay:

Another chapter where you see that exploration of objective versus subjective. It’s one of my favorite chapters, one 18 The Quadrant.

And this is a scene where someone’s trying to bust out the quadrant. Sailors use this to navigate. You look at the stars and you can figure out where you’re at. And Ahab is like, I’m not having it. He’s like, I hate this thing. He says, fool. He calls it foolish toy babies play thing of hudy admirals and commodore and captains. The world brags the thee and thy cunning might. And then he says, science cursed thee thou vain toy and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven whose live vividness, but scorches him as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light. And he said, level by nature to this earth’s horizon are the glances of man’s eyes not shot from the crown of his head as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament, curse thee thou quadrant, and he dashed it to the deck.

No longer will I guide my earthly way by the level ship compass and the level of dead reckoning by log and by line, these shall conduct me and show me my place on the sea. And I think that’s a great idea. He’s like, I’m rejecting science. I’m not guiding my life by the objective science. I’m just going to use my own self to guide my life. And I read that and I can see, okay, that’s not good to reject objectivity, but at the same time, I’m kind of inspired by Ahab like I’m going to do what I want to do and not what some instrument tells me to do. I think it’s very relevant today where we have ai, people are going to chat, g gt asking chat, GBT to make decisions for them about, well, should I take this job or even about their romantic life? And I think Ahab would say like, no curse the chat GPT, and he’d smash it.

Mark Cirino:

There is definitely that to it. And this is like Luke Skywalker using the force and not putting the blast shield down. And he’s like, I’m trusting my own instinct is strong enough to solve this problem and execute this mission. And I agree with you that is inspiring. But we can see also the cautionary tale of how they can get you into trouble, how you can forsake facts and say, I got this. And there’s a difference, especially in romantic literature, capital R. So I’m not talking about romance novels, I’m talking about romantic literature. The difference in romantic literature is trusting yourself, and I’m using self as its own word, trusting yourself, which means the heart’s core, that deep inner part of you that maybe other people don’t see, maybe you don’t even see. It’s your soul trusting that which is a divine correspondence to nature and to divinity versus trusting your ego.

And so Ahab may let ego get in the way, or other leaders may let ego get in the way and they forsake facts. But I do agree with you that if you’re using instinct properly, if you’re balanced, that can be inspiring. There’s one other illustration of this, Brett, that might add a layer to it in the chart, which is not dissimilar from the quadrant. In chapter 44, Ishmael is saying essentially, Ahab wanted this whale so badly. He was so bent on this obsession that he says all possibilities would become probabilities. And as Ahab fondly thought, every probability the next thing to a certainty. And so we all know people like this, the people who they can’t see reality because they want something so badly, and because I want it to happen, I can will it to happen. So it cuts both ways because the more kind of sober, realistic people may say, wow, that’s not going to, I don’t think that’s going to work. But the fact is, don’t our heroes don’t. The really great adventurers and leaders and inventors don’t, they have this kind of little strain of hyperbole to them, this little extreme element to them. We’re going

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about some of the characters more specifically. We’ve been discussing them kind of on the surface. I want to go deeper with this.

Mark Cirino:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about the narrator, Ishmael. Moby Dick starts off in a famous way. Everyone probably knows the first line of Moby Dick. It’s “Call Me Ishmael.” What does this line do for the narrative? And what does that tell us about Ishmael that he started off this story with? Call me Ishmael.

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, that’s a question that people have been wrestling with for 150 years. What does “Call me Ishmael” mean? On the surface, it’s a really folksy introduction to our narrator who’s going to sit down and tell you a nice wailing yarn. But on the other hand, it might be a little shifty. There’s a difference between saying, my name is Ishmael and call me Ishmael. Call me. Ishmael is kind of establishing the authority of who is telling the story and who is going to be listening to the story and at the mercy of who is telling the story. So if somebody tells you, call me blank, they are kind of setting the terms of the narrative. In fact, we can go onto the second sentence of the story. He says, call me Ishmael some years ago. Nevermind how long? Precisely, so it’s already he’s telling us what to ask and what not to ask. He’s a very engaging narrator, but again, he’s also setting the terms. We might also wonder about the name Ishmael, because I dunno how many Americans are named Ishmael. This is a quintessentially American narrative, and we have American characters named Ishmael and Ahab.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, why is that? Is there something symbolic about the name Ishmael?

Mark Cirino:

There must be. So when he says, call me Ishmael, he is alluding to a figure in the Bible, the son of Hagar, who is an outcast. So when he’s saying, call me Ishmael, he might be suggesting that he serves that same kind of role in society or that same kind of role in the narrative. One of the things about Ishmael, and I think this is truly the genius thing about the novel Moby Dick or one of the genius things is that Ishmael is not the protagonist, and Ahab is not the narrator. Ishmael is kind of on the periphery off to the side observing. Sometimes you don’t even know how he has access to certain events that go on on the P Quad, but he can sometimes get into the thoughts of Ahab. Sometimes Ahab does something all by himself, even below Deck, and you wonder how does Ishmael know what is going on? Does he have imaginative powers? Does he have supernatural powers? Is he a fiction writer? Where does the truth and imagination blend?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, this reminds me going back to The Great Gatsby. It’s the same thing with Nick Caraway, the narrator, then Jay Gatsby’s the protagonist. And my son just got done reading The Great Gatsby, and he had this funny comment. He’s like, Nick Caraway is just always kind lurking. I don’t know why he’s there and these different situations, how he knows what’s going on, but he’s just kind of there in the background. I’m like, yeah, he is kind of a lurker.

Mark Cirino:

That is a great parallel. It’s exactly the same. The central phrase for Nick Caraway is you remember, and I’m sure your son just read this, when Nick Caraway is talking about this party that he’s at this really kind of seedy party in this apartment, and he looks outside and he sees kind of a bystander, and he says, I was within and without. So simultaneously, he was two places at the same time, and he was two people at the same time. And that is the brilliance of Gatsby, the way it’s narrated. But of course, Moby Dick came way earlier, and so I’m sure that Fitzgerald modeled it after Ishmael.

Brett McKay:

So Ishmael, as you said, he’s this really enthusiastic guy. He’s really enthusiastic about whaling, and he’s also kind of an outsider. What does Ishmael represent, do you think? Because Melville’s writing symbolically in this novel, so Ishmael must represent some idea that he’s trying to convey.

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think Ishmael might be the stand-in for Melville. I think he’s the writer of the, I think he’s the poet. And so the poetic leaps that Ishmael takes, the philosophical and psychological leaps that he takes, he’s really the poet and the novelist on the ship. Ahab doesn’t think on those terms. Ahab is thinking he must get the whale, and if this novel were to be narrated by Ahab, it probably would be very direct. It wouldn’t be much shorter. But Ishmael is more expansive, and I think it’s kind of showing what it’s like. And this goes back to the Nick Haraway thing, what it shows to be in the proximity of these larger than life figures. So Ishmael is kind of awestruck. He looks around with a sense of wonder at whales, at these great captains at all the events, the violence, and he’s sort of our standin and also Melville’s standin.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about Queequeg. Queequeg has always been one of my favorite characters. For some reason, I just find him endearing. Why do you think this cannibal sailor dude from the South Pacific is such an endearing character?

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, first of all, he’s great at being a harpooneer. So he gets on the Pequod due to merit, and that’s fantastic. He’s more qualified than Ishmael to get on the Pequod. He’s a great friend. He’s generous, and I think, well, you can answer why he’s endearing to you. What he’s endearing to me about is that he’s in the Emersonian sense of being self-reliant in comfortable in his own skin, which is in his own heavily tattooed skin. Imagine being a heavily tattooed Pacific Islander, observing Ramadan carrying heads in your sack in Manhattan in the middle of the 19th century. You would be extremely conspicuous. He has absolutely no embarrassment about his own actions. They give him a wheelbarrow to lug things around him. He puts things in the wheelbarrow and carries it because he doesn’t understand how wheelbarrows work, and it feels like, well, didn’t you feel silly?

He’s like, no, why would I feel silly? I don’t know how to do. This isn’t something I’m familiar with. So he’s completely at ease with who he is. I find that very inspirational. One of the great chapters in Moby Dick is called the monkey rope. And in the monkey rope, you remember this episode Brett, where Queequeg is on top of a whale carving it up, and Ishmael is on the boat tethered to Queequeg with a rope, and Ishmael finally realizes if Queequeg falls in, I fall in and if I let go, Queequeg falls in. And then he takes another step back and goes, well, isn’t this just like every human being all across the world, is that we all are connected, even if it’s not with a tangible rope, if I’m driving to work and someone swerves in, I’m done. If the pharmacist isn’t paying attention when he gives me my medicine, I overdose and I’m done. So we all depend on one another for survival. We just don’t see it on an everyday basis. And so Ishmael’s having this very physical connection, but he also appreciates this sublime metaphysical connection he has to him also.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I love that insight. He lacks that morbid self-consciousness that a lot of westerners have, and that’s admirable. Someone who’s comfortable in their own skin. I think that really ties in. I think Melville is probably getting it at that idea in American romanticism of just what Emerson hit on. You got to be your own guy, as Thoro said, March to the beat of your own drummer, that sort of thing. And that’s admirable.

Mark Cirino:

Emerson says, anybody can be themselves in the privacy of their own room. The key of being yourself, a fully functioning human being is to be yourself out in society. That’s the challenge when conformity is really pressuring you to be like everybody else. He said, if you can maintain who you really are, really are deep down that is greatness. And Ishmael’s looking around to see like, oh, who’s doing this? Am I being, he’s kind of like jittery is in a foreign land at complete ease. 

Brett McKay:

Talk about Ahab. He is one of the great figures in I’d say world literature. He’s part tragic hero, part madman. How do you think Melville wants us to understand Ahab and his obsession for the whale?

Mark Cirino:

Wow. So many ways. I think for starters, we can ask ourselves if we are Ahab at all. If there’s in common parlance, the white whale is like, Hey, what’s your white whale? It’s like, what’s the one thing that you keep trying for that you can never get? And it’s like, oh, I might be obsessive about certain things that I keep failing about or that I’m destined to fail, and I’m really driving myself crazy about it. What is your white whale? So we might all be Ahab at one time or another in our lives. Hopefully we recognize it before it’s too late. So at one point, it’s about obsession and monomania only thinking about one thing and how that, remember Brett, I hope you’re comfortable with spoilers. The way that Ahab dies I think is so crucial.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, tell us about that.

Mark Cirino:

Are we okay?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. If you haven’t read Moby Dick yet, you can fast forward. Let’s talk about this.

Mark Cirino:

Okay. Well, the manner in which Ahab dies is he’s impaled by his own harpoon.

And how symbolic is that? That what really ended up killing him was not necessarily the whale. It was his own violence towards the whale got turned on himself. I also think Ahab is a quintessential dictator. So the P quad is run in a fascist way, and so Melville is talking a lot about government and leadership. One of the aspects of the P quad is that there are people from all over the world. Almost every nationality and ethnicity is represented on the P Quad. It’s like a floating united nations, of which Ahab is the leader, is a commander, and Ahab sooner than later, gets everybody to do exactly what he wants them to do. The passion of his leadership, his charisma, his magnetism has overwhelmed everybody else on the P quad, so that his doomed insane mission becomes unanimous.

Brett McKay:

That sounds, I mean, I know this is probably not a great parallel, but it reminds me of Steve Jobs when he was the head of Apple. People would talk about how he could just because of his charisma in his just obsession with making the best product possible, he would get people to do what they thought was impossible. Oh, interesting.

Mark Cirino:

The way you’re saying it, that almost sounds like a positive application.

Brett McKay:

Well, so I mean, it was positive. We got the iPod and we got the iPhone, but the way you hear people describe working for Steve Jobs, he was a real jerk. He was awful working under him. He was mean, and he even recognized that as he was dying. He was like, yeah, I probably could have done things differently, but maybe not. Maybe he couldn’t have done things differently to get accomplished what he accomplished.

Mark Cirino:

What I think about sometimes when Ahab gives that first pep talk where he gathers everybody around and he essentially says, Hey, you know why you’re here. We’re here to kill one whale, Moby Dick. And Starbuck is like, Hey, I thought we were going to do see how many whales we could catch so we could make a lot of money. He’s like, no, no, no. We’re getting one whale. We’re going to get vengeance on the one whale who injured me. What that makes me think of is to look at a Nazi rally from the 1930s and how Hitler was so passionate filled with evil and hate and madness. You could tell the power of his insanity was greater than the emotions that anybody else in that room had. And Ahab even knows it. Ahab knows what he’s saying, might be ruinous and wrong, but he also knows there’s nobody who is his equal. Nobody wants it as bad as he does. Nobody wants the opposite as bad as he wants what he wants, so he overwhelms them.

Brett McKay:

I mean, when I read Ahab, I think Melville paints a really complicated character. On the one hand, his obsession ended up killing him and lots of other people too. But on the other hand, I mean, Melville does paint Ahab in a kind of romantic light in a way he’s got on a bad course, but there’s something attractive about this dynamism, and I feel like Melville would say there’s a role for passion, this whole American romanticism thing, but it’s got to be harnessed in the right way.

Mark Cirino:

You make a great point. So first of all, just a couple of things about that. First of all, I think there’s a moment where after Ahab kind of riles the entire Pequod up and everybody’s on his side, there’s a line that should make your heart sink, where the beginning of chapter 41, Ishmael says, I Ishmael was one of that crew. My shouts had gone up with the rest. My oath had been welded with theirs and stronger, I shouted more, did I hammer and clinch my oath because of the dread in my soul? A wild, mystical, sympathetic feeling was in me Ahab’s quench list feud seemed mine. That is for anybody, and it doesn’t have to be grandiose like politics or religion or life and death. It could be any time you went along with something that you deep down knew better then you got overpowered. 

And the other thing that your comment made me think about Brett was there’s a moment where Ahab is really humanized, where he’s all by himself, at least he thinks he’s all by himself, or perhaps Ishmael’s looking on, and he leans over, he’s thinking about his wife, and he’s thinking about what his obsession and what his career as a sailor has done to his family and how he’s spent way more time out on the ocean than on land. And one teardrop drops into the water. And what Ishmael Surmises is there was more substance in that one teardrop than there was in the rest of the ocean combined because of just how long did it take that tear to form? Probably he had never done it before, but there is that, it’s kind of a yin and yang type thing where yes, Ahab is all one thing, but there’s one dot of humanity and sanity and family man where he kind of remembers who he really is.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about another character, really important character, the whale, Moby Dick. I’m sure lots of people have written essays when they’re in high school like, well, the white whale represents this. What do you think the white whale represents?

Mark Cirino:

Okay, so let’s take one baby step back. And I think a lot of readers of literature who were asked to read this book, let’s say in high school and 10th grade seems actually very early to read this book, but let’s say they did. And their professor, their teacher said, now we’re all going to write essays about what Moby Dick represents, what the whale represents. And a common complaint is, well, why does the whale have to represent something? Why can’t it just be a whale? Why can’t it just be? And we have to have a discussion in that class about there is such a thing as literary symbols. Things do represent other things, and we don’t really need to presume this. We don’t have to guess about this because actually Ishmael tells us what the whale represents. He says in chapter 41, which is called Moby Dick, and let me just quote a sentence or two, all that, most maddens and torments, all that stirs up the leaves of things, all truth with malice in it.

All that cracks, the sinews and cakes, the brain, all the subtle demons of life and thought all evil to crazy Ahab were visibly personified and made practically a saleable in Moby Dick. So Ishmael is saying everything bad about the world, Ahab ascribed to this one particular whale. Now, it’s very important that Ishmael is saying that is what the whale symbolizes to Ahab. The thing about a symbol is that it means different things to different people. An American flag will mean something different to an American and someone from a different country. A cross means something different to a Christian and a non-Christian, and this is the way symbols are. They mean different things to different people. We almost started our conversation by talking about the difference between objective and subjective. So we have to be very careful that the whale doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody.

Ahab is trying to make Moby Dick mean the same thing to everybody. He wants everybody to hate it as much as he does. But in fact, the very next chapter, chapter 42, which is called The Whiteness of the Whale, begins when Ishmael says what the white whale was to Ahab has been hinted, what at times he was to me, as yet remains unsaid. So for every person in the book and for every reader, the white whale probably means something different. I know that’s frustrating, and I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m equivocating, but what it really is, it’s a celebration of subjective perception over objective reality.

Brett McKay:

And so, okay, Moby Dick represents evil to Ahab and he has to kill it. What does it mean to Ishmael?

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, so exactly. So Ahab is saying, once I kill Moby Dick, everything will be better. And now we may look at that and go, what is going to happen once he kills Moby Dick? He’s going to live happily ever after. Do we really think that’s what’s going to happen? So in Ishmael’s case, in chapter 42, he takes a philosophical point of view. Chapter 42 is called the Whiteness of the Whale. And he says, do you know what really bothers me about Moby Dick? The thing that really kind of exasperates me is that he’s white, and by that it’s saying he’s blank. He has no definition. It’s his absence. He says, vague, nameless horror. So what frightens Ishmael is that he’s a white whale, and it could mean anything in that sense. It means whatever you think it means. You are projecting your own anxieties, fears, prejudices onto this blank screen.

If you’ve ever had to write something and you look at a white sheet of paper, that could be very anxiety causing. But here he’s saying, and this is kind of counterintuitive because I think our culture, we look at white as pure and clean and innocent. And here he’s saying, you know what it’s like, it’s like if you’re caught in a whiteout or an avalanche and your surroundings have no definition. In 1851, the early 19th century, if you looked at the map of America, there were white spots, there were white areas, things that hadn’t been fully settled and explored. And romantic writers, Emerson and Thoreau were like, don’t explore externally. Don’t explore the continent. Go within, explore the white spots in your own brain, the areas of your own psyche and consciousness that you haven’t thought of before.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, there’s a great line in that chapter, chapter 42, talking about how the whiteness, it’s this void, this blankness in how it’s anxiety producing sort of existentially anxiety producing. He says, this is it that by its indefiniteness, it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with a thought of annihilation when behold, the white depths of the Milky Way.

Mark Cirino:

Incredible. That’s incredible. Yeah, if you are an imaginative person, if you can project and then you can spiral out of control because it’s just blank. There’s a line in Walt Whitman’s song of myself, which is 1855, and I might butcher it, but I’ll do my best. He says, the white topped mountains are in the distance. I fling my fancies toward them, fling my fancies toward them. So he’s looking essentially at a white easel or white canvas, and he’s like, whatever’s in my brain that is going to project onto it. And that’s scary. What Ishmael is gesturing towards is that we really, as human beings seek definition. We seek boundaries. We want things to be contained. And if the white whale is so enormous and he’s white, we don’t know if there’s any end to it. It could be just an infinite beast.

Brett McKay:

You’re a Hemingway guy. You have a podcast called One True Podcast, and it comes from this line from Ernest Hemingway in a movable feast where he describes how he writes, and he says, all you have to do is write one true sentence, write the truest sentence that you know. What do you think is the true sentence in Moby Dick?

Mark Cirino:

Well, that question is just, now I realize how evil that question is because there’s about 91 true sentences from Moby Dick. I can choose one of my many one true sentences. So as the novel goes along, and this might be a little bit of a key for people who get frustrated with some of Ishmael’s digressions, we start to see a little bit of a pattern in how Melville structures Moby Dick. What he’ll do is he’ll spend a few pages of a chapter talking about some arcane aspect of wailing or whales or the practice of wailing. And you’re saying, why am I engaged with this? Why do I need to know this? And then at the very end, maybe the last sentence or the last paragraph, Ishmael will tie it in to a larger, universal or metaphysical concept, and you’re like, oh, now I see why we’re talking about it.

And it’s absolutely brilliant. Many of these chapters are absolutely brilliant. One such chapter is called Fast Fish and Loose Fish, and this is chapter 89. This very small chapter is essentially a rule book about whaling, which is to say, what do you do when two rival ships are both pursuing the same whale? How do you know who gets it? And the short answer is, whichever ship is fast to it or attached to it, and if the whale is loose, if it’s unclaimed, then whichever ship becomes fast to it gets this whale, and you’re like, well, this is kind of interesting. I never thought that there was a rule book about wailing, but I guess there’s rule books about everything that’s kind of interesting trivia, and that’s that. But towards the end of this chapter, Ishmael begins to talk about being fast and being loose in the sense of metaphysics or your soul or your spirit or your psyche.

And then let me just end the chapter the way he does. He says, what are the rights of man and the liberties of the world, but loose fish, what all men’s minds and opinions, but loose fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them? But a loose fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling, ISTs are the thoughts of thinkers, but loose fish, what is the great globe itself, but a loose fish? And what are you reader, but a loose fish and a fast fish too? And that last sentence brings it home and kind of twists the knife in where he’s basically saying, okay, so what are things that you are susceptible to being influenced by? It goes back to a lot of the strains of conversation, Brett, that we’ve just been having, which is okay, who could come along and convince you to do something that you wouldn’t ordinarily do? And then he goes back to, but what are you fast to what has already claimed you in ways that you might not even be aware of? Like, who ain’t a slave? What are you imprisoned by? Have you ever taken a step back to say, what am I loose to and what am I fast to? It’s an absolutely brilliant way to parallel this weird, trivial law of wailing and the way we all experience life.

Brett McKay:

That’s amazing. Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. I hope it’s inspired some people to go pick up their old copy of Moby Dick and give it a reread. Where can people go to learn more about your work and what you do?

Mark Cirino:

So I am actually hosting two podcasts. One, as you say, is Hemingway specific called One True Podcast. The other is called the Norton Library Podcast, of which there are two beautiful episodes about Moby Dick with the editor, Jeffrey Insco and I have recently published an edition of Hemingway’s, A Farewell to Arms with the Norton Library that I hope everybody enjoys. 

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Mark Cirino. He’s a professor of American literature. Check out the podcast he hosts. He’s got the Norton Library Podcast, as well as One True Podcast, which is about Hemingway. You’re available on all podcast players. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/mobydick where you can find links to resources we can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com and make sure to check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Note: We’re excited to welcome back longtime contributor Jeremy Anderberg, who will be writing occasional articles for AoM once again.

Reading aloud to your children provides a host of benefits for little ones and adults alike. Beyond even the measurable advantages is the simple pleasure of connecting with your kids and engaging in the ancient tradition of sharing stories.

When kids are ages 4 and under, getting through read-aloud stories can honestly feel like a chore. The same board books repeated again and again and again . . . one can only handle so much Pete the Cat and annoying rhyming ditties.

Ages 4 to 7 bring some relief. Kids can enjoy longer, more engaging tales, plus they can start to read words and sentences themselves, which adds a special magic to the experience.

Somewhere between ages 7 and 9, things change yet again. Kids are usually reading on their own and may not “need” stories read aloud — heck, they might even ask you to drop the nightly routine. But if you keep the practice going, you’ll find it becomes even richer and more fun than before because they’re ready to listen to more interesting middle-grade chapter books.

It’s when kids get to this crucial age that they can truly start learning some of life’s most important lessons about love, courage, relationships, and more — and those lessons don’t change much as you age. It’s no accident that many of the classic novels in this category are among the best-selling titles of all time. Their blend of timeless lessons with compelling adventure has made them favorites in our own household too.

Below are four we’ve read aloud to our kids that they really enjoyed.

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

Tolkien’s classic children’s book is generally seen as the appetizer to the immense Lord of the Rings trilogy. But when read with kids, you’ll (re)discover that it makes for a fantastic story of its own that doesn’t just need to be a stepping stone to its door-stopping follow-up.

Introducing Middle-earth and all its inhabitants — hobbits, elves, orcs, dwarves, wizards — readers are immediately drawn into a world that combines whimsical adventure with rather serious battles between good and evil. (Tolkien knew his age group, though: this story doesn’t get as dark or scary as Lord of the Rings.) At its core, The Hobbit is a tale of a quiet fellow who discovers a well of courage and resolve to do good and daring deeds.

While any version of it works well, our family especially enjoys the edition illustrated by Jemima Catlin.  

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

If the movie Interstellar were a children’s novel with a little more fantasy and a little less sci-fi, it would be L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. This book has a bit of everything: time travel (and tesseracts), aliens, sibling conflicts, mitochondrial science, and a darkness vs. light theme running throughout. What makes this story really stand out are its beautiful meditations on love, family, and accepting who you are. A Wrinkle in Time is perhaps our household’s most beloved story; I’ve read it aloud at least three times, and I expect I’m not done yet.

The graphic version, adapted by Hope Larson, is fantastic. We started with it before moving onto the full, unabridged novel. And although we’ve tried the sequels (there are five books in the series), none have been enjoyed nearly as much as the original.  

The Odyssey by Homer

This ancient Greek epic is not your standard children’s fare. But I know a bunch of kids, mostly boys but not entirely, who love learning about Greek and Roman mythology in school. They eat up all those old stories of heroes battling monsters and fighting next to their brothers in arms. What better book to read, for this group, than one of the oldest and most powerful narratives in the history of world literature.

Now, don’t jump right into the full text of the Odyssey. That’s enough to make an adult’s head spin, let alone a 10-year-old. For this book, I recommend going with an abridged graphic version that hits all the narrative highlights while retaining the classic poetic writing style. There are a few options, but the best of the bunch is Gareth Hinds, who has adapted a number of famed novels and plays into accessible graphic editions. If that goes well, consider trying the real thing — Emily Wilson’s translation is great — but don’t be too discouraged if it doesn’t hit the same.

By now you’ve seen I often recommend illustrated or graphic editions. Some people worry about this trend in children’s literature, but I see them as a great bridge between picture books and chapter books. If it keeps kids reading I’m all for it, and the visuals usually make the story stick even more.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis’s most famous book is also the shortest and most accessible title on this list. Combining mythologies and religious ideas, Lewis gave the world the kind of story that anyone and everyone can enjoy.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a rich, beautiful tale about four kids who find themselves in a hidden world that’s been plunged into an epic conflict. They’re drafted into that battle and are forced to find deeper reserves of bravery and love than they thought possible.

Our kids love all things Narnia, including the whole seven-book series, along with a few movie adaptations. But the book that started it all is still their favorite — and mine too.

Here are a few more recommendations from Brett and Kate that the McKay children especially enjoyed:

• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
• My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
• Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
• The Curse of the Blue Figurine by John Bellairs

Reading aloud doesn’t have to end when kids learn to read on their own. In fact, these middle-grade classics show that it can get even better — and go a long ways towards raising confident readers! They remind us that stories aren’t just entertainment, but also offer adventure, tradition, and lessons that last a lifetime.

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This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The idea for the Art of Manliness came to me 17 years ago as I was standing in the magazine section of a Borders bookstore. As inspiration struck, I took my Moleskine out of my pocket and jotted down some notes, like potential names — I considered things like “The Manly Arts” before settling on “The Art of Manliness” — categories of content, and initial article ideas. Almost two decades later, the fruits of those notebook jottings are still bearing out.

That’s the power of a pocket pad’s possibilities, something Roland Allen explores in The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. Today on the show, Roland traces the fascinating history of notebooks and how they went from a business technology for accounting to a creative technology for artists. We talk about how famous figures from Leonardo da Vinci to Theodore Roosevelt used notebooks, the different forms notebooks have taken from the Italian zibaldone to the friendship book to the modern bullet journal, and why keeping a personal diary has fallen out of favor. Along the way, we discuss ways you can fruitfully use notebooks today, and why, even in our digital age, they remain an irreplaceable tool for thinking and creativity.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: 100 Ways to Use Your Pocket Notebook
• AoM Article: The Manly Tradition of the Pocket Notebook
• AoM Article: The Pocket Notebooks of 20 Famous Men
• AoM Podcast #194: The Field Notes of Theodore Roosevelt
• AoM Article: The Right and Wrong Way to Journal
• AoM Article: Finally Understand How to Keep a Bullet Journal
• Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks
• Charles Darwin’s notebooks
• John Locke’s Method for Commonplace Books

Connect With Roland Allen

• Roland’s website

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. The idea for the Art of Manliness came to me 17 years ago as I was standing in the magazine section of a boarder’s bookstore. As inspiration struck, I took my moleskin out of my pocket and jotted down some notes like penitential names. I considered things like the manly arts before settling on the Art of Manliness categories of content and initial article ideas. Almost two decades later, the fruits of those notebook jottings are still bearing out. That’s the power of a pocket pad’s possibilities, something. Roland Allen explores in the Notebook, A History of Thinking on Papers. Today in the show, Roland traces the fascinating history of notebooks and how they went from a business technology for accounting to a creative technology for artists. We talk about how famous figures from Leonardo da Vinci to Theodore Roosevelt used notebooks, the different forms notebooks have taken from the Italian Zibaldone to the Friendship Book to the modern Bullet Journal, and why keeping a personal diary has fallen out of favor. Along the way, we discuss ways you can fruitfully use notebooks today and why, even in our digital age, they remain an irreplaceable tool for thinking and creativity. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @aom.is/notebook. All right, Roland Allen, welcome to the show.

Roland Allen: Hi. It’s nice to be here, Brett. Thank you.

Brett McKay: So you put out a book called the Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper. And this is a history of the humble notebook. And I think hopefully by the end of the show we’re going to find out it’s not so humble because if you look at any advancement in art, technology, economics, there’s typically a notebook involved. I’m curious, what got you to take this deep dive into the history of the notebook?

Roland Allen: Well, I guess there are two questions. There’s where did my interest come from in notebooks? And then what made me take the deep dive? The interest came from keeping a diary myself, essentially, which I did for years. I started in my mid-20s, and quite quickly it became a really important part of my life, and it still is. And keeping a diary, I started just to notice other people’s notebooks. And in my work, I’m a sales guy. I’m not especially creative. But in the publishing companies where I worked, the really creative people always had sketchbooks and notebooks which they would use to design things or write books or generally be enviably creative. So I would sort of notice them and always sneak a peek at them if I could. How did the book come about? I guess one day it just occurred to me that this absolutely universal, omnipresent, really simple object had in fact been invented at some point like anything else. And so I thought, well, where was it invented? And it was really hard to find out, by which I mean Google didn’t help. So that was what set me looking. And yeah, and it sent me off on this sort of wild journey which turned into a book pretty quickly. And you have the results in front of you.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And what I loved about this book, it really captured, I think, the love and the mystique that I think people have around notebooks. I know for me there’s something about buying a new notebook. You open it up and it just. You feel good. What do you think is going on there? Why, why do you think people are so drawn to notebooks and keeping a notebook and buying new notebooks even though they already have unfinished notebooks at home? What’s going on there, you think?

Roland Allen: I think partly there’s a promise. There’s potential, isn’t there? It’s like any vaguely improving thing. It tells you that you can be a better version of yourself. I think you can be a bit more creative, you can be better organized, you can write that novel or you can start keeping a journal or you can get really on top of your workload. I think that promise is in the blank pages, I think. But also you find it inviting. A lot of people actually, particularly who aren’t long term notebookers, do find it a little bit intimidating, almost the blank page and they get a bit frightened of it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve known people like that. They’ll buy a really nice journal and they won’t write in it, like, well, I just want to make sure what I write in it is good.

Roland Allen: Yeah, it’s got to be perfect. And that’s not the right attitude at all.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So let’s talk about the history of the notebook. What did humans use to keep track of notes before paper notebooks existed?

Roland Allen: There were three main things and we’re talking about Europe here. It’s largely a European story that I tell in the book, although I’m not arrogant enough to think that that’s the entire world. But they used parchment, which is very tough. It’s very expensive. It’s very tricky to write on. It’s very hard to use parchment if you’re not sitting at a desk and in effect you’re painting onto the page when you write on parchment. So it’s not the most practical medium.

Brett McKay: For those who aren’t familiar. What is parchment? I’m sure people have heard, like, oh, this is parchment. But, like, what is parchment made out of?

Roland Allen: A parchment is basically a kind of leather. It is animal hide, which has been stretched very thin, so it’s been tensioned while it’s been, I guess, cured. But it is leather and it’s made out of the same stuff as your boots are, and it does therefore last forever. It’s incredibly tough, it’s very robust, but it’s very thick pages. So if you have a parchment book with 100 pages, it’s like a brick, but it’s a very tough material. And as I say, if you can sit down on your desk, it’s a great material. Then you have papyrus, which came out of Egypt, which the ancient Egyptians famously used, but also the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans used a lot of papyrus, and it’s much easier to use for sort of quick and dirty writing. And it was very cheap, but it falls apart over time. It’s very, very hard to keep papyrus together, which is why it basically only survives in Egyptian tombs, which are sort of the driest, stillest places in the entire world. So the Romans had a lot of literature on papyrus, but it’s all gone. And then the third thing, which is, in a way the most interesting, were these little wax tablets which people all over the Mediterranean used and the Middle east used for thousands of years.

And these were very much the notebooks of their day. You’d have a little pair of wooden frames, if you like, which opened, like those little picture frames with a hinge in the middle, and you’d have wax on the insides, which you could scrape into with a stylus. And so you could fill up these pages with scratched writing. And then when you filled the page or didn’t need it again, you could just wipe it clean. Now, obviously, that’s really, really useful if you want to just make a shopping list or keep a quick list of something that’s going on. But it’s not so practical if you’ve got something like a contract, which you want to preserve forever and never change. So all of these mediums had their advantages and disadvantages.

Brett McKay: I thought that was interesting, the handheld wax tablets. There’s actually mosaics of a woman, and it looks like she’s using almost like a PalmPilot. It was really bizarre to see.

Roland Allen: Yeah.

Brett McKay: It’s like, wow, this is like thousands of years old, but it looks like she’s got a little PDA in her hand.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And they were absolutely used everywhere for maybe 2,000 years or probably more. They were really, really good. Little bit of technology, and then they vanished with paper, basically, because paper was so much more practical.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And during this time, what did people keep track of? I mean, today we use a notebook for all sorts of things. What were people keeping track of on their handheld tablets or parchment or papyrus?

Roland Allen: Well, one of the interesting things which I found out during the book is really that people’s lives back then were as complicated almost as ours are now, or rather that they were certainly as varied. So people had shopping lists, they had anything to do with their businesses. If they were buying and selling or making, they inevitably had to take notes about their customers or the money that they borrowed or lent, et cetera. And so any kind of business, it was very important. But also, people were writing down prayers and poems, any kind of what we would call literature. But obviously they didn’t have printed books in those days. So if you wanted to have poems or any kind of writing in your house, you had to have it basically in a notebook or something like that.

Brett McKay: Okay. So these three mediums, parchment, papyrus, tablets, they allowed you to get stuff down and keep it there. But they all had their downsides. Parchment too heavy, too expensive. Papyrus didn’t last very long. The wax handheld tablets good for shopping list, and very ethereal type things that you could just erase at the end of the day. But you talk about. There was a big change that happened in the 1200s in Italy that basically revolutionized the notebook and created almost the notebook that we have today. So what was going on in Italy in the 1200s that led to the development of the paper notebook?

Roland Allen: They… It was a really important moment in history, I think, and it was a real technological leap forward. So they got hold of paper from the Spanish, and the Spanish got hold of paper from the Arabs or the Islamic occupiers of what is now Valencia. And for hundreds of years, they’d been making paper there as part of the Islamic caliphates, and they got really, really good at it. And then when the king of Catalonia, who was a guy called James II, wanted. He wanted it, basically, he went out and conquered them, and he got hold of the paper, and the paper makers kept hold of them, treated them very well, and started exporting paper everywhere. Now, the Italians, what they did was they realized that it could transform their business because suddenly they had this medium which they could do business on, which was permanent and therefore secure. So if you had a business ledger and you wrote something down in it, you knew it could not be forged.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Why is that? What is it about paper you talk about in the book, that parchment? That was one of the key difference between parchment and paper. Paper was permanent. What was it about paper that made it permanent?

Roland Allen: If you write on paper with ink, the ink goes into the middle of the paper and it sticks there and you can’t get rid of it without destroying the page. If you write on a parchment sheet with ink, it just sits on top a bit like paint, and it’s very easy to scrape it off and replace it with something else, which people who used parchment did all the time because it was so expensive. So if they’d finished with a book, they wanted to reuse the parchment, they just scraped off the writing and it was as good as new. So. But merchants suddenly had this secure way of recording transactions, debts, deals. And of course, that enabled them to have much more interesting, complicated businesses because they could suddenly trust their information technology.

Brett McKay: And this allowed the development of paper and paper books. This led to the development of… What’s that? Accounting. Double book accounting…

Roland Allen: Double entry bookkeeping.

Brett McKay: Double entry bookkeeping. I mean, maybe people have heard this, but for those who aren’t familiar, what is double entry bookkeeping and why is it such a big deal?

Roland Allen: Right. Among your listeners, you’re going to have, I hope, plenty of accountants, plenty of people who’ve got double entry bookkeeping degrees or qualifications, people who have trained in any kind of money management. And I just want to salute them because they’re the real heroes of the story. Double entry bookkeeping is tricky, but it’s a very, very useful way of managing money. And it enables you to create a profit and loss picture out of quite a complicated array of deals. So when you talk about a company’s balance sheet today, you’re talking in terms of double entry bookkeeping, balancing credits and debits. When you talk about the profit and loss account, which every company does to this day. This was invented in Italy around the year 1300. When you talk about an annual statement or an annual statement of a company’s accounts, that was invented in Italy. They invented limited liability partnerships, they invented futures markets, they had very sophisticated insurance and modern banking, and they invented the company. So if you’ve ever worked for a company, you can thank these Italians. Back in the year 1300, they invented all of these things in probably around Florence.

Brett McKay: And it was all done in paper notebooks.

Roland Allen: And that was their technology. Yeah. And because there was so much cash flying around, Florence became one of the richest places in the world, despite the fact that it’s a small city with very few natural resources of its own. They were so good at money management that their bankers basically ran European business for 100 years or more. And their merchants and manufacturers were among Europe’s leading tradesmen, so basically because they were incredibly good at managing money. And that people from all over Europe would look at them enviously and say, oh, they’re doing it the Italian way. But they couldn’t quite understand it because looked at from the outside, double entry bookkeeping is quite opaque, a little bit difficult to get your head around. So it took quite a long time for other people to do it. But the northern Italians learned how, the Germans learned how, then the Dutch and the French and eventually even the British learned how to do double entry bookkeeping. And that is where the sort of the whole European economic model capitalism really comes from.

Brett McKay: And something that happened at the same time is you had these Italian accountants basically with their notebooks, their ledgers. And there were the artists around the same time, looking around like, oh, these guys have got this cool thing that’s. They got this medium.

Roland Allen: This is handy, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah, they got this medium where they can just look at things. It’s lightweight, it creates a permanent record. Maybe we could use that for our art. So how did Florentine artists co opt paper accounting books and then turn them into sketchbooks?

Roland Allen: I think it really was that simple. Imagine if you are an artist in a time before paper, then you can paint on the walls, you can paint on parchment or canvas, which are both inconvenient and expensive. You could carve wood or stone, but you couldn’t casually go out and just sketch something. And today’s artist, whether or not they’re a hobbyist or a pro, good or bad, can take it absolutely for granted. You can pick up a pencil, just go out and sketch whatever you want, or draw a picture of a person or of a rabbit or of a tree. But this is actually again, a sort of surprising development which people weren’t always able to do. So I think there was like a generation of artists in Florence basically, who saw their contemporaries using these notebooks, which were quite cheap by this point, for quite interesting business things. And they just picked it up and started drawing in it. And they realized or they discovered that if you draw a lot, you get good at drawing. And suddenly they were better artists than they would have been without these notebooks and turned into really great artists. A generation, I think, of great artists.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s when you see the development of perspective. Like there was an artist you highlight and you can actually see how you develop this perspective, where things. Because before that time when people drew things people have always seen those sort of like Byzantine type paintings where they’ll just basically stack people on top of each other. And maybe they might. The person that’s supposed to be far away looks smaller, kind of, but then it’s still not in perspective. Well, the notebook, the sketching allowed these guys to figure out, oh, if we do it this way, we can actually provide some visual depth to our art.

Roland Allen: Yeah, and they could try and try and try again, which is really important. You know, if they produced a drawing which wasn’t very good, all they had to do was turn the page and try again. And that was never really available to previous generations of artists. But this movement from business technology to creative technology, we’ve seen in our own time, because we’ve seen computers go from IBM to the Apple Mac and then you have Pixar and you have these amazing digital artworks which no one could have conceived of 50 years ago. And it’s a very similar story. It’s information technology being co opted by creative people and used in crazy new ways.

Brett McKay: And the other thing that the notebook allowed artists to do was not only could they just draw a whole bunch, but because it was lightweight, they could share things with other artists. So it allowed artistic ideas to spread faster than before. If you wanted to see a painting, you had to like, go visit a church or go look at this mosaic wall. Now, the notebook, you could just hand someone your sketchbook. Hey, what? I’m doing this thing with perspective or two point perspective. You should check this out. And then it just started spreading faster and faster.

Roland Allen: Exactly, exactly. And there was definitely training going on in artists studios which worked exactly like that, where they would have some really good drawings of feet in the studio. Notebook. Studio sketchbook. And then you would just practice drawing feet using those. And you would get good at feet, and then you’d move on to the next piece of anatomy.

Brett McKay: And during this time too. So you had the artists using paper notebooks for sketchbooks. You had accountants keeping the ledger. During this time in the Renaissance, you also had this development in Italy of a notebook called the Zibaldone. Did I say that right?

Roland Allen: I guess so, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. All right, so tell us about the Zibaldone. What is the Zibaldone? What was that?

Roland Allen: Zibaldone seems to have meant at the time salad. And it was a kind of notebook which was exactly like a salad in that it was all mixed up, it was all different kinds of things. It was basically just what you fancied having. So remember that, again, people didn’t have printed books to rely on. If you wanted to have literature in your house of any kind, it had to be in a notebook, it had to be handwritten. And a Zibaldone was your own personal collection of your favourite book bits of writing. So very commonly it was prayers, but it could also be songs, poems, Aesop’s Fables, translations of Ovid or other classical authors, or just the business of the town, proclamations from the town authorities and so on. Anything which was going to be fun or useful, people just wrote down in their own notebooks. And they were called Zibaldoni because they ended up as hodgepodges. You know, they were completely mixed up like a salad. And these are great because they’re a real insight into what people actually were interested in. And so some of them are a bit smutty, but most of them are very just enjoyable. They wrote down the fun stuff. It’s a bit like a kind of mixtape, if you like people copying down their favorite tracks back in the ’80s, as I’m sure you did, or I certainly did, and making these unique mixes. And no two were ever the same.

Brett McKay: I thought was interesting too, about the Zibaldone was that they were oftentimes intergenerational. Like a father would pass on his notebook to his son and then the son would pick up where his dad left off.

Roland Allen: Exactly, yeah. They were like a family asset. And you see it in people’s wills when they died, quite often even. And this was in a time when, outside of Florence, most people couldn’t read by really, the vast majority of people couldn’t read. But in Florence, where this went on, the vast majority of people in their wills would leave two or three books behind, and those were mostly Zibaldoni, which they would leave, as you say, to their sons or their daughters, and they would just be carried on in the next generation.

Brett McKay: All right, so they were writing things like poems, prayers, catchy quotes. Did anyone do any drawing or sketching in the Zibaldone?

Roland Allen: Yes, they did. And this is one of the things that makes them so fun, because these people aren’t by and large, trained artists. So when they draw, for instance, a scene from the story, like an Aesop’s Fable or something, it’s a bit haphazard. It’s clearly the work not of a trained artist. It can look quite childish, but therefore it’s really fun and charming. And again, it really brings the people to life who actually used them.

Brett McKay: Did they keep to do list or grocery shopping list in their Zibaldone, or was the Zibaldone was like, no, it’s only for things we want to keep for a long time.

Roland Allen: Yeah, I think that’s right. I don’t think I came across one which had anything like a grocery list in it. They would have things like recipes in them, though, which are pretty functional. You know, people would have cures for baldness, for instance, which would involve mushing up various grains or herbs or produce in olive oil and then smearing it on your head, that sort of thing. So they had that kind of list. But anything as casual as a shopping list, they probably just put on a bit of scrap paper, I guess.

Brett McKay: And there was no. Again, there’s no rhyme or order to the Zibaldone.

Roland Allen: No.

Brett McKay: It’s just, you just whatever you want to write, I’m gonna write in there.

Roland Allen: Yeah, yeah.

Brett McKay: And I think that’s a difference from the commonplace book, which we’ll talk about here in a bit. So it was just. It was like. It was like a tossed salad.

Roland Allen: Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay: Okay, well. And one of the most famous notebooks keepers during the Renaissance, I don’t know if you’d call his notebooks or zibaldonis. They’re kind of like that was Leonardo da Vinci. How many notebooks did this guy go through during his life?

Roland Allen: Ah, no, we can’t know, but thousands and thousands of pages. I think we have surviving 1,300 pages of his notebooks, and they estimate that that’s maybe a quarter of what he produced in his lifetime. So what’s that, about 5,000 pages?

Brett McKay: Wow.

Roland Allen: Which I guess is. Oof. That’s 20, 25 big fat moleskins. But some of his notebooks were oversized. Some of them were pocket sized. He actually wrote about how he used notebooks for sketching. He said he always had one tied to his belt. He never went anywhere without a notebook. If he ever had a thought, he could write it down. If he ever saw something interesting, he could sketch it. And he never stopped. He basically just never stopped. He filled pages of notebooks and sketchbooks every day.

Brett McKay: So give us an idea. What did he keep in his notebooks? Like, what kind of things was he writing down?

Roland Allen: Oh, Lord, where to begin? He had lists, for instance. He wasn’t super well educated, Leonardo. The education he got was pretty. You’d call it elementary. And then he went off to work in an artist studio when he was a teenager, but he was very keen on learning Latin. So for instance, he kept lists of Latin words. He did keep shopping lists and traveling lists, for instance, packing lists in his notebooks so that we know when he moved house, what he took with him, we know who he owed money to, who owed him money, etc. And then sort of these very mundane everyday things go up to incredible anatomical drawings, which he made from drawing dissected cadavers. He was way ahead of his time as an anatomist. But then there are mathematical sketches. He was obsessed with geometry and polyhedrons, so 12 sided things, tetrahedrons, that sort of thing. He was obsessed by mechanics. He designed things like ball bearings, we don’t know if they were ever manufactured. And then he designed these crazy machines which look like flying machines or tanks. I don’t think that they were necessarily ever built.

One Leonardo expert said to me that you’ve got to think of his sketchbooks as kind of him showing off a little bit, because his job was basically to be a genius. He didn’t actually do anything very productive apart from painting. And he actually didn’t paint very many paintings either. But he was kind of like a public court genius. And therefore the Duke of Milan or the King of France or whoever would want to pay him to be around. And his sketchbooks and his notebooks were really important for that because he could show off all of his crazy ideas, just turning a few pages and people would have their minds blown. So, yeah, so Leonardo’s notebooks are undoubtedly some of the best ever. And he didn’t really see any boundaries. He just wanted to write or draw everything that he thought of.

Brett McKay: The thing that stood out to me when you’re describing Leonardo’s notebooks was how much drawing he did in it. This is not like a Zibaldone, where people are just keeping prayers and writing things down. He did a lot of drawing, I think you pointed out. What he was doing is he was like the title of your book says, thinking with paper. He was taking these abstract thoughts that he had in his head and he was trying to make them more concrete by drawing them out.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And so, for instance, very famously, he was obsessed by drawing running water. So he could put him by a stream or by a watermill and he would draw the water moving over the rocks very, very happily. Must have done it for hours and hours. He was obsessed by hair as well, by drawing curly hair and looking for similarities between it. But he was always looking, for instance, when he was drawing the water moving. He was also thinking about fluid dynamics and he was trying to work out why the water moved the way it did, what forces were working on it and so on. So he never stopped asking why. And I think that’s what’s kind of inspirational about Leonardo’s career is he just never ever stopped asking why, why, why, why? Like a really irritating five year old why, why? And of course, because he was always looking for answers. He found some.

Brett McKay: The thing about Leonardo’s drawing, it inspired me because I’m not much of a drawer. I’m trying to become more of a drawer in my notebooks because I think there’s something to that idea of thinking with paper and like drawing things to help you understand things. In your experience with your notebooks, do you do a lot of drawing? Have you found any benefit to adding sketches along with your writing in your notebook?

Roland Allen: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Funny enough, I used to keep separate sketchbooks and diaries. I never really drew in my diary, but I always love seeing people who can draw doing a visual journal. You see so many of them online, people who go traveling and then they sit in the town square with the coffee and they sketch the town square and then write about it around the page. And I think those are so beautiful. I think those are wonderful. They’re really inspiring. But I just don’t feel confident enough in my own drawing to do that. But drawing is a great thing to do and you never look at anything as closely as when you’re drawing it. You never really concentrate on a scene until you’ve got a pencil in your hand, I find. So if you want to really experience a place, then drawing it is the best thing to do.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’d agree. One of my favorite presidents, US Presidents was Teddy Roosevelt and he was a naturalist. He kept journals where he talk about his adventures he went on and his observations of nature. And he did a lot of drawing and I was, I was pretty impressed, like how, well, how good of a drawer this guy was.

Roland Allen: Yeah, I did not know that. I missed him. But this is the, the hazard of doing such a wide ranging book. You, you miss all of the ones which you wish you found.

Brett McKay: Okay. So if you want to have a notebook like Leonardo, just write anything and everything that you come across do you think is interesting and do more drawing. I think that’s a good takeaway from that.

Roland Allen: That’s my takeaway. Yeah, yeah. Draw more. You’ll be very happy with yourself.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So this was a Renaissance period. Eventually notebooks started spreading across Europe and then you see this development of something that’s kind of like the Zibaldone but different, the commonplace book. What is a commonplace book and how is it different from a Zibaldone?

Roland Allen: So you should think about this as a reaction to the age of print arriving. So Zibaldone you have. Because you can’t have printed books, basically, commonplace books arrive about 100 or 60, 60 odd years after print and suddenly there are books everywhere. And suddenly, for the first time in Europe anyway, there are more books than you can ever hope to read because of this explosion in print. So everyone’s busy reading more and more books, which are cheaper than ever, and therefore it’s hard to remember what’s going on. Commonplace books are a really good method of taking the best bits out of what you read, organising it, and therefore you end up making your kind of own encyclopedia, which is thematically arranged.

So, for instance, if you’re a legal student, if you’re studying to be a lawyer, then all of the law books you read, when you go through them and you come across a concept like, I don’t know, divorce or murder or justice or sentencing, you take a little quotation out, you take a snippet out on that topic, you collect all these snippets from different authors and you end up with your own little law encyclopedia. But that could work equally well if you’re studying to be a priest or if you were just reading generally, or studying Latin or Greek or anything. So they’re much more organized than Zibaldonis and they’re quite hard work to make and they’re definitely less fun. But commonplace books are very, very good way to educate yourself to a high standard.

Brett McKay: So who were some famous commonplace bookkeepers?

Roland Allen: More or less anyone you’ve heard of between about the year 1500, 1550 and say the mid Victorian period? So Shakespeare, undoubtedly, that generation of dramatists with definitely massive commonplace bookers in their youth, that’s how their education worked, that’s how they were taught. But basically anyone who had any kind of education in the period would have kept a commonplace book at school. And then if they carried on keeping them into adulthood, often they became quite serious, weighty tomes. John Milton kept a commonplace book into adulthood. Isaac Newton used his stepfather’s as a kind of sketchbook, but he also would have kept his own when he was a student. So it was a really important part of education at that time.

Brett McKay: I think John Locke was another famous. Didn’t he write a book or a treatise on how to keep a commonplace book?

Roland Allen: He did, yeah. And this is quite a common thing because people recognized that it was quite hard work, so they’re always trying to make it slightly easier for each other. So Locke published this, as he said, treatise on how to commonplace, which seems to have been fairly popular. People seem to have listened to him.

Brett McKay: I thought was interesting about the development of the commonplace book. You saw people borrowing again from accounting. So I think accountants had different types of books that they kept. There’s like the main ledger and then there’s like a waste book. There’s things that were like, temporary and you shifted it over to more permanent records in the. The accounting books. And people who had commonplace books had a similar system. They’d have like a work a day notebook that they would carry with them all the time, write down things they came across during the day and they would get home and then they’d go to their main book and then synthesize and organize everything and that they track down that day into the main commonplace book.

Roland Allen: Yeah, absolutely. They would always be organizing their thoughts. And if this is one of the most important things you can do to help you understand things better or think more creatively, always try and organize your thoughts. It’s just a really, really good process to go through. It’s the same when you’re drafting a piece of writing or making preparatory sketches for a painting or a drawing, or just trying to work through what you’ve seen. A really good example of that is Darwin when he was on the HMS Beagle, going to the Galapagos and places like that and looking at tortoises. The notes he made on the spot were absolutely minimal, completely illegible to anyone but him. Very, very, very sketchy, in tiny little notebooks, which he could just put in his pocket when he was out and about. But every evening when he went back to the ship, then he would break out the big notebooks, he would organize his thoughts, he would write a proper journal and he would pull in facts from his reference library, which he had with him on the boat, and create something much more sophisticated. And then in turn, that goes on to be the foundations of the rest of his career on the evolution of species by natural selection.

Brett McKay: Do you keep a commonplace book?

Roland Allen: Do you know what? Literally two weeks ago, I thought I’m going to have to do this. I started one and what I did was I went and got a little Moleskine address book. I’m holding it in my hand now. You know, the sort which has the tabbed pages.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Roland Allen: Because what I wanted to avoid was having to go through and if I would need to write down the Alphabet and all the head words hundreds of times. So, yeah, so I’ve got those little tab pages down the side and I’ve made a few entries, but really, I should be making more. You’ve reminded me. But like I say, keeping a commonplace book is hard work.

Brett McKay: It does sound hard. And I think part of the reason why a lot of people don’t do okay, it’s hard. And I think instead, what a lot of modern people do, instead of writing things out by hand and taking the time to organize things manually, is they’ll use digital tools where if I highlight text on the web, it’ll go to this app that will then organize the notes. And I’ve. I’ve experimented with those things. I don’t find them particularly useful.

Roland Allen: No. And the reason they’re not that useful is because they’re really easy. So your brain doesn’t have to engage too much. You just. It’s no more complicated than, oh, that’s interesting. Copy, click, pi.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Roland Allen: And then you move on. Whereas if you’re actually writing something down in a notebook, you have to pause. You have to take five, 10 minutes to write it down. And when you’re writing it down, you’re concentrating on every word because you want to make it an accurate record. So. Yeah, so it goes into your mind, it goes into your brain. The work is very much the point.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the work. It’s not the writing itself. It’s the work you have to do to organize.

Roland Allen: Yeah, it’s the mental work you’re doing. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. That reminds me of when I was in law school. In class, you would take notes, lecture notes, but the thing that really helped the most was after class, I’d have to go and take those notes and then put them into my outline, which I guess you call my commonplace book for that law class.

Roland Allen: Exactly, exactly. There you go. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Okay. So if you want to do a commonplace book, you probably recommend, get yourself an actual physical analog notebook and make that your come. Don’t try to do this digitally.

Roland Allen: But I would also say, like, when I was a teenager. Making mixtapes, if I heard a song and I particularly liked the lyrics, I would always write the lyrics down. I had a notebook which was just nothing but snippets of Bob Dylan and things like that and which actually I didn’t know, but that was my Zibaldone and I would recommend that, really, if just anything you read, which you like, just write it down in a notebook. Keep it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So after you talk about the development of the commonplace book, what I love, you take these little side journeys and different fads that notebooks went through throughout Western history. And one you talk about was the Friendship Book. What was the Friendship Book?

Roland Allen: Oh, these were lovely. Yeah. So these, these started off as a kind of autographed book in Germany, and students who were particularly impressed by their professors would take them up to Luther or to Melanchthon and get these little notebooks signed and autographed by their professors, who were their stars, and then they would go off and study at another university. Because in those days when you studied at university, you were expected to travel from place to place quite a lot. You didn’t really root yourself in one place. And when you arrived in your new town, you would whip out your autograph book and you would show it to professor so and so, and you would say, look, I am friends with professor such and such over in that other town. And he would say, ah, well, you must be a clever young chap. So this is what Germans did, and then the Dutch got hold of it, and this is around the year 1600 or so, and they made it into something much more fun, which was the Friendship Album. So it wasn’t just for students and professors anymore, it was for anyone. And when you went out for dinner with new people, you would take your friendship book, your album Amicorum in Latin, and if you met someone interesting, you would whip it out and say, it’s so nice to meet you.

Could you dedicate yourself into my book? You would give them a page of your book, they would write down a little prayer again, or a snippet of poetry, or a motto of proverb, or they would do a sketch of something and hand it back, and that would be a little record of your friendship. And you can see thousands of these things have survived in Holland. They were hugely popular. And you can see people making these little social networks in these notebooks and recording their friendships for again passing down through generation after generation. And of course, you have people like Rembrandt or the other great Dutch painters would leave sketches in people’s notebooks. So these are now incredible little works of art in their own right. But they’re lovely. I mean, really, really nice things, really. Strangely, no one ever did it, apart from the Dutch. We don’t really know why they did it. For a couple hundred years and then they kind of just stopped. It petered out. But it was such a nice habit to be in for those couple of centuries.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it sounds like it was like the 1600 version of Dutch Facebook.

Roland Allen: Yeah, it exactly was. You’re exactly right. Yeah.

Brett McKay: That’s funny. Another thing you talk about in the book is do a chapter about the role of notebooks in traveling. What role did the notebook play in the lives of travelers?

Roland Allen: Well, it’s really interesting. People seem to have an impulse when they go traveling to write a diary, to keep a journal. It seems very natural. But people did this when they would never have dreamt of keeping a diary at home. So you have people like Marco Polo, for instance, who kept an amazing travel journal when he was in China, but then any kind of traveler afterwards would. And then these became a kind of literary sub genre, because when people went traveling, they would keep notes, expecting it to be published when they got back if their journey was particularly remarkable. So, yeah, travelers notebooks are always great, and particularly if they are filled as well with sketches and things like that. There are so many wonderful, wonderful examples.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, going back to Teddy Roosevelt, there’s actually records of his travel journals that he kept as a boy when he did this European tour. And I think he also went to Egypt, and he drew pictures of the things he saw in Egypt and writing about how it was boring on the ship and that sort of thing. It was really cool.

Roland Allen: Yeah, that’s amazing things.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then I guess the most famous travel journal would be or travel notebook keeper, Charles Darwin. You mentioned him earlier. He kept, like, a notebook with him all the time where he just kind of wrote slipshod notes that he could later transcribe in his main notebook and that eventually. And what’s crazy, on these little notebooks, you can see him develop the theory of evolution in real time.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And also, he seems to have been a really nice guy, Charles Darwin. He was very chatty. He was not secretive at all. He would share his ideas with whoever he met, but he would also whip out his notebooks, and if anyone said anything interesting, he’d be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. And he would make a little note of their conversation, and then that would get fed into his. His writing later on. So he absolutely never stopped taking notes.

Brett McKay: Wasn’t there. There’s like an excerpt from one of, I think, maybe a diary or a notebook that he had about marriage. Like he was doing this pro and con list of whether or not to get married.

Roland Allen: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And he sort of weighs up the cost of his independence against the sort of the benefits of companionship and not being lonely and things like that. In the end, he plumps to get married. And fortunately he made a very happy marriage and it worked out well for him. But he did have to think it through before. He did.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you talk about too, the history of the diary. And I thought, this is interesting. So notebooks had been around, like the paper notebook around since about 1200s. And people had commonplace books, the Zibaldones, they had ledger books, they had sketchbooks. There weren’t a lot of people who were using their notebooks to write about their thoughts and feelings.

Roland Allen: They really didn’t. It’s so, so strange when you think of people who buy moleskins these days. They’re doing it basically to write journals, a lot of them, and it’s a completely normal thing to do, but for hundreds of years no one did it. And when I was researching, I’d keep on coming across mention of a notebook which was called the Diary of so and so. And then I’d go and look at it and it wouldn’t be a diary at all. It would be an account book or it would be a business notebook, or it would be a town chronicle or something like that. It would never be a personal diary. Like, here’s what I did today. I got up, I had this breakfast and how did I feel?

Brett McKay: Yeah, and it was funny too. Even if you look at these notebooks from the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s, people would sometimes talk about children dying, but it’s almost like they were just keeping track of livestock. They never talked about, like, oh, I felt sad, I’m grieving. You know what most people do today with a notebook, if a child died? They didn’t do that.

Roland Allen: Yeah, no, it was very much because it was to do with accounting. And I don’t mean that in a cold way, but they viewed it as that. Rather, they wrote about these terrible events and wonderful events. They wrote about the birth of children as well. They would mark the day, but again, there was no emotion really. Sometimes they would, for instance, write a prayer or they would write a little formula saying how sad they were. But then two years later, another child would die and they would write exactly the same thing. So it was a formula rather than a genuine feeling pouring onto the page.

Brett McKay: So when did diary keeping, the way we know it today, is the sort of self reflective notebook. When did that come to be a thing?

Roland Allen: Well, this is England’s moment to shine. So for most of the story, England is this terrible backwater inhabited by thugs, very poor education and muddy roads and all that. But for some reason, around the year 1600, in England, they do invent the diary, the daily diary as we know it. We don’t really know why. Various theories out there, but I’m not convinced by any of them. I can’t think of any explanation myself. But by the year 1600, it was definitely a fashion which, for instance, people in plays could refer to. So there’s a play by Ben Jonson from 1604 in which one of his characters writes a diary and people take the piss out of him for it, and he’s very humiliated. And everyone’s familiar with that. I think the idea that some stranger reading your diary is a terrible humiliation. So by then, by 1600, people were keeping diaries. We know that, but where it came from, we have no idea.

Brett McKay: And you talk about. They kind of went out of style in the 1940s. What do you think was going on there?

Roland Allen: I think time, actually the mass media comes along. Imagine 120 years ago. Imagine in 1900, you don’t have radio, you don’t have any Internet, you don’t have the movies, don’t have any tv. What do you do in the evenings? You read. Okay. You chat, you talk, you sing, you play instruments. But you’ve just got quite a lot of time, particularly in the Northern hemisphere with long, cold winters when it’s dark. You know, diary keeping is a good way to fill that time. And then over the 20th century, you have more and more distractions. You have the cinema, you have the radio. You then have the tv, and then you have the Internet. And every time, it chips away at people’s evenings, essentially. So it became harder and harder, I think, to find the time just to sit down and think, okay, I’ll think about what I did today for half an hour. And I find it difficult to carve out the time.

Brett McKay: No, I agree. And something else you point out in the book is that keeping a diary has declined in the west because we live in a peaceful time. And you can see that in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was during times of war that sales of diaries or journals would spike.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And this is, I’m sure, true to this day. Whenever there is some upsetting, traumatic event, your world turns upside down. People start keeping diaries, which is why teenagers keep diaries, because their lives are in turmoil automatically because of hormone poisoning, as someone said to me. So teenagers keep diaries and people in war zones keep diaries for the same reason. And I think anywhere you’ll see it now, I’m sure in Ukraine, for instance, there’ll be a lot of people keeping diaries who didn’t before.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve seen that in my own life. I was a big journal keeper in high school and then the early part of young adulthood, and then I remember. And if I look back at what I wrote, it was a lot of the. Just ruminating over, oh, here’s this problem, here’s this big decision I got to make. I’m feeling anxious about test scores if I’m going to get a job. And then I remember I kind of reached this point in my 30s career established, had a house, kids. I just didn’t really have the itch to write in a journal anymore. And I, I stopped doing it. But I’ll notice whenever I have a problem going on in my life, I will bust out the journal to write.

Roland Allen: Very healthy habit. Really healthy habit. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When you talk about this. There’s research that backs this up of. It’s called expressive writing, where you just write, kind of stream of conscious what’s going on in your thoughts and your emotions.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And this, I think, was the single most surprising thing I came across in the whole project. You know, three year project, whatever it was, that writing your emotions down on the page then helps your body heal from physical wounds because it reduces the levels of stress in your body so much that your body is able to recover from, for instance, an operation or an injury or a burn more quickly simply if you write down your emotional trauma. And this is now they’ve researched it and researched it and researched it, tested it, all kinds of experiments. It holds up completely. And this blows my mind every time. If you go for a cancer biopsy, you will heal more quickly if you have written your diary beforehand. It’s absolutely baffling to me how powerful it is.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You talked to the researcher, James Pennebaker, who sort of the father of expressive writing.

Roland Allen: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And I think one of the things he noted too, is that in order to make expressive writing effective, you don’t have to do it all the time. Like you don’t have to journal every day to get the benefits, basically. So just do it when you feel like you need to do it.

Roland Allen: Exactly. And when I asked him about that I said to him, do you ever keep a journal? He said, yeah, yeah, when I’m feeling low or when I’ve got something to think about some problem. And I said, do you keep it all the time? He just laughed. He said, no, why would I do that? I’m fine.

Brett McKay: He also has some advice on how to get the most out of it. I think one problem that people run into, I’ve run into this problem when I’ve kept a journal, when I’m trying to sort through problems, is I end up doing a lot of ruminating, just bellyaching. And it’s not very productive because I’m always asking, why is this happening? And why that one bit of advice? Instead of asking why in your journal, ask how and what? Because that’ll give you better, more concrete answers.

Roland Allen: Interesting. Okay. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Because it’s often hard to pinpoint why something happened. And then also what writing does in general is it forces you because it’s very logical and linear. You have to call in your prefrontal cortex. So it calms you down if you’re really emotional. So it gets you to think more clearly and turns your emotions into actual thoughts.

Roland Allen: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay: You have this fun chapter on bullet journaling and I’m sure our listeners, if they’ve been on Instagram, they’ve seen pictures of people’s really cool looking bullet journals. Tell us about the history of bullet journaling. When did that get started?

Roland Allen: So I guess people have been keeping lists obviously, and checking them off since they were able to write anything down. Ryder Carroll, however, sort of taken the list and turned it into a kind of, I wouldn’t say art form, but a very sophisticated way of organizing your thoughts and feelings. And the reason he felt driven to do this was because he had very pronounced ADHD, which made school life for him impossibly difficult. He couldn’t concentrate, he couldn’t focus, he couldn’t get anything done. He was constantly being shouted at by his teachers, et cetera. And school was miserable for him until, I think at college, I want to say he started just writing things down in lists in bullet pointed lists. And he did it with everything. And this kind of had a transformative effect on how he was able to approach his day because it helped him to focus.

It helped him break big, unmanageable tasks down into small, actionable little things and therefore complete things. And he went from being this sort of constant headache for his teachers and his parents to being super, super productive, very entrepreneurial. I’ve got to say, he’s a lovely guy anyway, but he’s also incredibly productive and gets a lot done with his time in a really interesting way. And he invented the Bullet Journal thing, which is essentially a really ingenious way of creating lists that organize your thoughts and organize your day. And it took off. He wrote a couple of books and has thousands of hundreds of thousands probably of people who have gotten his little method now and use it to organize their lives and benefit from it.

Brett McKay: What I think is interesting about the Bullet Journal is the visual aspect of it. Whenever you look at them, there’s lists. People just kind of keep it to a list. But sometimes people get really fancy and they add in little pictures and drawings and they kind of look like Zibaldonis sometimes when you look at the pages.

Roland Allen: Yeah. And again, the feeling of making something with your hands, I think, is really powerful. So every time you fill up a page of a notebook like that and tick everything off and you can look back and think, yeah, I’ve really accomplished something.

Brett McKay: Have you experimented with bullet journaling in your notebooking?

Roland Allen: Not formally, but all of my notebooks are full of lists.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Roland Allen: Full of lists. So I’m a great believer in lists and therefore I’m a kind of bullet journaler. But I never had the ADHD type issues, which Ryder did.

Brett McKay: So after your deep dive into the history of the notebook, what do you think is the future of the notebook?

Roland Allen: I don’t think it’s going to go away. I think a conversation I often have is people sort of waving their iPads and saying, oh, aren’t these things going to take over? But what we’re seeing, I think, is a reaction to it. When people like you, you’re saying that Evernote or whatever doesn’t seem to work for you as well as a commonplace book does. So you’re going back to keeping a commonplace book or a written notebook. That’s quite a common experience. People are realizing now, certainly the scientists all know, the psychologists all know, that writing by hand is better in terms of learning and it’s better in terms of thinking things through than typing all the time. So I don’t think that notebooks are going to go away anytime soon. People are always experimenting as well, with these clever kinds of half notebook, half iPad things, the remarkable tablet, things like that. And they have their place, I think, particularly in the office. But I don’t see the next Leonardo da Vinci using a notable tablet.

Brett McKay: How do you combine your use of an analog notebook with digital tools?

Roland Allen: I try and go through a handwritten phase with every project. I mean, not when I’m bashing out emails for work, because I have a day job as well, but When I’m doing anything creative for work or anything kind of strategic or trying to do any kind of deep thought, then I pick up a pencil first rather than go straight to typing. And then when it’s my own creative work, anything I’m writing, I’m writing another book at the moment and thinking about the book after that. It’s all in notebooks to begin, and they’re full of spidergrams and little charts and graphs and lists and notes from what I’m reading. And I’ve become more organized over time with that. So now I keep a notebook, basically, or a series of notebooks for every chapter I’m working on. Then my notes are pretty organized, which they certainly weren’t six years ago when I started writing about notebooks. My notes from then that time are really haphazard, but now they’re very organized.

Brett McKay: Do you refer back to your notebooks from old projects at all?

Roland Allen: Ha! That’s interesting. Yeah, I did. I had a quick flick through the notebook ones once fairly recently, and they were just horrible. It was so like the ones I use, the ones I make now are so much better organized. And it’s interesting that I sort of really educated myself on the journey and I found so many examples of really good note taking which I could essentially copy. Yeah. So my old notebooks, my old writing notebooks are pretty horrible. The ones I make at the moment now I like a lot. I’m sure I’m going to hold on to them for a long time.

Brett McKay: Well, Roland, it’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Roland Allen: Well, the book is out in the States. It’s published by Biblioasis, who are a fine Canadian independent publisher. And it’s available everywhere. Your Barnes and Noble or your local independent bookstore, or even online if you’ve got no other choice. But yeah, so seek it out. The Notebook by me, Roland Allen. I’d be really grateful.

Brett McKay: And when you pick up the book at the Barnes and Noble, you got to check out the moleskin section. Get yourself a moleskin too, while you’re at it.

Roland Allen: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Roland, it’s been a great conversation. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Roland Allen: Thanks very much for having me. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Roland Allen. He’s the author of the book The Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, roland-allen.com also check out our show notes @aom.is/notebook. You can find our links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net It’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcast but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

I remember when I was a kid, and my dad was in his forties, Christmas shopping for him was tough.

By this point in his life, the guy had pretty much everything he wanted or needed.

Socket set? Had it.

Ties? He had plenty of those and didn’t want any more.

Briefcase? Acquired.

Cologne? He had his go-to drugstore cologne and bought more on an as-needed basis.

Even though he was pretty set, the one thing he still enjoyed finding under the Christmas tree was a new book.

My 12-year-old brain couldn’t comprehend it.

The one time a year you could ask for anything and all you wanted was a book?

Well, now that I’m in my forties myself, I completely understand my dad.

I don’t want or need much these days. But I always welcome a new book.

I’m sure a lot of guys can relate.

The holidays we need now aren’t those that burden us with more “stuff.” But more enticements to read? We could all use that.

If you’ve got a tough-to-shop for man in your life who’s reached the stage of dad development that my dad and I are in, below I highlight nine highly interesting, can’t-miss books to gift him (or get yourself!). While any book makes for a great gift, history books have broad appeal and tend to be a favorite genre of dads everywhere.

Merry Christmas and happy reading!

Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne

There are few books I’ve thought about more often since reading them than Empire of the Summer Moon. This gripping history charts the rise and fall of the Comanche nation through the story of its last great chief, Quanah Parker. The son of a Comanche warrior and a kidnapped white woman named Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah’s life serves as a lens into the larger clash between Native Americans and white settlers across the Texas frontier.

S.C. Gwynne doesn’t romanticize either side — he details both the Comanches’ tactical brilliance and brutal raiding culture, and the settlers’ resilience alongside their ruthless expansion. The book is particularly strong on the practical details of frontier warfare, from the Comanches’ mastery of horseback archery to the game-changing impact of the Colt revolver.

While some histories of the American West can feel either too apologetic or too triumphalist, Gwynne strikes a clear-eyed balance that makes the tragedy of this cultural collision all the more powerful. This is a great book to read in conjunction with Lonesome Dove, the greatest dad novel of all time.

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing

What makes this survival story so compelling isn’t just the unbelievable hardships Ernest Shackleton and his band of explorers endured — it’s watching leadership in action when everything goes wrong. Drawing from crew diaries, Alfred Lansing shows how Shackleton kept 28 men alive and hopeful after their ship was crushed by Antarctic ice. His decision-making under extreme pressure is a masterclass in crisis leadership: maintaining morale through months of darkness, knowing when to abandon equipment, having the gumption to risk everything on a desperate gamble for rescue. While other accounts of the expedition focus on the adventure, Lansing’s crisp prose highlights the human dynamics — how Shackleton managed personalities, delegated authority, and earned the kind of loyalty that kept every man alive through nearly two years of unimaginable adversity.

Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides

Hampton Sides is one of the best narrative historians at work today. His knack for making history read like a compelling novel is on particularly strong display in his biography Blood and Thunder. Sides uses the illiterate mountain man Kit Carson to provide a sweeping history of the American Southwest and the collision between Native American, Mexican, and American civilizations.

Carson emerges as neither hero nor villain but something more interesting: a man caught between worlds, serving as both friend and nemesis to the native peoples he understood better than most. The book’s account of the brutal Long Walk, when the Navajo were forced to march to Bosque Redondo, is unforgettable. While the scope of the book is ambitious, Sides uses his reporter’s eye for detail and gift for pacing to keep the story grounded and intimate.

The Last Lion Trilogy by William Manchester and Paul Reid

These are quite possibly the best biographies of all time. William Manchester spent decades crafting the first two volumes, covering Churchill’s youth through the 1930s with novelistic detail and psychological insight. After Manchester’s death, Paul Reid stepped in to complete the trilogy; while the third volume thus falls slightly short of the first two, all are eminently worth reading. What sets these books apart is their mastery of both the intimate and epic — you get Churchill’s wit and personal quirks alongside his towering historical impact. It’s hard to call any biography a page-turner, since you know what happens, but The Last Lion comes awfully close; the chapter on the dark days of 1940, when Britain stood alone against Hitler, is particularly gripping. Don’t let the combined 3,000 pages intimidate you; Manchester’s vivid prose makes them fly by.

Patton’s Prayer by Alex Kershaw

Old Blood and Guts — General George S. Patton — was a walking contradiction. He was a warrior poet, a mystic tactician, and a sensitive soul with brass bravado. Through newly unearthed letters and diaries, Alex Kershaw captures Patton during his months of exile in England after his infamous slapping incident, showing us a man who consulted medieval military texts, composed poetry about reincarnation, and fervently believed he was destined for battlefield glory. On the eve of his campaign to relieve soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge, Patton had a prayer composed that asked for good weather. Some saw it as a PR stunt, but Kershaw shows that it was a genuine expression of Patton’s deep, if unorthodox, faith. While other Patton books focus on his campaigns, this intimate portrait lets us see the man behind the medals — a leader who was incredibly profane, but deeply pious.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

I read this book over seventeen years ago as a law student, and it had a big impact on the ethos and mission of the Art of Manliness. It chronicles Theodore Roosevelt’s life from his asthmatic childhood through his transformation into a specimen of “strenuous living,” covering his years as a Harvard boxer, Dakota rancher, NYC police commissioner, and Rough Rider.

What sets this TR biography apart from others is Morris’ eye for detail and his skill at making you feel the raw energy of the man — you can practically hear Teddy’s high-pitched voice and see his big gleaming teeth as he bounds through the narrative.

While some biographers get caught up in hero worship, Morris gives us the full picture, warts and all: TR’s occasional pomposity, his blind spots, his sometimes manic drive. But it’s impossible not to be swept up in the sheer force of Roosevelt’s personality and his infectious enthusiasm for life. No wonder The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt won the Pulitzer.

The rest of Morris’ trilogy on TR is also worth reading, but if you’re going to get just one volume, make it this one.

In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors by Doug Stanton 

After carrying the components for the Hiroshima-bound atomic bomb, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine, setting off an epic survival struggle for the 1,000 men who went overboard, only 300 of which would survive four days of exposure, dehydration, and nightmarish shark attacks. In Harm’s Way evocatively details those personal accounts of survival while describing the historical context for the sinking of the Indianapolis, why it took four agonizing days for its survivors to be rescued, and the later controversial court-martialing of the ship’s captain, Charles B. McVay III. The greatest test of historical nonfiction is whether it can maintain a sense of tension and suspense despite the reader already knowing the outcome, and In Harm’s Way passes with flying colors. Gripping, frightening, and poignant, it’s hard to put down.

Grant by Ron Chernow

While plenty of books cover Grant’s military achievements, this 2017 biography pierces through to the enigmatic man himself. What sets it apart is Ron Chernow’s skill at revealing Grant’s complexity — the hesitant shopkeeper who became a masterful general, the supposed drunk who showed extraordinary self-discipline in wartime, the quiet soul whose determination reshaped a nation. The section on his presidency overturns decades of lazy historical consensus, showing how Grant’s pro-civil rights stance and willingness to deploy federal power against the Klan made him a more consequential leader than previously acknowledged. Chernow’s attention to detail and fluid prose bring fresh life to a figure we thought we knew.

Ten Caesars by Barry Strauss

The meme that men are always thinking about the Roman Empire may have gotten overplayed, but the sentiment still rings true. If you’re looking for a window into that fascinating period of history as offered through the lives of the men who ruled it, check out Ten Caesars. Barry Strauss’ book offers readable profiles on the lives of ten of the consequential emperors who defined and shaped the Roman Empire, from Augustus to Constantine. What makes this book particularly engaging is how Strauss draws thoughtful parallels to modern leadership challenges. Rather than getting bogged down in academic minutiae, he focuses on the human drama and practical lessons of imperial power. It’s fascinating to see how each emperor navigated the delicate balance between military might, political savvy, and public image. While some popular histories of Rome can feel either too dry or too sensationalized, Strauss hits the sweet spot between scholarly rigor and narrative flair.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

In creating the Jack Reacher character, Lee Child launched a series of books that now boast 100 million copies in print and have been turned into movies and a popular Amazon streaming series.

Today on the show, I talk to Lee about what makes Reacher so compelling and much more. We first discuss how Lee didn’t get started with writing until he was almost forty, and what prompted him to change careers. We then unpack the Reacher character, discussing the ancient, archetypal roots of this vigilante, drifter detective, what he has in common with the knight errant, and the enduring appeal of the lone wolf. We also talk about Lee’s writing process, why midlife is the best time to write, and why, after writing more than two dozen Reacher novels, he’s chosen to hand off the series to his brother and fellow writer, Andrew.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• The latest Reacher novel: In Too Deep
• The Reacher streaming series 
• Jack Reacher website

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Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. In creating the Jack Reacher character, Lee Child launched a series of books that now boast 100 million copies in print and have been turned to movies and a popular Amazon streaming series. Today in the show, I talk to Lee about what makes Reacher so compelling and much more. We first discuss why Lee didn’t get started with writing til he’s almost 40 and what prompted him to change careers. We then unpack the Reacher character, discuss the ancient archetypal roots of this vigilante-drifter detective, what he has in common with the knight errant, and the enduring appeal of the lone wolf. We also talk about Lee’s writing process, why mid-life’s the best time to write, and Why, after writing more than two dozen Reacher novels, he’s chosen to hand off the series to his brother and fellow writer, Andrew. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/reacher.

Alright, Lee Child, welcome to the show.

Lee Child: Thank you. Great to be here.

Brett McKay: So you are an international best-selling author, who has created one of the great detective characters in English literature, Jack Reacher. I’m sure a lot of our listeners are fans of your work. They’ve read the books. They’ve maybe even watched these series on Amazon. And I know my dad, Tom McKay, a huge fan of your work. And I hope today in this conversation, we can maybe get to the bottom of why you think Reacher has such a broad appeal. But before we do, before we get to the Reacher character, let’s talk about your background. I’m sure a lot of people don’t realize you didn’t start your writing career until midlife. In fact, a job layoff started your writing career. So how did a layoff from a television network lead you to start writing?

Lee Child: It was really a desperation move in as much as I’d had this intense almost 20 years in TV in a very specialized role in the British Commercial Network, the rival to the BBC. It was a 14-station network, but coordinated and worked together. My job was like an air traffic controller, essentially, to keep the whole broadcast going. There were five of us. We rotated through 24/7 duties. And then it was a complicated job. And back in the day, we had a good union, and we made decent money. And then in the 1990s, we had that thing where shareholder value was suddenly just a burden cost, cutting supporting jobs and getting cheaper people. So all of us, old, expensive veterans, were laid off. I was 39, very nearly 40 years old. And it seemed to me to try and stay in TV would be a very negative experience, because it was clearly on a downward spiral, the fund was gone, the luxury of doing your job properly was gone, and so it was the question of what else? And the problem was, there was nothing else that I was qualified for. I was hyper-qualified for the thing I just got thrown out of and really nothing else.

So I panicked a little bit, and then, I said, “No. Wait a minute. Just take one step back. And what is it fundamentally that you’ve been doing?” And fundamentally, what I’d been doing, obviously, was entertaining an audience, but beyond that, knowing what the audience wanted, having some kind of sense of how they were gonna react. So it seemed to me, I’ll just stay in something that has an audience. And then quite independently of all of that, I had been a reader all my life, just fantastically, enthusiastic reader, just reading all the time, loving it, but strangely, never really thinking, “Where do these books come from?” I’d never really inquired about that. To me, they just existed, sitting there to be consumed.

And I put two and two together. I thought, “Well, look, you love books. You’ve read literally tens of thousands. Why don’t you try writing one? That is, fundamentally, the same proposition. I think modern TV movies, modern entertainment, we all swim in the same river. A book is not that different from a TV show.” So I thought, “I’ll try that.” And I was really wanting to be my own boss. After that very negative corporate experience, I wanted to be my own boss. And writing is something that is entirely down to you.

It’s difficult in TV. If you have a big hit in TV, it’s not really to your credit because there were 100 other people working on it. If it’s a total failure, it’s not really your fault, because there were 100 other people working on it. Whereas writing, yeah, of course, there are editors, there are publicists, there are booksellers, and so on, but fundamentally, this is one-on-one, the author to the reader. It’s a one-on-one communication. It is totally down to you. If it fails, yes, it is totally your fault. If it succeeds, yes, you can take the credit for it. So I thought, “Let’s give it a try. See what happens.” And here we are all these years later.

Brett McKay: You said you read a lot. Was there a genre that you liked to read, or did you just read whatever?

Lee Child: I’d started out… And in principle, I read whatever. Anything at all, that… Just looking around my room here, I’ve got a big stack of books to be read. I got one on the psychology of music. There’s one about fentanyl. There’s… Anything and everything, I’ll read. But as a reader, yeah, you do get in touch with what turns you on personally. And I migrated to the crime and thriller genre. That was the thing that I most enjoyed reading.

Brett McKay: Was there a particular author you enjoyed?

Lee Child: Oh, there were a lot. I’m not one of these pretentious guys who says that, “When I was 7 years old, I was reading Tolstoy or something.” I was reading all the usual kids stuff, and then all the usual thrillers. Your dad has, maybe, got them on the bookshelf. And so I would say there was an English kids author called Enid Blyton. Like everybody, I started out with that and then I migrated… My first real love was a Scottish thriller writer called Alistair MacLean, and that cemented my feel. Yeah, I wanna write adventure stories, I wanna write thrillers, crime stories, things of that nature.

Brett McKay: How did your experience in visual story-telling shape your writing style? Because of the things I love about your writing style is that it’s Spartan. It’s sparse. But it’s really punchy, and it just… It flows.

Lee Child: Yeah, that’s the thing that I felt. There is very little that you can take from TV to writing, because they are fundamentally very different. In as much as TV, the viewer just sits there and it comes at them. It washes over them. With writing, it’s gotta be interrogated by the reader. The book is passive. The book is doing nothing. It’s just sitting there with strange black marks on white paper, and it is the reader’s brain that creates the story inside the reader’s head. So there’s not that much you can transfer directly, but what you do transfer is a very specific understanding. This is not about you. This is about the audience. It doesn’t matter if you’re a cool guy. It doesn’t matter if you smoke French cigarettes and wear a black leather jacket. It’s not about you. “Is the audience having a good time?” That is the only question. And that part, I transferred like stock and barrel. That is really important.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about the Jack Reacher, ’cause he’s got a lot of fans. And it’s a very wide-ranging fan base. You’ve got, men in their ’70s, like my dad, and then there’s also women who are big fans of Jack Reacher. How did you come up with the Jack Reacher character?

Lee Child: Well, it was a kinda two-stage thing. Vaguely, in principle, what I wanted to do was be a success, because I was out of work and I was broke. So this was not a kinda hobby, this was not a kinda like to do it sort of thing, it had to work. So part of it was about a real consciousness that this had to be popular, but completely contradictory to that was what I’d learned in the entertainment business up to that point, which is that you cannot plan anything like that. It is not possible to plan a major popular success, because if you do, you just end up with a limp car body thing that is basically a shopping list of everything that you think you should do.

So I knew enough to know that it was gonna be kind of fortuitous or accidental. So I knew I had to metaphorically close my eyes and just write and just see what came out. And so Reacher was something that just came out. And I didn’t wanna think about it very much. I didn’t wanna interrogate it and think, “Okay, why is this work? And how can I improve it for Book two? How can I improve it for Book three?” I wanted to not burst the bubble. I didn’t wanna look at it that closely, but then much later when I felt safe and secure about it, I could look back. And what makes Reacher popular, I think, is that he represents… Clearly represents something that has always been with us as humans.

You were kind enough to say I invented this character. Well, did I? I think, actually, Reacher is a character that has always existed, going back through the history of storytelling, possibly even thousands of years, the idea of the mysterious stranger who shows up and solves your problem and then rides off into the sunset. That character has been around really forever. All the way back through all our recorded narrative, there’s always have been a character like that. And so I think Reacher is just the modern iteration of that. And you gotta ask yourself, “Why has this character been invented over and over again?” And the only answer to that is because people crave such a person.

They want such a person. We’ve all got problems. Hopefully, they’re only trivial. Some people have real serious problems. Wouldn’t it be great if one night there’s a tap at the door and there’s a strong, silent guy there who fixes your problem, chips his cap and moves on? We crave that. We fantasize about it. And so that’s why people love reading about it. They either wanna know that character, or they wanna be that character.

Brett McKay: Yeah. What’s interesting is that there’s this idea out there that the kind of hero people want is someone who’s broken. They want a vulnerable hero. Reacher is the opposite of that, but he’s still really compelling. Why do you think that is?

Lee Child: Yeah, that is such a great question, because people want an interesting character, people want a memorable character, and there are ways to achieve that. And certainly, yeah, if you go back to, let’s say, Raymond Chandler writing about Philip Marlowe, there is an alienated man, a lonely man, somewhat dysfunctional, we might say by, modern standards, and that was a great paradigm. And then many, many years later, let’s say, there’s James Lee Burke, writes Dave Robicheaux, who was a copper, recovering alcoholic, absolutely tormented by his demons.

That was great. But that was the first time we’d seen that particular trope. And the problem with writing is that authors tend to copy what’s already been done. And in order to stand out, they inflate it. They make it worse. So instead of just an alcoholic cop fighting his demons, we’ve got a divorced alcoholic cop, and then a divorced alcoholic cop, who’s teenage daughter hates him, and then the divorce alcoholic copper’s teenage daughter hates him, accidentally shoots at a fleeing shadow in the dark, and it turns out to be a 12-year-old boy so that life is a tragedy now, and they go and live in the woods by themselves, with a metaphorical, or sometimes literal bullet lodge next to their heart, and the relentless inflation makes that character miserable.

And my view was, people don’t really wanna read about miserable characters. They wanna read about interesting characters. So how do you make somebody interesting without giving them all these problems? And I think what happens with Reacher is that he is profoundly eccentric in all of his lifestyle choices, but the thing is, he does not know that. He thinks he’s perfectly normal. He has none of that navel-gazing going on. He is who he is, and it is the reader who makes up their mind about what he’s like. And that is super important, that an author cannot force the reader to come to a certain conclusion. You cannot make anybody like your character. All you can do is present them in an authentic way and hope for the best. And the more that you try to make a reader like your character, the more embarrassing it gets.

Brett McKay: So talking about those things that make Reacher interesting. First off, he’s larger than life, literally. He’s 6’4″, 250 pounds, just a monster. And what I love about him too, is sometimes there’s that idea like, “Oh, the hero is not sure about his strength of whether he can overcome these bad guys.” Now, Reacher can always take care of the problem. And he doesn’t have a cell phone, and he thinks that’s just normal, to not have a cell phone. And his clothes. He just buys cheap clothes at Academy and jeans and t-shirts, and then doesn’t really carry a wardrobe with him.

Lee Child: Yeah. All of that stuff. Part of that was a reaction against what else was being done. It fit very neatly for me, because like I say, I needed this to be a success, and so why go head-to-head with what other people are doing already so well? And if you looked at every other series, really ever, they’re fundamentally a soap opera, and I say that with the greatest respect. I’m not being disparaging about soap opera at all. It’s an incredibly difficult genre to do. It is incredibly powerful in terms of the narrative engine. Having worked in TV, we all depend on soap operas. They’re fantastic.

But I didn’t want to write one in competition with everybody else who was doing it so well. Everybody else, the hero has got superiors, has got colleagues, juniors, neighbors, they have a house, they have maybe a favorite bar, they have a dog or whatever. I didn’t wanna do that. I thought, “Let’s be different.” So it was a really epic avoidance for me that the idea of the knight errant, the mysterious stranger. He doesn’t have any of that stuff. That’s the whole point of that character. He’s completely mysterious and unexplained. So I felt I could do a different lane, or a different channel, that nobody else is doing.

And so that explained it to a large extent. I just wanted Reacher to be distinctive. And the rest of it was based on logical thoughts of my own. “If I was living like that, what would I do about clothes? Would I wanna carry a backpack around with me all the time, or would I just buy some old stuff at Goodwill every few days and junk the previous stuff and just move through life?” That seemed logical to me. And clearly, it is logical. That’s the way you gotta do it.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned Reacher’s kind of like the knight errant. Did the stories of the knight, like the Arthurian tales, did that… Was that in there? It sounds like you weren’t consciously pulling on that. It was there in your subconscious, ’cause you read these stories as a boy and as a young man, and they just came out in Reacher. Knights had this idea of nobleness. How do you think Reacher has a sense of nobleness?

Lee Child: That’s another good question. Yeah, the idea of the knight errant is that he must have been a knight in the first place. The classic Arthurian tales, he is… Sir. Lancelot, for instance, banished from the court for some indiscretion and sentenced to wander the land, doing good deeds. And that myth replicates everywhere. The Ronin myth in Japan. A samurai who’s been disowned by his master and sentenced to wander the land. It’s a perpetual part of human storytelling. So that’s why it seemed to work well enough that he can be… He needs to be completely unattached. He happens to other people.

And you can trace it right back. A lot of people in America say, “This is really a Western.” It’s like Shane or any Zane Grey story, where you’ve typically got a very isolated homestead and all the men are away on a cattle drive and there’s something going really bad. And at the very last minute, the mysterious rider comes in off the range, and in exchange for a woman-cooked meal, he will unsheathe his rifle, take care of the problems, and then he moves on. But that was not invented by Zane Grey or the Westerns, that is an import from medieval Europe, where the Black Forest was this immense uncharted waste, and a band of pilgrims would be in terrible trouble, and then a mysterious knight rides out of the trees and solves the problem.

This same story has reoccurred over and over again. So it’s really about the community in trouble. Reacher happens to them. It’s not that the community happens to Reacher.

Brett McKay: So Reacher is a lone wolf. And the idea of the lone wolf often gets criticized. We’ve had plenty of podcast episodes where the guests have criticized it. And I understand the criticism. Relationships have been shown to be central to mental and physical health. But I still find the idea of the lone wolf viscerally appealing. And I imagine a lot of other people do. What do you think the appeal is?

Lee Child: Well, I think first of all, Reacher acknowledges that central conundrum there. Yeah, we do. We do crave relationships. We need them for the reasons that you just mentioned. And Reacher does too. The thing about Reacher, he’s constantly balanced between really liking his solitude and also really being worried that he’s lonely. So there’s an acknowledgement of that. But I think the true appeal for Reacher is that people can imagine being him. And so many people, men and women alike, are bogged down with responsibilities and chores and duties. And their week is just an endless slog of working their job, looking after the home, paying the bills, paying the mortgage. All of these things that tie them down. And as a fantasy, they love to, for a day or two while they’re reading a book, they love to live in Reacher’s head. None of those responsibilities, none of those burdens.

If you’re not having a good time, you just move on. You’ll be somewhere else tomorrow. And I think that is a huge fantasy appeal for a lot of people.

Brett McKay: And it sounds like too, you’ve been playing out this tension between connection and autonomy. Like you mentioned earlier, the reason why you went into writing was you wanted to be your own boss. You kind of wanted to be a lone wolf.

Lee Child: I did, and I put a line in the first book. Reacher says it, but it’s really me saying it. He says, I tried it their way, now I’m gonna try it my way.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so I do think there’s something that we shouldn’t just dismiss the lone wolf completely. I think the fact that it holds such an appeal tells us something. Like we shouldn’t literally be lone wolves, but we can adopt some of that ethos, keep part of ourselves that’s comfortable with solitude and self-sufficiency. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Another idea that gets criticized quite a bit is this idea of revenge. And it seems like a lot of Reacher’s missions are ones of revenge. People say we should rise above the need for revenge and that just poisons you. But do you think revenge can be something healthy? What do you think Reacher can teach us about that?

Lee Child: Yeah, it’s a great issue because revenge is fundamentally negative even though it feels great at the time. But the thing about Reacher is he’s not doing it for himself. It’s not a question of somebody has hurt him or insulted him and he’s gonna get revenge on them for that. It’s always a third-party issue. And that takes us back to the Night Heron. It takes us to a kind of noblesse oblige that if you can do something for somebody, you really ought to. From he who has to he who needs. And I think that takes it out of the revenge track just enough to make it super satisfying.

And then, of course, the whole business of fiction is very mysterious in that sense because generally speaking, book readers are the more civilized amongst us, the more thoughtful, the more informed. And of course they understand that you can’t have a guy who just walks into town and starts murdering people like Reacher does. I saw a fantastic online comment once that says the Jack Reacher series, the only series where the detective commits more crimes than he solves. And people understand that’s completely unacceptable. That is not how we should live.

These are not textbooks for how to live. But it is some corner in the back of their brain, the reader finds it so satisfying just to see a bad guy get a punch in the face as opposed to a legal arrest and a trial with rights and with lawyers and with procedure and all that stuff. They know they need that in real life. They want that in real life, of course they do. But it is so satisfying, so consoling just to see brutal justice meted out in the moment. So people lap it up. Like I’m sure your dad, who enjoys the books, loves those scenes, but there’s no way he thinks that’s how society should run. It’s like an escape valve.

Brett McKay: Yeah, no, my dad was in law enforcement. That was his career.

Lee Child: There you go.

Brett McKay: He was a federal game warden. So yeah, he knew the procedures. He respected the rule of law. But I think, yeah, I think he does. It’s fantasy.

Lee Child: It is fantasy, but then a lot of crime fiction is fantasy because the Reacher universe, people might say, it’s fundamentally unrealistic. But then so is all crime fiction, to be honest, because what happens even in a really grounded, so-called realistic type of crime fiction book, you will have a trace of DNA. There’s a droplet of blood. So they rush it to the lab and three hours later they get, yes, this guy. That doesn’t happen. It’s three or four months, possibly even longer if the lab is all backed up. In real life, things take forever. And then probably there’ll be some kind of miserable, unsatisfying outcome to it. There’s a technicality. The guy gets off. People are frustrated by that. And so fiction is to give people what they don’t get in real life. And so that instant visceral type of satisfaction, seeing a bad guy get his just desserts is something that we secretly love, but we’re civilized enough to know that it can’t be real.

Brett McKay: How would you describe Reacher’s moral code? ‘Cause he… Like you said, he has this idea of revenge, but it’s for a third party. But why does he get involved in stuff that doesn’t really have to?

Lee Child: Because he gets annoyed. There are certain things that annoy him. And there’s a line in one of the other books where there’s a flashback to when he’s in the army and one of his friends is asking him, why did you choose the military police? Reacher’s a West Point graduate. He could have done pretty much whatever he wanted. His friend says, why didn’t you go to special forces? Why didn’t you go to the armored divisions? And Reacher says something anodyne like, oh, I wanna take care of the little guy. And his friend says, really, you care about the little guy? And Reacher says, with total honesty, Reacher says, no, I don’t really care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug guys who think they can get away with something. And so it’s not a pure motivation on Reacher’s part.

His moral code is firm, it’s solid. He basically has a heart of gold. But he’s not just a do-gooder. He is annoyed at certain injustices and he will stop at nothing. Not to put him right, because he knows he can’t put everything right, but just to punish one big smug guy who thinks he’s getting away with something, that’s what Reacher lives for.

Brett McKay: And I’m sure that’s another reason why people find the character appealing. ‘Cause I’m sure we, all of us have big smug guys in our lives that we’d love to bring down a notch.

Lee Child: I’m sure we’ve all got like 10. That’s what I say at a book event. I say, I look out at the crowd who are all book people and I say, you’re lovely, civilized people, but I guarantee every one of you has got a list of 10 people you would cheerfully shoot in the head. And everybody agrees, they can’t deny that.

Brett McKay: You’re British, but you’ve made Reacher an American and set most of his books in the United States. Is there something about America and the American character that allows you to do different things with Reacher that you couldn’t do if he was British?

Lee Child: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s not so much character, although that is distinctive, but it’s the geography. The idea of a nation that inhabits a giant continent, some of which is very densely populated and some of which is virtually uninhabited. And so it is plausible to have secret things going on in a remote town where, you know what it’s like out West where it could be 50 miles or 100 miles before the nearest police department. It is absolutely plausible that you can have secret locations. Whereas in Britain, the dynamic is totally different. It’s crime fiction there tends to be very internal, very psychological, because there is not the physical space or the physical separation between people. The landscape is not the same. Like my second book, Reacher intervenes in a kidnap and gets thrown in a van with the kidnapped victim and they’re driven 2000 miles to a remote Rocky Mountain hideout, which is obviously possible in the US.

But if I had been kidnapped where I lived in England and driven 2000 miles, I’d be in the Sahara desert by that point. So it’s about the scope, the big skies, the big landscapes, the possibility that a wandering man can come across an isolated situation where something bad is happening. That is plausible in America. It’s really not plausible anywhere else.

Brett McKay: You said earlier that an author can’t force people to like a character. Like they have to see what he’s like and then make up their own minds. Do you like Reacher as a person, as a character?

Lee Child: That’s a great question too, because I think the way fiction works with a character-based series is the author needs to like the character less than the reader is gonna like him. The author has got to maintain that critical stance, that slight detachment, so that the character will always appear authentic, warts and all, the bad parts as well as the good parts, an honest portrayal. And if you start to like your character too much, then that falls apart and it becomes, you protect the character. You only show the good parts. It all becomes very idealized and very sugary. And so I worked very hard to like Reacher less than you’re gonna like him. And that’s what keeps him vivid, I think.

Brett McKay: So you’ve written, like you’re about to come out with the latest Reacher novel. There’s like 28 you’re coming up on?

Lee Child: Yeah, is it 28 or is it 29? I’ve lost track. It’s somewhere up there, yeah.

Brett McKay: You’ve written a lot. I’m curious, what’s your writing process like?

Lee Child: It is literally chaotic, other than I always start on the same day, which is the 1st of September. And that was a practical decision because if you’re gonna publish a book a year, you’ve got to write a book a year. And so you’ve got to have some shape and structure to your year. So I would always start on the anniversary of when I started the first book. It seemed not only logical, but also somewhat sentimental. So I would always start on the same day, but with really no firm idea. I would often have a feeling about the temperature or the landscape. Is it a cold, hard book? Is it a hot, sweaty book? I would have that kind of basic idea, but other than that, nothing at all. And so it was a question of just, you sit down on the 1st of September, you write the opening paragraph, you sit back and you think, okay, that’s pretty good. Now what about the 2nd paragraph? And then it carries on like that through the whole book, just inventing it as I go along, which made it, it feels slow day to day.

My word production per day is often less than other writers, but I only do it once. They’ve planned this beforehand. They’ve written an outline. They’ve at least jotted notes on index cards so that they can shuffle around. I don’t do any of that. I just make it up on the spot. So all the thought and all the research is distributed daily rather than being done in a chunk in advance. So overall, I think it’s as efficient as any other system. And for me, it brings total spontaneity. What I want is always based on how I feel as a reader. And what I want is the reader to have that unique sensation that I think we’ve all had from time to time where you’re into a really great book and you’re loving it. And then for some reason, dinner is ready or a visitor comes, you’ve got to stop and you’ve got to put the book down.

And that gives you a kind of flavor of annoyance that you get nowhere else. And so I wanted to feel that as a writer. And the only way you can do that is by not having a plan. I would sit down just desperate to know what was gonna happen. Same as if I was reading it. And I think that really helps, certainly helps my process. I think it helps the quality of the book. And the first time I knew this was gonna work for me was in the first book, I’d written some of it and I was looking forward to writing the scene that I had in mind next. I was gonna do that in the morning. But my wife said, no, we’ve got to go to the store and do this and that. And I remember feeling really annoyed that I couldn’t sit and write that scene in exactly the same way as I would have felt annoyed if I couldn’t sit and read that scene. I thought, yeah, this could work.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we had Beau L’Amour on the podcast a while back ago. He’s the son of Louis L’Amour, famous Western writer. And he said his dad had a similar writing process. It was all just from his subconscious. He just started writing and he just wanted to see where the story went. And it sounds like you have a similar process.

Lee Child: Yeah, very similar. And that kind of relates back to something you said at the very beginning about me starting in midlife. I was 39, almost 40 when I first started that book. And a lot of writers do that. Writing, a successful writing career is almost always a second phase career because it is good to wait till you’re older. Writing is wonderful from that point of view. It’s not only something that you can do when you get older. It’s something that you should do when you get older because by the time you’re 40, you’ve got almost 40 years of reading. You’ve got almost 40 years of experience of meeting people. Your first career, whatever it was, has had all kinds of ins and outs and problems and highs and lows that teaches you something so that by the time you are in the middle of your life, you’re ready. You’ve got gas in the tank. You’ve got ideas stored up.

You’re still young enough to have the energy and stamina to deal with it, but you’ve got something in your head. I think it’s really difficult to write when you’re young. I get asked to go talk to school students or college students and it’s a miserable experience. What can you say to them? All you can really say honestly is don’t do it now. Read for the next 20 years and then do it.

Brett McKay: You said you do some research, but it’s like on the spot. Like you don’t research and then write. When you do research, what’s your research process like?

Lee Child: Well, it’s for small details that need to be right. Like the number of bullets in a gun or, the barrel length of a gun or this or that or what car you could use or the name of a helicopter. And my process is so linear. I remember one book where the first sentence was, the man was named Calvin Franz and the helicopter was a… And I had to stop there. After just a few words of the book, I couldn’t just leave it and go back to it later. I have to know in a linear fashion. So I had to actually go out to the store and buy a book about helicopters and select one and put the correct model number in that sentence. So yeah, research for me is small things like that, but the larger issues, I don’t think you can research, not when you’re on a book a year schedule, because if you think, okay, I’m gonna do this research for this year’s book, that research is gonna be too fresh, not digested.

It needs to percolate. You need to know which parts of it are important and which parts are not. And so for the larger issues, I always depend on what I already know, what I read years ago sometimes, what I experienced two years ago. The big things are always already settled and it’s only the minor details that need checking. And that is, I mean, I’m the perfect example of somebody who has bridged the analog and the digital era. I would do it with gun catalogs, or as I say, a helicopter book or something of that nature. Now, of course, and I was a pretty late adopter, but now it’s mostly internet-based.

Brett McKay: Do you do any revisions on your work?

Lee Child: Sort of, yeah, I mean I do, I write all day and then the beginning of the next day I check what I wrote the previous day and I will smooth it out if necessary, I’ll add a comma, I’ll change a word and then I’ll plow on forward and repeat the same process the following morning. So it’s a constant kind of churning aspect so that every single bit of it has been re-read and smoothed and corrected at least once in a forward-moving momentum. But then when I reach the end, that is the end. It is a strange thing in my head, I mean I’m completely normal, I’m a completely rational person, but while I’m writing the book it’s as if this is really happening for real and I never change anything because that would seem to me dishonest. The editor will say to me, wouldn’t it be better if this happened after that? And I’ll say probably, but it didn’t. It’s real at the time I’m writing it and so to massage it later seems to be cheating to me.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so it sounds like you’re doing like some grammatical stuff, but you’re not making major edits. Once you’re done with the book, you’re done with it. That is not like F. Scott Fitzgerald who was massaging The Great Gatsby, even after it got published, he was still editing the thing.

Lee Child: Sure, and you look at writers and you figure out why they’re doing that. And really, the real reason for endless editing and worrying about it is a kind of fear of letting it out into the world, fear of people’s reactions to it. And so you find ways to procrastinate and delay that. You think you’re polishing it, but what you’re actually doing is you’re showing that you are afraid of the reaction to it. And I can understand that completely. It is a huge thing. A book is so personal. It is your mind just spilled out onto that paper. It is very much who you are that specific year that you wrote it. It’s like a brutal psychological X-ray and you’re gonna show that to the world. It is a little intimidating, but you’ve just got to, as soon as I’m done, I kind of sense when the book is finished. I remember one book sitting there thinking, this is nearly done, another chapter will do it.

And then I suddenly realized, no, the book is done right now. Right where you are is the end of the book. And so I sent it off without giving it another thought because you can end up paralyzing yourself if you go over and over it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You got to be like Reacher, no navel gazing, just move on.

Lee Child: Exactly. Yeah. Just do it once and do it right. That is Reacher’s motto.

Brett McKay: So you are transitioning Jack Reacher to your brother, Andrew, the transition of a beloved character to a new author is rare in literature. Why did you think the time was right to hand off Reacher?

Lee Child: Well, because going back to my life as a reader, I would get into those series, starting as a kid, continuing as a young person. And I just loved that feeling of you thoroughly enjoyed a book and you knew there were 10 more or 20 more. That was such a gift. It was such a valuable feeling. And I would rush to the library and I would start devouring the series one after the other. And too many series got sagged after a while. You could sense the author getting lazy or running out of energy or running out of gas and beginning to phone it in. It happened time after time. And as a young naive reader, I felt so betrayed by that. Something that I had loved before was now no good. And I promised myself I would never do that. If I ever felt I was running out of gas or running out of energy, I would stop before I found it in. Because I love my readers and I don’t want to give them a substandard product. Now I was probably a little hyper vigilant about it, but it meant a lot to me.

Also what meant a lot to me was as a young person, as a teenager, as a young adult, I hated the way that old geezers just hung on forever. They would not get off the stage. They would not leave room for anybody else. And I thought on a bound to stick to those two feelings, never phone it in and get off the stage, let somebody new take over. And so I felt obliged in a way, morally obliged to stick to those promises I’d made to myself. So I did feel myself running out of energy, running out of gas. I’d been doing it for a quarter century and I felt it was time to bow out. And the idea of my brother taking it over did not occur to me at first. I thought I’ve just got to stop, think of a satisfying final plot and just stop it right there. But I felt people would be so upset to miss Reacher. They’d grown to love him. They’d been so nice about him.

I felt it would be gratuitously cruel just to take it away. And so I started developing these fantasies about, wouldn’t it be great, go down to the crossroads at midnight and sell my soul to the devil in exchange for a potion that would make me 15 years younger, full of the old energy, the old stamina that I used to have. And of course, that’s a fantasy. There are no magic potions like that. But then I suddenly realized, wait a minute, you idiot, you know yourself 15 years younger with all the energy and the stamina, which is my younger brother, who is a lot younger than me, almost 15 years younger. And he was a writer. So I said, would you like to continue it? And to be honest, I thought he’d say no, because he’s a proud, stubborn boy who had his own thing going. I thought he’d want to continue with his own thing. But he’s been involved with Reacher from the beginning.

Lee Child: He was the first person that ever read Reacher, because he was the only person I knew who could give me an informed opinion. He’s a thriller reader, very much in the same genre as me. So I showed him the very first manuscript in pencil and basically asked him, is this any good? Should I continue? And he happily said, yeah. So he’s known the series since day zero, so that there was no learning curve for him. He just stepped right in.

Brett McKay: What do you think is in store for Reacher in the future now that your brother Andrew is taking the baton?

Lee Child: Well, I mean, Andrew’s slightly more of a planner than I am, but I’ve encouraged him just to busk it, just see what happens, just start each book, see what happens. And so neither he nor I have any idea what’s going to happen to Reacher. I’m sure every year he will get into some scrape and he’ll sort it out. And hopefully it’ll last for a good long time.

Brett McKay: And so this next book that’s coming out, In Too Deep, did you both collaborate on it?

Lee Child: No, this is the first one that is entirely his. We collaborated on the last four as a sort of transition period. And now he’s striking out on his own with In Too Deep. And so I was, funnily enough, it was like that feeling a quarter century ago when he read my manuscript. I read his manuscript with the same kind of trepidatious feeling. What was I going to think of it? And it’s actually a great book. It’s a great Reacher book. He’s really nailed it. He’s got exactly the right start to it. The development is just improvised and random, just like I would have done it. And it reads really well. So I’m not only proud of him, but also very happy that the series is in good hands.

Brett McKay: What was that like reading a book that’s based on a character that you created, but you’re going into it like the readers that have been reading your book for the past quarter of a century?

Lee Child: Yeah, I’m going into it like the consumer. It’s like me watching the movie or me watching the TV series. This is something somebody else has done with my character. But fundamentally, it’s a very satisfying feeling because people find it as if it’s difficult. They say, how is it giving your character away? And my answer to that is, that’s the whole point of writing fiction. You’re desperate to give your character away, first and foremost, to the reader. The reader owns the character. Soon as a reader reads the book and enjoys it, they own the story. They own the character. The whole point of writing is to let the ownership of the character migrate outward, to belong to other people. So it wasn’t difficult to give it to the movies or give it to TV or to give it to Andrew. It kind of feels perfect. This is what it’s all about.

Brett McKay: Well, Lee Child, this has been a great conversation. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Lee Child: Really, my pleasure, Brett. It’s great to be with you.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Lee Child. He’s the author of the Jack Reacher series. You can find more information about this series at jackreacher.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/reacher, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give viewing up a podcast for Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would be something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to AOM Podcasts to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

With over 300 million books sold, Louis L’Amour is one of the bestselling authors of all time. All 120 of his books remain in print. But the greatest story L’Amour ever penned was his own. He spent the early part of his life traveling in a circus, working as a lumberjack and miner, circling the world as a seaman, winning over 50 fights as a professional boxer, and serving in WWII.

Today on the show, I talk about both the personal and professional aspects of Louis’ life with his son, Beau L’Amour. We discuss some of Louis’ adventures and the autodidactic education he gave himself by way of a voracious reading habit. We then turn to how Louis got started as a writer and how he cut his teeth writing for pulp magazines before breaking through as a Western novelist and becoming a blockbuster success in his sixties.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Louis L’Amour works mentioned in the show:
  • Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir
  • Hondo
  • Yondering
  • No Traveller Returns
  • The Walking Drum
  • Last of the Breed
  • Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures, Volume 1 and Volume 2
• “Holding Her Down” by Jack London
• AoM Article: How and Why to Become a Lifelong Learner
• AoM Article: The Libraries of Famous Men — Louis L’Amour

Connect With Beau L’Amour

• The Louis L’Amour website
• Beau’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. With over 300 million books sold, Louis L’Amour is one of the best-selling authors of all time. All 120 of his books remain in print, but the greatest story L’Amour ever penned was his own. He spent the early part of his life traveling in a circus, working as a lumberjack and miner, circling the world as a seaman, winning over 50 fights as a professional boxer and serving in World War II. Today on the show, I talk about both the personal and professional aspects of Louis’ life with his son, Beau L’Amour. We discuss some of Louis’ adventures and the autodidactic education he gave himself by way of a voracious reading habit. We then turn to how Louis got started as a writer, and how he cut his teeth writing for Pulp magazines before breaking through as a Western novelist and becoming a blockbuster success in the ’60s.

After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/l’amour.

Alright, Beau L’Amour, welcome to the show.

Beau L’Amour: Thank you very much.

Brett McKay: So you are the son of the famous Western author, Louis L’Amour and we’re gonna find out he was more than just a Western author today in this conversation. I know a lot of our listeners are familiar with your dad and his prodigious work, but for those who aren’t familiar with Louis L’Amour can you give us a thumbnail sketch of his career? What was he famous for and how many books did he publish?

Beau L’Amour: Sure. Dad was one of the bestselling authors of the 20th century. He’s wrote maybe 200, 250 short stories, novels, over till today, we’ve sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 330 million copies.

Brett McKay: Wow.

Beau L’Amour: We’ve never had a title go out of print, that’s actually even more impressive.

Brett McKay: That is.

Beau L’Amour: And dad’s still in probably the top 50 authors in the world when it comes to yearly sales.

Brett McKay: That’s impressive. And he was mostly famous for his Westerns.

Beau L’Amour: That is correct. Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then I think some people might… Some of his work, his stories and novels, they got turned into TV shows and movies, correct?

Beau L’Amour: About 40 of them, if you include all the TV adaptations. Dad, he did a lot of business in early television in the 1950s and ’60s, so he sold a lot of stories as episodes to Tales of Wells Fargo and a really, really, really early TV series called Cowboy G-Men, if you can believe that, was really one of the first television series that was ever produced.

Brett McKay: And one Western that people probably seen, it’s a John Wayne one, Hondo.

Beau L’Amour: Yes.

Brett McKay: That was based off of a short story by your dad, correct?

Beau L’Amour: That was, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When did you realize growing up that your dad was a famous bestselling author?

Beau L’Amour: He wasn’t really famous when I was a kid, so dad really started to hit in the mid 1970s, like the big bestseller kind of things, autograph lines around the block and that kind of thing. And so when I was a child, when I was a very young teenager he was still kind of struggling. And we were… We always lived comfortably, but he had to write three or four books a year to let us do that. And by the mid 1970s, the number of backlist titles, the number of titles that were still in print and still in distribution kind of reached critical mass. And every time he had a new book come out, it boosted sales on everything in his backlist. And so there was… Since the backlist was just bigger and bigger and bigger and nothing was going out of print, the money turned up, the sales turned up and it became quite a thing, but he was in his 60s, late 60s by that time.

Brett McKay: Well, and he had been writing a long time too, like since the ’30s.

Beau L’Amour: Yes, yes.

Brett McKay: So that’s a great example of sometimes a career success, it takes a long time to develop, it’s not gonna happen overnight. He was not an overnight success.

Beau L’Amour: He was not an overnight success, not at all.

Brett McKay: So your dad, he wrote incredible stories, but I think his greatest story was probably the life he himself lived and he tells this story in his memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, it’s one of my favorite books. ‘Cause every time I read it, I just get super inspired, I also feel convicted, I’m like, “What am I doing with my life? I’m wasting it. I need to be more like Louis.” So let’s talk about your dad’s life ’cause it’s really fascinating and I wanna offer kind of a thumbnail sketch of his early adventures. So your dad was born in North Dakota in 1908, his family faced some financial difficulties starting in the 1920s, so they pulled up shop and went on this eight year journey, crisscrossing America, looking for work and trying to start a new life. And during that time, Louis, like he was only 14 or 15 years old, he got separated from his family somehow. There was some kind of miscommunication about where he needed to be.

So he was looking for them, but he was also working, he skinned cattle, he bailed hay, joined a circus, he rode the rails a bit as a hobo and worked in some mines and then he even went out to sea as a merchant seaman. And he was also doing some boxing during this time.

Beau L’Amour: He started boxing back in North Dakota.

Brett McKay: Okay.

Beau L’Amour: So his older brothers were pretty good boxers, he had friends that introduced him to a couple of professional boxers. And so as a kid, he was a pretty good amateur fighter, I don’t know when his first professional fight was. I know a very, very early professional fight was when he and his parents and adopted brother got to New Mexico they were out of gas money and he and John, his adopted brother, both went on the ticket of this local fight and there’s actually posters for this fight and everything else. My dad was fighting as Jack Leonard because all of the cool fighters in the early ’20s were Jewish, and he faced a young guy from Mexico who he later learned had had something like 200 fights in Mexico. He said, “I never saw so many gloves in my life.”

But they got their gas money and were able to continue on.

Brett McKay: After one of his stints working the mines, he heads to California, what does he do at this point?

Beau L’Amour: Yeah, he went out to California and he met some people, he made some connections through boxing with some people who were in the movie business. And he kind of got to know some of those people as a wannabe or up and coming boxer, but he really wanted to go to sea. So went down to San Pedro, signed up to get aboard a ship, but it was in the middle of a time, I can’t remember if there was a strike or something was going on and the opportunities for shipping off the West Coast were not particularly good. I think he said there was something like 400 seamen ahead of him on the list. And so he lived on the streets of San Pedro in very, very rough conditions, sleeping in lumber piles and abandoned houses and things like this for three or four months. And just accidentally got a ship to the Far East and it was a ship that nobody really wanted to sign onto, it was kind of a crumbling ship.

But he went all the way around the world, Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaya, Egypt, Arabia, and got off of it in New York, spent some time in New York and then got on another ship headed for Los Angeles, down the coast through the canal and to Los Angeles, that was a tanker.

Brett McKay: And all these experiences that he had, riding the rails, the mine work, going out to sea, this showed up later in his writing, like he wasn’t doing all this stuff to get fodder for stories. But later, when he did start writing, he called upon these firsthand experiences.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah. He was just trying to work. The idea of going to sea wasn’t so much for the adventure of it, but if you got on a good ship, you could stay on that crew for years. And he was looking for something that would basically allow him to just relax about having to make money just to have a job that he could keep doing.

Brett McKay: As I read about this part of your dad’s life when he was a teenager and his early 20s, it reminded me a lot of Jack London. Like Jack London rode the rails, he was a boxer, he went off to sea, he was the Seawolf. Was your father a fan of Jack London?

Beau L’Amour: He was, very much.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Do you think he was like purposely trying to follow the steps of the Seawolf or it was just like, that’s just what boys did back then.

Beau L’Amour: No, I think there may have been a… There was certainly a lot of other romantic literature that dealt with going to sea. It was also the only way that you could possibly see the world, number one, no air travel, number two, in my dad’s case, no money. So you had to do it as a worker, that was a way of working your way to foreign places. And certainly in my dad’s day, if you had been to Canada or Mexico, that was as foreign a place as an awful lot of Americans ever got. And certainly if anybody traveled farther than that on vacation, they were amongst the one tenth of 1% of the wealthiest people in the country.

Brett McKay: Right.

Beau L’Amour: So not only because it was expensive, but because it took a lot of time, LA to Yokohama, the first leg of my dad’s journey west from San Pedro was, I think, 22 days. Travel was just very slow, a liner would do it, a passenger liner would probably do it in five, but even so, maybe seven. So it was a different time, but I think he did have a vision of wanting to do certain things, but more of it was financial, he wasn’t really looking for adventure. Just on the Jack London front, London wrote an essay, you couldn’t really call it a short story, but he wrote a piece on riding the rails called Holding Her Down. And it is one of the best examples of the kind of work you had, you didn’t just jump on a boxcar and go someplace. It’s like as you started into any place where the train stopped, you had to get off while the train was still moving and then run as fast as you could to get to the track where the train was gonna depart.

Because if you were on the train while it was stopped, the train crew would throw you off. And so you had to get off while the train was still moving and you couldn’t get on until the train was moving because the train crew had to be on the train. And so it was quite a physical adventure, it wasn’t… And I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this, but you don’t sleep in a boxcar while the train’s moving, the ride is horrific, you will beat yourself to a concussion if you do that. And so a boxcars ride very, very hard and you wanna be in them with your knees broken a little bit, and you’re just like… It’s almost like riding a horse in some cases. So it’s a very physically demanding way of travel.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and for sure. So after your dad’s that one stint at sea, he comes back and then in his early 30s, he served in World War II.

Beau L’Amour: That is correct.

Brett McKay: That’s pretty old for a serviceman, were they calling him like grandpa?

Beau L’Amour: He was old. Yeah, well, they were calling… So as the… Before the war, but as it looked like the United States was gearing up its military, he tried to get in the Navy because he’d had not like full-time professional experience in the merchant marine, but he’d had one decently sized trip to sea and one extraordinarily long trip to sea and figured that he knew something about that and that was something that he’d like to do. But he wanted to be an officer and the Navy wasn’t accepting officers who didn’t have any college and so he backed off of that. The first draft call up came and it included, gosh, everybody under a certain age, I don’t know what it was, but he was definitely in that category, and he went in and they basically looked at his mouth and they looked at his heart and they decided he wasn’t soldier material. So he didn’t have good teeth and they didn’t wanna spend the money fixing soldiers teeth in those days.

And they thought he had an… He did have kind of an enlarged heart because he’d been an athlete, he’d been a prize fighter and he was drinking a lot of coffee. So I think his pulse was very fast and they were sort of like, “Oh, you’re at death’s door, you’re gonna have heart problems, go home and deal with it.” And he went and saw another doctor and the doctor said, “You’re a boxer, right?” “Yes.” “You drink a lot of coffee?” “An awful lot of coffee.” Well, he’s like, “Stop it with the coffee and you’ll be fine.” And so then Pearl Harbor happened and everybody was called back, anybody that hadn’t been taken. And at that point, all you had to do is have a pulse, they didn’t care. And so he went, he was drafted into the army, he went in as an officer candidate to the tank destroyers. So he was in officer’s candidate school for the tank destroyers, which was kind of a special warfare outfit. They were definitely the prestige armor outfit in the US army.

He got a very, very good education. They had lots of map reading, lots of artillery training, lots of stuff that was pretty sophisticated. And as an aside at this point, my dad’s interest in doing research and getting the locations right and everything else, if he hadn’t been to a location, my dad was really able to extract a tremendous amount of info from a map and a lot of it came from his artillery and tank destroyer training. So while he was in the tank destroyers, he turned 34, there was a cutoff that they established later on after he had… This was very early in the war and all these different rules were being figured out, they didn’t quite know what age they wanted different people. But anyway, by the time he graduated from tank destroyer school, they didn’t want combat soldiers who were over 34. So they sent him on, he went into the transportation corps.

And in the transportation corps the first thing he did was he went up to the upper peninsula of Michigan in the winter to test winter gear, they thought he was equipped for that because he was from North Dakota. Luckily for him, he spent a fair amount of the time that he was up there coaching a Golden Gloves team an Army Golden Gloves team, so he spent a lot of that time in Milwaukee and Chicago. And then they sent him west to San Francisco, where he was supposed to be a cargo control officer in San Francisco sending Army Cargos out to the Pacific, that lasted a really short period of time. He was hanging around the office late one Friday and an order came in for a bunch of officers and they just said, “You, you, you, you.” He was one of them, get on this train and they put him on this train and I don’t think anybody had any idea what they were doing. The train went all the way south to Los Angeles, all the way east into Georgia, all the way up the east coast of the United States.

And it was just collecting soldiers the whole way, very secretive. Well, these were the, like the last wave of guys that were gonna go over for the invasion of Normandy. And so he got to England and during the invasion, he was a… Like a traffic control officer putting stuff on ships in England. That sounds kind of passe, but wow, I went over and looked at the area where they did this, they would have the ships in a place called Portland Island, in this case. And parking lots full of trucks and tanks and landing craft, whatever they were using up this long causeway in England itself, not really on the island. And if you didn’t sort out exactly what had to go on the ship before it hit that causeway, there was no room to straighten anything out, it was an incredible job. They had vehicles backed up for dozens of miles and everything had to be perfect or the wrong stuff would arrive at the wrong time.

And then when he got to… Finally got to France, he was in charge of a platoon of gasoline tanker trucks that were delivering fuel to the front lines.

Brett McKay: Okay. So first part of his life, that first part of his life, lots of adventures, picking up experiences that he would put into his stories later on when he started writing. And then also he was just talking to people and getting stories from the people he talked to. And then another thing he did, the other thing I just, I find so inspiring about your father’s life, not only the adventures he went on, he was also just reading all the time when he was on these adventures. He was a prodigious reader and this he accounts all the stuff that he reads in Education of a Wandering Man. In the back of the book, he has this, a list of bibliography of books and plays he read from 1930 to 1935. And it’s just, it’s a ton. Like it just… It’s like pages and pages of stuff he read, everything… Okay, just kind of looking at it, Frederick Nietzsche, he read Ralph Waldo Emerson, a lot of Eugene O’Neill, he was reading Voltaire.

Let’s see here, Upton Sinclair, he would just, he’d also read detective stories. Like he was not… It seems like he wasn’t very discriminatory on what he read, he was just like, “If I got something to read, I’m gonna read it.”

Beau L’Amour: Yeah. Well some of it was what was available, some of it late… If you look at a lot of the titles in the late 1930s, he had a job. It wasn’t much of a job, it didn’t really pay him very much, but he had a job reviewing books for a newspaper in Oklahoma. And so he would just read whatever they sent him and they let him keep the books. So he really did it for that. And so, yeah, he just… Anything he could get his hands on. I mean, if you were to go to my mother’s house today, you would see a library with, I don’t know, last time we bothered to count we were over 17,000 books.

Brett McKay: Wow.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah.

Brett McKay: That’s like a bookstore. That sounds like Larry McMurtry. Like Larry McMurtry had that giant book collection that he turned into a bookstore.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah, no, it was the only thing that my father was the least bit materialistic about. He just loved his books and collecting books and having books on different subjects and very, very wide ranging subjects and incredible collection of weird periodicals too. So all kinds of magazines on like strange aspects of science and nature and history and things like that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. My favorite books that he would sometimes talk about were these like really obscure books about specific locations in the Southwest. Like there’s probably only a 100 printed, but he wanted to learn about the history of this particular area of New Mexico. I like that style there.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Do you think there are any writers or philosophers who had a big impact on his thinking? If you look at his work and his writing?

Beau L’Amour: No, I’m gonna say, look at what today people would call like the great books. They’re real classics, the Greeks, things like that. Yes, for sure. He was very interested in the development of science and philosophical thought in the Renaissance era. And then in the 1930s, a lot of the people who were making the world at that time, so he read Marx and Engels and all those. It’s like think what you want about them. But they were definitely the most very historically important writers. And so, yeah, I don’t know too many that I would say too many philosophically or something like that. But he was definitely interested in everything he could get his hands on.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think the big takeaway from that his reading is you don’t need to go to school to get an education. I think 10th grade was his last bit of education.

Beau L’Amour: He didn’t even finish the class.

Brett McKay: Didn’t even finish 10th grade. But he… I mean if you look at his reading, like he knew a lot and it enriched his life. Again, your education doesn’t end with schooling. You can keep reading like he kept reading ’till the day he died.

Beau L’Amour: Absolutely. Absolutely. The downside of not getting schooling is you don’t get a chance to talk about your ideas with other people who’ve been exposed to the same ones which he had issues with. Another one of… I just mentioned Marx, one of the interesting things about his life, especially in the 1930s, was at least you could get the commies to talk to you. It’s sort of like you could throw around ideas with these people and if you were out in the middle of a bunch of… With a bunch of laborers, you could always end up finding somebody who could talk about kind of communist philosophy and things like that. Whereas you couldn’t find that other places and those people couldn’t talk about anything else, is the only thing they’d really been educated in a lot of times.

And there were some subjects that came up like that history everywhere, but it was always local. You could always find somebody who would tell you about the local history. You might not be able to talk to them about the impact of the French and Indian War or something like that. But you could get ’em to tell you about when this area was settled or this thing happened or what their great-grandfather did. And so these were the places where he had an opportunity to involve himself with other minds as a young man. Whereas a lot of the stuff he studied was just more… He was kind of on his own. It was just whatever he had the opportunity to read, he had the opportunity to read.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So just looking at this bibliography he wrote in Education of a Wandering Man, it seemed like each year he was reading about 120 books a year. I mean that’s impressive. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So when did your dad decide to become a professional writer and what was his first work like?

Beau L’Amour: Well, he had worked as a sports writer in Prescott. He had written a couple of things when he was there. He wrote a column on boxing for a newspaper in Oregon for a while. I mean, these are… This is not impressive writing even for sports. I mean sports writing in those days was actually kind of a high art. And this didn’t reach even the low art of sports writing. But he was doing it. Later on, I’m gonna guess he got back together with his parents and they all moved to Oklahoma. They moved into a little farm that his oldest brother owned and he lived there with him throughout the 1930s. And I think once they stopped in a particular place, he really had to do something with his life. He was getting older and he was in the house with his dad who was always a really hardworking guy and he needed to do something.

And he didn’t have any skills. He didn’t have any other skills. And so he had been writing poetry for a while. I mean, to a certain… So the thing about poetry is because the meter and the rhyme are like mnemonics. If you got a mind like my dad, you can write it without any paper. The meter and rhyme help you remember what you’re doing. And so he had been doing that. I think he started lecturing on his travels and things of that sort. And he wanted to be someone. And I think at first he more wanted to be someone than he wanted to be a writer. But then he realized he had to kind of sit down and do it. And he wrote a series of stories that now exist in the book Yondering and the novel No Traveller Returns.

This is… I kind of jokingly call this Louis 1.0. This was the first version that he had of his life as a writer. And they were adventure stories, but they were personal and they were realistic. They weren’t overly romanticized or melodramatic. And he got pretty good notices for them. He got good reviews, he was in good magazines, but the type of magazines he was in were so good. They didn’t pay anything. They were like literary journals and things like that. And that wasn’t gonna cut it. And so eventually he started writing more melodramatic stuff for the Pulps. Now maybe I should kind of talk about the magazine market, like what the Pulps really were.

Brett McKay: Yeah, let’s talk about the Pulps. ‘Cause like a lot of, I mean a lot of famous writers that we know about today, like they got their start in the Pulps, Dashiell Hammett. All these guys. So tell us about the Pulp business and how did the Pulp Magazine business kind of craft or shape your dad as a writer?

Beau L’Amour: Okay, so first off, kind of the business of it, there were really three different types of magazines that were published in the early 20th century, even the late 19th century. And they were what they called the literary magazines, which is what my dad had been publishing in. And those were magazines that came out of college campuses and various literary, some of ’em were literary journals, things like this. They didn’t pay anything, but they often had very good writing. Then there were the slick magazines. They’re called slick because the paper was shiny and slick. So it could take colored advertisements and those magazines generally published fiction, but kind of a minimum of it. And they paid very, very well. But they would take forever to figure out what story they wanted to have in what magazine. They always wanted a very artful collection of stories in each magazine.

And they only paid when they actually published. So they could take your story mess around with what edition it was gonna go in, what month it was gonna appear, and keep your story for months and months and months and months without ever paying you. And then there were the Pulps and the Pulps were pure fiction. They were published on Pulp paper, like newsprint. And it didn’t last particularly long. It was only good for black and white ads. So these magazines were less expensive, but the Pulp magazines paid when they accepted your story. So as soon as they said yes, we want this, you got a check. And that was something that was the saving grace for the Pulps. And many a writer’s life ’cause nobody wanted to lose a story for six months while Colliers figured out which month they wanted to put it in.

And the Pulps weren’t incredibly demanding editorially, you could be a writer of modest skill and still get published. They were very, very much a volume operation. There were hundreds of magazines on, hundreds of subjects and each one published quite a few short stories. And some of them published short stories and novels at the same time. And so they were a place where a writer could make a living and get better. All you had to do is be able to write fast ’cause they didn’t pay very well. And so in my dad’s case they really taught him to write quickly and to write in a very, very entertaining manner. They were into the blood and guts, they were into the plot moving quickly. In his case he wrote a lot of short stories. So the material was relatively 10 to 20 pages. And it was a terrific training ground because he could train himself and survive at the same time and get better. In today’s world we’ve got a lot of winner take all industries. You can come in as a genius and do really well, but there aren’t too many places where you can kind of develop your talent and still make a living. It’s very rare these days, especially in the entertainment arts.

Brett McKay: Yeah. There’s like no place to be like a middle class writer. It’s harder to do that.

Beau L’Amour: It’s very hard to do that. I mean the music business is one place ’cause you can play bars until you get good, but there’s nothing like that for a writer. And so it was a wonderful opportunity. Most important for my dad was it trained him to write directly from his unconscious. Instead of sitting there going, okay, what am I gonna do now? He was able to kind of open the doors to his unconscious and just write what showed up. And this does not come easily. It’s not something that’s normal. I think that the thing that I’ve always thought it was most like was improv comedy where you just, if you can kind of learn to open your mind and free associate from one thing to another, once you get pretty good at doing it, good stuff comes out. But very important for my dad, very important for his later work ethic.

You do not wanna stop because when that conduit to your unconscious gives itself an opportunity to close, there’s something about it that wants to stay closed. And so I’ve experienced this in my life ’cause I tend to work on a creative project that, or work on a project where it’s very creative, but then I go off and do all kinds of technical details that have to do it. And that technical detail period really kind of allows me to close down creatively. And it’s very, very hard to get started again for the next one.

Brett McKay: So the Pulps helped him to be productive ’cause like he had… He ate what he killed basically. And he had to…

Beau L’Amour: That’s exactly right.

Brett McKay: He had to sell a story like at least once a… That was sell a story, not just finish a story. It was like sell a story every week to get paid. So what was his workday like? Was he up from 8 o’clock in the morning and then just riding ’till 8 o’clock at night? What was a typical workday like for your dad?

Beau L’Amour: More like 5:30 in the morning.

Brett McKay: Wow.

Beau L’Amour: So up very early, butt in chair, sit at the typewriter work until the kids are ready to have breakfast, go into the next room, have breakfast with the kids. He would read to us every morning. A lot of times it was stuff he was interested in. Sometimes it was stuff we were interested in. But when we were little kids, he read to us every morning. And then when we went to school, he was back at work, work until lunch, lunch, back at work for an hour or two. Then he generally took an hour or two off to exercise and clean up from that dinner. After dinner, he often worked another hour or two, seven days a week, 365 days a year, pretty much only taking off when the publisher sent him off on a publicity trip or something like that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Or you said that if he needed to do some research, he would travel then maybe to maybe go scope out a little bit.

Beau L’Amour: Yes. But he’d still work.

Brett McKay: Yeah, he’d still work.

Beau L’Amour: He’d take a typewriter with him and he’d still work.

Brett McKay: Alright. So just a really strong work ethic. Did he enjoy it? Like did he have to struggle and was just this tortured writer? Or did he genuinely love being there on the typewriter? Just click clacking away, cranking out a story?

Beau L’Amour: He loved it. I think one of the magic for a reader is reading something that just the person who was writing it, the joy of creating it is just seeped into every letter of what he’s doing. So I think the energy with which he wrote translates out to the reader in incredible energy and incredible happiness that he’s doing this. So the tortured thing was not something that got him anywhere that he was really… That really was doing him any favors. And he wasn’t tortured. He was just very, very, he was thrilled to be doing it. And another important thing about how he worked, I mean actually what he put on the page, dad wrote in a very abbreviated style. And in many cases the details were very sketchy. And what this does was, it’s just enough to inspire the reader’s imagination.

So your job as the writer, especially if you’re one of these writers that came out of the Pulp world of writing short stories and things like this, is to put just enough on the page to turn the reader into a partner in the imagination of the story. And that’s really what makes a lot of that writing so wonderful. You won’t hear too many people in the kind of more literary side of the business talking about this. In fact kind of more literate writing tends to write down absolutely every single thing. But that’s not really a way to engage an audience. You really engage an audience by giving them just enough. It’s a trick. You got to be able to give them just enough without giving them too little. But it creates a wonderful reading experience.

Brett McKay: So in the first part of your dad’s career, when he was writing for the Pulps, he was writing all sorts of different stories, adventure stories. I think he did a few boxing stories. When did he become known as a Western writer? How did he become the Western author that we know him today as?

Beau L’Amour: Yeah, so Westerns had been a part of the Pulp Magazine market since the 1880s. I mean, really since the dime novels, but not huge. And what happened, especially related to my dad who had written a lot of adventure stories kind of based on his travels or very melodramatically based on his travels. Before World War II, nobody traveled internationally and exotic places were very interesting to people after World War II. Well, everybody had seen their children, their buddies die in exotic places. The adventure genre kind of created a certain amount of PTSD or something like this. And people were recognizing it in the magazine business as my dad was recognizing it to a certain extent, maybe unconsciously in his own world. And I think that the Western boomed after World War II, because it was an adventure environment that you could have writing and movies and everything else in, but it was sort of safely in the past and it was at home.

And so he went to a, I think New Year’s Eve party, 1946, he wasn’t even out of the military yet with a publisher’s party, a publisher that he knew very well. And the guy told him he says, we think now Westerns and you know something about this. You kind of grew up in that environment you should do this. And so throughout the mid ’40s, so ’46, ’47, he started transitioning to more and more Westerns. By ’48 or ’49, he was going full-bore writing Western short stories for the Pulps. In many cases, he was selling… In probably three or four years, he sold 50 stories a year, which means he had to write like 60 or more to do that. He was writing more than a story a week, going full out and just able to make due, he could buy himself some nice clothes.

He had a tiny little… He had a little room in the back of somebody else’s apartment, didn’t have a car, wasn’t gonna be able to afford anything like that on what he was doing. And then the Pulp magazines, because of radio, because of television, because of the rise of the paperback, the Pulp magazine started to collapse. And he had a very difficult few years. I remember him telling me that he would go to the park in the morning at breakfast time so that his landlady wouldn’t realize he didn’t have enough money for breakfast and start getting worried whether he’d pay the rent or not. And during that time, he wrote a story called The Gift of Cochise, which he sent to his Pulp editor and they didn’t want it. And he had kind of a sleazy agent who hadn’t really been good for much and kind of in desperation, he sent it to that guy and that guy sold it to Colliers, which was a top market.

And he made a bunch of money. I mean, it wasn’t life changing money, but it was four or five times what he would’ve made for a Pulp story. And that was placed in Colliers magazine and then it was optioned by John Wayne. This became the movie Hondo. And as soon as it was optioned, he took the Option money. Option is like you rent a story for a while to see if you can get the pieces together to make a movie out of it. He took the Option money and flew to New York and just barged into the face of like every editor at every paperback house he could find. And he had some manuscripts he hadn’t been able to sell, various things like this. And he kind of stuck stuff in front of them and just said, I’ve got a movie coming out with John Wayne, I’ve been writing Westerns, I wanna be your Western writer. And just fired the full force of his personality onto them. And he sold four books on that trip. And that basically started him writing paperback original Westerns, that was like 1954, 1953.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And at this time, he hit the wave like the America, that’s what they wanted. They wanted the Western and he was able to ride that wave.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah. Although I would say that he didn’t really start distinguishing himself. I think he wrote some… Actually some of the best writing that he wrote was in the, maybe the early 1960s. But I don’t know that he really necessarily distinguished himself from the pack. What was interesting was is as the Western started to decline a little bit and he started writing more and more different Westerns, this would’ve been again towards the end of the 60s, early 70s, right before he really exploded sales wise. That’s when the material gets particularly interesting and he starts doing different things with it.

Brett McKay: Why did it explode in the 70s, you think?

Beau L’Amour: Well, first off critical mass of backlist titles, he just had so many titles in the marketplace. None of ’em were going out of print. All of ’em were making money all the time. So that’s the big one. I think something that’s important at this moment is that once he’d written 12, 15 Westerns, he felt that he wanted to go back and write in other genres because that’s what he’d done as a Pulp writer. And he didn’t really realize that the paperback business isn’t organized that way. They don’t like you to change genres because the books are in the bookstore, organized by genre. And so when a writer starts writing in one particular genre, the publishers want him to stay there. And dad didn’t really wanna stay there and he kept trying to break out. He wrote some stories that had other… In other genres, Ii was actually, the Walking drum was written in 1960.

It wasn’t published until the 80s, but it was written in 1960. That’s a set in like, year 1200 Europe. It’s a between the Crusades Adventure story in Europe. And he did some other stuff like that trying to break out of it. Last of the Breed, his Cold War thriller was conceived at that time. It’s based on the Gary Powers U2 incident. But nobody wanted this stuff. So he went back to writing Westerns, but he decided he was gonna change the Westerns. He was gonna write different kids of Westerns. So he would write Chaco, which was a Western about Europeans on Safari in the West, something that happened, but people don’t really know about it too much. He would write The Broken Gun, which was a contemporary Western.

It was set at the time, late 1950s when it actually occurred. But it was about a mystery set further back in the west in the 19th century. And other stories, he did a little bit of science fictiony stuff with the Californias. He started changing it up and by the early 1970s, the audience for Westerns wasn’t so brittle any longer and it was open to different experiences as a lot of things were in the 1970s. And so he was able to do various different things. All the backlist titles were doing very well. The Centennial was coming up and he started writing stories about the early frontier, which meshed with people’s interest in the Revolutionary War because, 1976 was the Bicentennial of 1776 and things all really came together right about that time.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So he had this plan. He didn’t like being pigeonholed as a Western writer, but he had to figure out a way to transition without upsetting one the audience, ’cause they expect a certain type of thing. And then two, the publisher. So he played around the margins with the Western to do what he wanted.

Beau L’Amour: Correct.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Beau L’Amour: Very correct.

Brett McKay: I’m curious, when you look at your dad’s writing, the stories are… They’re very entertaining. I love reading your dad’s novels, the short stories, but it seems like subtly there’s like a message there. Do you think your dad had a message that he was trying to convey with his stories as besides just being entertaining?

Beau L’Amour: Not consciously. I know sometimes when you read this stuff you go, really, that was unconscious, but dad, he just wrote so fast. And like I said, he opened up his unconscious and just let it happen. He had things that he cared about. And if you… Look, if you’re writing Westerns, there is no alternative. Westerns are about the friction between civilization and the wilderness. It’s just a fundamental. And so you get a big thematic thing just by saying, I’m writing a Western after that, I’m sure you’re quite aware of this. There’s this issue with families and family connections and the solidity that comes from having a good family that will help you out and things of that sort. It’s odd. It’s ironic because my dad spent a lot of time, not… Getting away from his family, not getting away from it because he didn’t like it, but just wanting to go off by himself and explore and do different things.

Brett McKay: And so there’s this interesting push pull friction in his work where a lot of his work is about the solidity of family. And yet that wasn’t necessarily what he was all about, especially earlier in his life. He certainly was when I was a kid, but not earlier. There’s an interesting theme about adopted parents, a older man will adopt a boy and raise that boy. Now orphans are a thing in literature. This is all Jungian stuff, there’s a lot of orphans in mythology. And so maybe he just clued into that unconsciously and was dealing with it. But one further level to that, my mom and dad were like surrogate parents for an awful lot of my friends and my sister’s friends. I think, we lived… We were growing up in the 60s and 70s and times were turbulent, especially in families. And my family is very solid. And it’s interesting how my parents became secondary parents to an awful lot of our friends.

So you are overseeing your dad’s legacy and you’ve worked to publish some of his unpublished writing. Can you tell us about some of the work you’re doing with your dad’s estate and his legacy?

Beau L’Amour:Well, we’ve just about finished this, Louis L’Amour’s lost Treasures series. So Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is, it’s the story behind the story or it’s a bit of a professional biography of my dad. So I took about 30 of his previously published books and added a postscript, which talks about different aspects of the book. Sometimes I have alternative drafts of part of the book or a correspondence that tells part of the story of how it came to be. Sometimes I’ll do a postscript on how the movie was made or wasn’t made because it failed. A lot of things like that. There’s a series of stories where dad was working out editorial issues with Bantam books and you can see the push pull between what they wanted in the book or what he wanted to see in the book.

And so I described those things. There were a couple of stories that really came out of a friendship that he had with Katharine Hepburn, and they never ended up working on a film together, but their discussion of what he wanted to do and what she wanted to do led certain stories to be written. So there’s that. And then there’s also, part of this series is two new books, Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures Volume One and Volume Two. And these are mostly beginnings of stories that dad never finished, but a lot of times I will have… He left behind an outline or he left behind notes for what the story was gonna be. And so I’ll give you the beginning of the story or whatever I’ve got of it, and then I will, give you the notes and explain what he was trying to do with his story, what he was trying to do with his career, how I think the story would’ve ended.

There’s a few finished short stories in that also. And then last of all, there’s a novel No Travel or Returns, which is one of those early yondering stories. It was really dad’s first novel, but he never really finished it. He started it in 1937. He worked on it on and off until he was drafted. And it was a pile of chapters and episodes that hung together, just barely. And so I went in and did a bunch of research to try and figure out what he was up to and how he might have finished that. And I rewrote that and we published that a few years ago. So Louis L’Amour’s lost Treasures that… You don’t have to read it in any particular order, but the wonderful thing about it is that because the story is there, because you’ve read the story, then what I have to say about the story is, easily understandable. If I was to try and write the professional biography of Louis L’Amour in a book separate from all this stuff, it would be very difficult ’cause I’d have to describe each individual story. And so this is a… I think we have one or two more of the Postscripts to do and maybe one more larger project in that. And then it’s, it’s onto something else.

Brett McKay: Well, Beau this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about, Louie L’Amour and your work?

Beau L’Amour: Louis lamour.com. L-O-U-I-S-L-A-M-O-U-R.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Beau L’Amour, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Beau L’Amour: Thank you very much. Take care.

Brett McKay: My guest name is Beau L’Amour. He’s the son of the author Louis L’Amour and he’s also the manager of his estate. You can find more information about Louis’ work@louislamour.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/lamour. You can find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’ve done so already, I’d appreciate it. If you take one minute to give us review on podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with our friend or family member who would get something out of it. As always, thank for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay. Not just listening on the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. It’s a peculiar book, especially for a bestseller. Not a lot of it is actually about zen or motorcycle maintenance, it combines a travelogue, a father/son story, and philosophical musings, and the structure of its narration makes it hard to follow. Thus, it’s the kind of book people often buy, start, and then put down without finishing.

That’s initially what happened to Mark Richardson, an author and automotive journalist who was born in the UK but has lived most of his life in Canada. But when the book finally clicked for Mark, he was so inspired by it that he actually undertook Pirsig’s motorcycle pilgrimage himself. Mark shares that story in Zen and Now, which intersperses stories from his own road trip with an exploration of Pirsig’s life and famous book.

If you’ve wanted to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but haven’t been able to get into it, today Mark will offer an introduction to what it’s all about. We discuss Pirsig’s ideas on the metaphysics of quality and our relationship to technology, and how he tried to combine the ethos of Eastern and Western thought into a unified philosophy of living. We also get into why Mark wanted to recreate Pirsig’s road trip, the joys of traveling by motorcycle, and what Mark learned along the way.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig
• Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Mark Richardson
• Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig
• Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Ron Di Santo and Tom Steele
• Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford
• Honda CB77/Super Hawk
• The Robert Pirsig Association 

Connect With Mark Richardson

• Mark’s website

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Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

I’m a big fan of hard-boiled detective novels. I highlighted my favorites in a previous article.

The thing about hard-boiled detective novels is that the characters often use slang words that were in common use in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, but are no longer part of our popular vocabulary.

There have been a few times when I’ve been reading a Raymond Chandler or John McDonald novel where the dialogue left me scratching my head.

Hundreds of hard-boiled slang words have been recorded and compiled. Below, I’ve highlighted my favorites from this category of vernacular. You’ll likely notice that there are a lot of different words for “detective.” It took me a while to figure out that a “shamus” was a detective. My absolute favorite of these slang words are the greetings (“How’s tricks?” “What’s the score?”) and the ways to tell people to get lost (“Go fry a stale egg!”).

Hopefully, reviewing this list will help you better understand the next hard-boiled detective novel you read. And maybe you’ll even sprinkle some of these words into your daily vocab to mix things up with some gritty old-school lingo.

Big house. Federal prison.

Bird. Person, either male or female, but frequently female.

Bite an egg. Take breakfast.

Blow. To leave.

Bo. Generic address; guy; jack; pal.

Booby-hatch. Mental hospital.

Bull. Cop.

Butter and egg man. Sugar daddy; implication is one fairly free with his money.

Buttons. Cops.

Buzzer. Police badge; identification.

C-note. Hundred-dollar bill.

Chicago overcoat. Coffin.

Chiseler. Low-life; hanger-on; somebody chiseling money from others.

Dance on air. Hang, as from a noose.

Darb. A person with money, who can be relied upon to pay a check.

Dead soldier. Empty liquor bottle.

Deadpan. Bodyguard; tough guy; gunny with a sheen of respectability.

Dip the bill. To have a drink.

Dish. Attractive woman.

Draw a lot of water. To have a lot of influence; to exert great influence.

Drop the arm. Arrest; nab; apprehend; snatch.

Dry-gulch. To ambush; surprise; sneak attack or attack from behind.

Dumb onion. A fool; dupe; idiot.

Dust. Take a hike; get lost; drift.

Fakeloo artist. Conman; faker; liar; pretender; deceiver.

Fin. $5 bill.

Flatfoot. Detective; shamus.

Flim-flam: Dupe; deceive; trick; take in.

Floaters. Corpses in the water; people dead by drowning.

Fog. Riddle someone with bullets.

Gat. Gun.

Gee. Man; fellow.

Gill. A drink.

Go fry a stale egg. Get lost; go jump in a lake.

Goose-berry lay. Stealing clothes from clotheslines.

Gumshoe. Detective/private dick/PI/etc.

Gunny. Hired gun; thug.

Gunsel. Hired gun.

Hackie. Taxi driver.

Hard boy. Tough guy; bodyguard; hired thug.

Hard number. Tough guy.

Hay. Useless scrip/fake bills/etc.

Heel. Jerk; low life; scumbag.

Heeled. Packing; carrying a gun.

How’s tricks? A greeting, akin to “How’s it going?”

Jake [also jakeloo]. Fine; okay; acceptable; no big deal.

Jasper. Man; handsome fellow.

Keyhole peeper. Detective/private dick/PI/etc.

Loogan. A guy with a gun.

Lug. A guy; generic address for a man; connotation of thick-headedness or limited ability/usefulness; not necessarily connoting goon, thug.

Lulu. A good-looking woman.

Make with the feet. Get lost; scram.

Mauler. Brass knuckles.

Mickey Finn (mickey). A surreptitiously adulterated drink (or the drug added to the drink to make it so) given to somebody for the purpose of rendering them insensible or unconscious.

Miscount the trumps. To overlook something.

Moll. Gangster’s girlfriend/woman/partner.

Mugg. A man (sometimes referring to dumb ones), guy, person; possible connotation of not being entirely on the up-and-up.

Muggle-smoker/muggle. Pothead; druggie.

Nevada gas. Cyanide.

Newshawk. Reporter.

No soap. No luck.

Nuts to you. Go to hell (mild).

Pie-eyed. Very drunk.

Piker. Amateur; small-time operator.

Polish an apple: Talk up; chat up; suck up to.

Prowl car. Police car.

Real cream. A good person.

Rodded. Carrying a gun (rod).

Rooster. Man who picks a fight, or somebody who carries himself like a rooster; confrontational.

Sap. Fool; fall-guy; love-struck sucker.

Sawbuck/double sawbuck. 10 dollars/20 dollars.

Shamus. Detective/private dick/PI/etc.

Sharper. Detective; private operator.

Sitting on dynamite. In the crosshairs; in the middle of a (figuratively) explosive situation.

Slip (one’s) clutch. Losing it.

Smart little egg. A fool; dupe; idiot.

Sneezer. Jail.

Squibbed (off). Killed.

Stool-pigeon. Rat; fink; an informant; criminal who talks to the cops.

Take a flutter (at something). To make a passing attempt.

Twist. Woman, with possible connotation of girlfriend, or somebody seen on the side.

Typewriter. Machine-gun.

What’s the score? What’s going on; what’s up; etc.

World-beater. Somebody better than the rest; capable of taking on the world; a person in high esteem.

Yard. One hundred dollars.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

In order to thrive in a world that’s constantly in flux, you have to learn to overcome your fear of the unknown and adapt yourself to whatever circumstance you find yourself in. Zombies and Minecraft can teach how to do both.

Today on the show, I talk to Max Brooks, son of famed filmmaker Mel Brooks, who is the author of books that include World War Z and a series of Minecraft novels for kids. Max and I discuss how he’s used his fiction to explore learning to be resilient in the face of change and how his work writing about the zombie apocalypse led to a gig at the Modern War Institute at West Point. Along the way, Max offers insights on overcoming your fear of the unknown and how Minecraft can help your kids learn how to thrive in a world where becoming a creative problem solver is the name of the game.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Select books by Max Brooks:
  • The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead
  • World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
  • Minecraft: The Island
  • Minecraft: The Mountain
  • Minecraft: The Village
• AoM Article: Survival Lessons from World War Z
• AoM Podcast #902: How to Survive Any Worst Case Scenario
• AoM Article: 5 Tools for Thriving in Uncertainty
• AoM Article: The Best Books to Read in Uncertain Times
• “In a Far Country” by Jack London

Connect With Max Brooks

• Max‘s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. In order to thrive in a world that’s constantly in flux, you have to learn to overcome your fear of the unknown and adapt yourself to whatever circumstance you find yourself in. Zombies and Minecraft can teach you how to do both. Today on the show, I talk to Max Brooks, son of famed filmmaker Mel Brooks, who is the author of books that include World War Z and a series of Minecraft novels for kids. Max and I discuss how he’s used his fiction to explore learning to be resilient in the face of change, and how his work writing about the zombie apocalypse led to a gig at the Modern War Institute at West Point. Along the way, Max offers insights on overcoming your fear of the unknown and how Minecraft can help your kids learn how to thrive in a world where becoming a creative problem-solver is the name of the game. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at AOM.is/MaxBrooks.

Alright, Max Brooks, welcome to the show.

Max Brooks: Good to be here. Thank you for having me.

Brett McKay: So, you’ve had a really interesting career as a writer. I know a lot of our listeners have read your books. You famously wrote The Zombie Survival Guide and then later World War Z, which got turned into that Brad Pitt movie. And that led to an opportunity to serve as a fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point. And then you’ve written some other fiction. You did something about the Harlem Hellfighters of World War I. And then you’ve also been doing a series of books based on Minecraft, books for kids. And, I gotta say my 10-year-old daughter, Scout, she’s a big Minecraft fan. She plays the game. She also reads the books. And I told her that I was interviewing Max Brooks. She said, “Well, let him know that Max Brooks writes the best Minecraft books.”

Max Brooks: [chuckle] That’s awesome.

Brett McKay: So a big endorsement there from Scout McKay, age 10, of Tulsa, Oklahoma. I wanna talk about your writing career more, ’cause I think your career as a writer tracks a theme that you see throughout your work, and that is adaptability and navigating new changes in your environment. Let’s talk about your zombie writing. What got you writing about zombies back in the early 2000s? What were you hoping to explore with writing about a zombie apocalypse?

Max Brooks: Well, actually, it was just fear, really just to be brutally honest. When I was about 12 or 13, I used to sneak into my parents’ room, ’cause they had cable, when they’d go out to dinner. And I found myself watching an Italian cannibal zombie movie, and it was really brutal. And it’s scared just the living hell out of me. And for years I thought, “Oh my God, what would I do if there were really zombies?” And then, in the 90s, Y2K was coming around. For your younger listeners who don’t remember, it was this mass panic that on New Year’s Eve, year 2000, all the computers were gonna reset, bank records would disappear, nuclear missiles would launch and land on the farms, and peoples really start thinking about survival. And so, I thought, “Well, what would happen if it was a zombie apocalypse?” Now, I should say that in the interim I had seen a movie that gave me hope, and it was Night of the Living Dead, because suddenly there were rules. There actually was a way to survive. It wasn’t that sort of dark euro feeling of like you’re just doomed. It was an American ideal, which is, yes, you can have a happy ending if you know what you’re doing. And so I really started to think about it. And then I saw Dawn of the Dead in graduate school, and I really started thinking about it.

So by the time Y2K came around, I thought as a pure exercise, just for me, I’m gonna take a few hours every day, every night, and then just write a guide book on how to survive a zombie attack. And that’s where it came from. And it sat in a drawer for years. And then when I was on Saturday Night Live, I met this book agent who thought he could get me a book deal. And it got published, marketed absolutely wrong, completely wrong, because they tried to portray it as making fun of zombies. A zombie joke book written by Mel Brooks Jr, that’s how they tried to portray it. And I warned them. I said, “It’s gonna be a disaster, because people expecting jokes are not gonna get it. And my tribe, the horror nerds, who I am of and who don’t know me yet, are gonna think that Mel Brooks’ Hollywood brat is taking a giant dump on everything that they love.” And that’s exactly what happened. Mainstream media hated it. Horror nerds hated it. And thank God, I was married to the best woman ever who said, “You need to throw that marketing plan out and market it yourself.” So I went to Fangoria on my knees, begged for an interview, “Let me introduce myself to you” and slowly but surely I established my street cred as a zombie nerd.

Brett McKay: And that eventually led to World War Z as kind of the follow-up to… You were kind of putting the things you wrote about in Zombie Survival Guide and playing it out, like war-gaming it.

Max Brooks: Yeah, because… Well, ’cause Zombie Survival Guide was all about how an individual or a small group would survive. And I took it to the next level in World War Z because, as a lover of zombie stories, I realized that almost every zombie story I’ve seen is about small groups but it didn’t answer a big question I had which is, “What about countries? How would governments survive? How would big systems survive? International trade? International relations? How would we as a species survive a zombie plague, because zombie plagues are big?” And there was no book out there for me, so I thought I’d write it myself and… One of my favorite books growing up was The Good War by Studs Terkel. It’s an interview with survivors, participants, in World War II. I had listened to it. My mother gave me the audio book, because I’m very dyslexic.

And I always loved it, and I thought, “That’s my template. I’m gonna do a book, interviews with survivors, and that’s the best way to try to tell this giant, global story of a zombie outbreak.”

Brett McKay: What do you think was going on in the zeitgeist in the 2000s where people were really into zombies? And we even… I remember doing some content on the website, zombie themed content. What do you think Was going on? Why did zombies have moment during that period.

Max Brooks: No idea. If I was good at understanding the marketplace, they probably wouldn’t have fired me off Saturday Night Live, I don’t know how to write for an audience, I don’t know how to judge trends, I just don’t know, all I can do is write for me, and this is what was important to me at the time, and I guess I just got lucky that what was important to me happened to be important to other people.

Brett McKay: And how did writing about zombies lead to a position as a fellow at the modern War Institute at West Point? That seems quite the leap.

Max Brooks: Well, for me, what happened was when I wrote these books, I wanted to make them as real as possible, I’m a huge Tom Clancy fan, I grew up loving his stuff, and I love that he took this sort of Ian Flemming, pseudo-macho male psycho-sexual fantasy of James Bond and just threw it away and said, How do real spies act, how do real submarines work as a giant nerd and wanna be… He decided to educate his readers as well as entertain them, and I realized that’s what I wanna be too, so like zombie survival guide, if you take away the zombies, it is a disaster prep manual, everything in it it’s 100% real from dehydration to clean socks to breaking in your shoes to which guns are gonna jam the most… It’s all real. I did, I did just a ton of homework, same thing with World War Z, I studied how systems work, how countries work. So what happened was, I got a call after the book came out from Admiral wise cup at the United States Naval War College, and he invited me to come and speak to the students. And I said, Are you sure you have the right guy? And said, Yeah, no, no, no, no.

We got the right guy. I love World War Z, and if you take out the zombies, you have written a credible scenario of how our planet would respond to a global catastrophe, and I want you to come speak about how systems are inter-linked and how they can collapse. And I did, and I must have said something. Right, although it doesn’t seem that way. I think the YouTube video is still out there, and I’m just flop sweating like Albert Brooks in broadcast news and saying something like, are you sure the orders didn’t get mixed up, there isn’t like a Lieutenant Commander Max Brooks wandering around, Comic-Con. But I must have said something, right, because then I was invited to come back and then I was invited to speak at other military forums, and then I was invited to be a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security to study global crises, and then I was invited to speak at a listening tour at the Pentagon, this is where generals come around and… They try to be open to new ideas. So right before me, Sebastian Younger came up and spoke about what is facing the average infantryman in Afghanistan, and I got up and I spoke about how the American public is 100% divorced from the global war on terror.

I said, if you’re just going on pop culture references, 9/11 never happened, and you need to re-introduce the American people to those who protect them because the sheep and sheep dog model is not working and it’s not sustainable. And there was a young captain, John Spencer in the back of the room, just got back from Iraq, and he said to me, Listen, we’re starting up a brand new think tank called the Modern War Institute. We are going to study how we fight each other, and no ideas are off the table, and we’d love you to come in as a fellow and bring your perspective. And that’s how I got into the MWI.

Brett McKay: And so what are you doing there? What kind of research and writing are you doing for the think-tank?

Max Brooks: I study crises that are non-kinetic at the moment, when I say non-kinetic, I mean crises that will eventually lead to shooting if they’re left unattended like… Perfect example, one of the articles I wrote for the modern War Institute was about food insecurity, because the United States is the only great power in world history that has never been vulnerable to food Blackmail… All the other great powers, Russia, Britain, Ancient Rome, Japan, you name it. Somebody has held a gun to their head and said, I’m gonna cut off your food supply if you don’t comply, but not us, even in the darkest days of our civil war, we were still growing enough surplus wheat to sell to Great Britain for profits, all that changed with Monsanto, because Monsanto has patented their seeds as if it were intellectual property, and so then if a farmer grows a field of wheat from Monsanto and then takes a little piece of those seeds that harvest later and banks them and then re-plants them the next year, he goes to jail for copyright infringement, the same way you’re copying a DVD. So Monsanto established that precedent, which means that now for the first time since the birth of the Agricultural Revolution, farmers are not allowed to bank their seeds anymore, and for a company that basically has…

I think at the time it was something like 90% of our soybeans, 80% of our corn. That’s huge. And if that’s not bad enough, Monsanto was sold to Bayer, German company. Now we have a security treating with them, they are our friends, they are our allies, but there was nothing in the bill of sale that would stop Bayer from selling Monsanto say to China, and if that ever happened, you can see a scenario where China is ready to invade Taiwan and times it at planting season and makes a call to the President of the US and says, Listen, you better back the hell off, or we are going to withhold our seeds, and maybe you won’t starve, but the panic that will ensue and the riots and the looting and the death will be a hell of a lot worse than anything our army could ever do to you, we have the potential to kill more Americans than if we actually went to war with you.

Brett McKay: That’s crazy. So to me it sounds like the modern war institute is using your talent as a fiction writer where you can think about a plot line from a single point and see where that can carry out and helping them figure out what are some potential scenarios…

Max Brooks: Yeah. That’s what I do is I take my imagination as a novelist and look at the real situation, and also the kind of novels I write always go just below the surface, like with zombies. I write about the fact that most people wouldn’t really die in a zombie apocalypse from zombies, they would die from second and third order effects like dehydration, malnutrition, infection, it’s the same thing in national security, like when I wrote about cyber security, my research showed me that we actually have the technology to ward off any kind of cyber attack from any enemy, the problem is we don’t have a doctrine, we don’t have a strategy and how to use it, there’s literally no master plan for how to protect us from the great hack, and our enemies know that, they have plans, they have doctrine, they’ve been working on it actually, since Desert Storm on how to hurt us, but imagine if you had a bunch of warships but no plan on how to use them, which has actually happened in history. So that’s kind of what I do.

Brett McKay: And then how did you make the connection with Minecraft? How did that collaboration happen.

Max Brooks: When I first saw my son’s… He’s 18 now but when he was a little boy, assuming he was about eight maybe playing Minecraft, and I played it with him, I realized this had the potential to be possibly… I’m not exaggerating possibly the greatest teaching tools since the printing press, and that is because you and me, and everyone on this planet has been trained in the industrial model of education, and that model of education was designed to help human beings thrive in the industrial revolution. This new crazy business model in the 18th century of breaking down labor into an assembly line instead of one person making a shoe, it’s 10 people making a part of the shoe, and whoever could master that could master the world, so it became about memorization, regurgitation, standardization as the clock is ticking. And it worked. In fact, it worked so well that Japan mastered it. And then ate us for breakfast in the 1980s, the problem is the Industrial Revolution is in the rear view mirror now, and the workforce has changed, and so today’s kids have to learn a whole new skill set. They’ve gotta be innovators, they’ve gotta be resilient, they’ve gotta be fluid problem solvers, and our method of education teaches them exactly the opposite.

So what the hell do you do? And watching my son play this video game, I realized, Wow, this game, if curated correctly, can teach kids everything their brain needs to know about how to become resilient, creative problem-solvers.

Brett McKay: No, I would agree. So my daughter, she loves to play Minecraft, and I’m always impressed ’cause I’ll check in on her, Hey, What are you doing in Minecraft? And then she’ll show me the stuff she’s made… And what’s crazy about Minecraft, the way it’s formatted? It’s an open world. You can do whatever you want in it. And I’m always impressed with these crazy contraption she makes with all the… I guess it’s red stone, is what it is, and then you can make like these…

Max Brooks:Oh, yeah. Red Stone.

Brett McKay: Yeah, red stone’s like this magic stone where you can basically make machines inside, so she’s made roller coasters, she’s made these elaborate mazes with secret doors, if you light a torch, it’ll set off this chain reaction that will… And I’m like, This is crazy. I mean, what… Growing up, my video game was like Super, Mario Brothers where it was just a line and that was it, it’s completely different gaming experience from other video games.

Max Brooks: Oh, exactly, like imagine if you played Call of Duty, but the best way to take out the enemy team was to have an authoritarian government on your side that then has very cheap labor that then entices the other team’s government to outsource their manufacturing base to your side. So your side makes their bullets and then withholds the bullets when the shooting starts it… That’s literally how China is eating us for lunch, but there’s no video game out there, certainly not a game like Call of Duty that could do that, whereas Minecraft, you actually can… Whereas in Minecraft, you are given hard and fast rules, especially if you play on survival, like you’re gonna starve or the sun is gonna go down and the monsters are gonna come out, you’re gonna die, so you do have hard and fast goals like shelter and food, but how you accomplish those goals… Totally up to you.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah, Minecraft also has zombies. Those are the monsters, right?

Max Brooks: Minecraft has zombies.

Brett McKay: Right. There’s the other connection.

Max Brooks: Thanks Mojang.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I wanna dig deeper into some of the themes you write about in all of your work, and a big one is how we respond to this state of uncertainty that comes with dramatic change, and you see this in the Minecraft books, I read the island, the intro to the island’s awesome. This character is put in this completely foreign situation, he’s trying to figure what’s going on… You see this in World War Z, what’s the typical response? Human response to dramatic change.

Max Brooks: Initially, there is shock and paralysis, sometimes there’s denial. It really depends on your personality type. Some people simply cannot accept, the world has changed and is doing everything possible to get back to where they were, there’s a frustration, anger, tantrums, bargaining, there’s so many different stages of dealing with crisis, and there’s no one size-fits all. Like I said, it depends on who you are and how you deal. But that’s always what I study because my life has always been constant change, and I think maybe growing up with dyslexia, I never got a chance to just cruise through life. I think a lot of times, it depends on who you are and how you struggled in your formative years, to how you deal with crisis when you’re a grown up…

Brett McKay: Right. People have talked about whenever we experience a disruption in our environment, there’s either the fight, flight, or freeze response. And a lot of times people think it’s either fight or flight, but I think a lot of times people just freeze. I mean, you’ve probably, people have probably seen videos where something crazy happens, right? A car goes through a storefront. And it’s funny that the amount of people you see just sit there watching, their brain can’t compute what is going on. And it takes like a minute or two for them to finally figure out, oh my gosh, something really bad’s happened. I got to do something.

Max Brooks: Yeah. One of the fellows at the Bonner War Institute, combat veteran of Iraq, multiple tours, he once told me, apparently everybody freezes, but it’s a question of for how long do you freeze? Because some people freeze for a nanosecond. So that way it doesn’t look like they freeze. But some people freeze for a really long time. I mean, Joseph Stalin totally locked up for hours and hours when Hitler attacked. When they were like, Comrade Stalin, the Nazis are coming. And he’s like, no, no, Hitler would never do that to me. We’re friends. We signed a non-aggression pact. General MacArthur totally froze right after Pearl Harbor for a day. He was commander of US forces in the Philippines. He’d heard about Pearl Harbor and didn’t spring into action and didn’t ready their forces. So literally the next day when the Japanese attacked the Philippines, they pulled another Pearl Harbor.

Brett McKay: Well, I mean, how do we overcome that tendency to freeze when we experience a big shift in life? Have you uncovered anything in your own life or observing and studying war?

Max Brooks: Yeah. I think that from what I have seen is that we have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. The sooner the better, we have to train ourselves to always be doing uncomfortable things, trying new things. That feeling you had like your first day at a new school when you were a little kid, it’s the worst feeling in the world, right? Absolute worst feeling. Likewise, your best feeling for a lot of us is like second semester senior year in high school when you know everything. Now I’ve always believed in, I’ve always seen is that that feeling of your first day as a little kid in a new school is actually when you’re at your best, is when you’re at your most nimble and you’re most willing to try something new and you’re at your worst when you’re a high school senior. And so it’s not too complicated to describe. It’s just for me, I’ve always found that when I have that feeling in my gut of being feeling small and scared and angry, that’s when I’m at my best because it means I’m over my head and I’m trying something new and I’m growing.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. And another thing you talk about in your work is that this unwillingness to recognize or accept the change that’s happening, this can bite you in the butt, not only in a survival situation, but it can bite you in the butt in your career, right? Like you may be in an industry that’s changing, like you’re used to it being a certain way because you got started 20 years ago, but now thanks to the internet, it’s changing. You think, well, maybe this change isn’t going anywhere. It’s just a fad. And then 10 years later, you’re out of a job because that fad that you thought was a fad just ate your lunch.

Max Brooks: Oh yeah. I mean, who invented the digital camera? Kodak. They had the first patent. They could have ruled the market in digital cameras, but they’re a film company. And they said, oh no, no, that’s just not the way it’s going to be. You see it. I mean, Blockbuster should have devoured Netflix when they had, they were holding all the cards and Netflix was this dumpy little startup. They didn’t. They’re like, we are a video cassette rental company. That’s what we do. We have brick and mortar stores. So they were not nimble. I mean, you see it all the time. I mean, this is one of the things I write about constantly in all my think tanks is how desert storm was the absolute worst war America ever fought. Not Vietnam, not Iraq and Afghanistan, desert storm, because we were at our best and we thought we were showing the world deterrence. We thought we were like, if you mess with the USA, we are gonna atomize you on the battlefield. We didn’t realize our enemies thought, oh, well, if you’re going to mess with America, don’t go anywhere near the battlefield. Don’t hit them where they’re strongest. So they’ve spent a whole generation developing asymmetric warfare, cyber economics, information OPs, terrorism, proxy war, all these things. And now we are really playing catch up.

Brett McKay: Yeah. One of my favorite writers who also writes about the theme of change is Jack London. And one of my favorite short stories he wrote is in a far country. And it’s got this awesome intro. I’ll link to it, but basically it’s just Jack London starts off the soliloquy about if you go off into a far country, which for him was like the great North, the Alaskan wilderness is that you have to change. And if you don’t adapt to the circumstances you find yourself in, you will die. And the whole story is basically after that’s recounting these three individuals who weren’t willing to adapt to the environment they found themselves in and they all ended up dying in this cabin of scurvy and freezing to death.

Max Brooks: Oh yeah. Yeah. This notion of change. And I say this as someone who hates change. I absolutely despise it. I love the way things just are. So I get it when people are like, I really don’t wanna change. I’m not comfortable. I’m like, I hear you. But unfortunately you have to, and you can see it through time. I mean, I’m very lucky that as a Gen X or I was raised by greatest generation parents who did not ask to have to adapt and did not ask to have to be more than themselves. It was forced upon them, but they did. You look at my dad and all his friends, these nebbishy guys, Hey, don’t you want a little nosh? These are not the guys you would think to crawl through snow, diffusing German S mines or hunting U-boats in the North Atlantic or being shot down over Regensburg on a B-17 bombing run. But they did it because they had to.

Brett McKay: Right. And I think it gets harder to change as you get older. I mean, I’m in midlife and I think, man, like I’ve spent 20 years developing a skillset. Now you’re saying I got to develop another skillset. I don’t have to do that, but you got to.

Max Brooks: Yeah. No, the, the funny thing is the toughest guy I’m friends with, you would not think so. He is the dorkiest dude you’ve ever seen. And yet he has had to change. He’s changed careers three times. He’s about my age. He got to start in magazines, magazines completely just cratered when the internet came and he was like, well, I’m just gonna have to reinvent myself. So he did. And he went and did something else. And then that whole business went away and now he’s doing something else. And then that looks like it’s going away and he doesn’t whine. He was like, Oh, what’s my path, my life, my career. He goes, ah, I got to go back to the drawing board because his family needs to eat. So he is the manliest guy I know.

Brett McKay: Right. Adaptable. I love it. So fear is another response we have to change. And you talked about the very beginning of this episode, you started writing about zombies cause you wanted to explore fear. What have you learned about managing fear from writing about zombies?

Max Brooks: You know the strange thing is I, there’s a lot of misconceptions about sort of what I do and how I am as a person because people say to me like, well, we write about all this stuff. Aren’t you worried you’re gonna scare people to which I say, no, no, you don’t understand. I’m already scared. And the studying of the threat calms me down. It’s like the first two acts of jaws for me are the scariest because I don’t know what’s out there. It’s this nebulous thing in the darkness and the depths. And I just don’t know what it is. Oh my God. But that moment, in the, when you’re looking in the top down shot on the Orca and you actually see the shark for the first time, then I was like, Oh, okay, now I know what I’m dealing with. So for me, the best way to deal with a fear is to study what you’re afraid of and figure out where the nose and the tail is and how heavy it is and what it does. ’cause then you actually have something tangible as opposed to the worst thing, which is your own imagination.

Brett McKay: When an interview you did, it was with hot guy. It was with Alan Alda. You talked about…

Max Brooks: Yeah, my mentor.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Max Brooks: My mentor.

Brett McKay: You talked about your mother taught you about investigating and researching as a way to overcome fear. What did your mother teach you about overcoming fear?

Max Brooks: Well, my mother, I mean, my mother is the reason I am who I am. There’s just no way around. I was deeply privileged to have the best mom ever because she was a thinker and an explorer. And so she always taught me, if you’re afraid of something, figure out exactly what it is you’re afraid of. And she, I watched her do this. When I was a kid in my ’20s working for the BBC in Africa, my mother was terrified. She bought herself a map of Africa and studied the geography of it. So that way, whenever there was a headline, violence in Mogadishu or there’s Ebola in Zaire or the Rwanda genocide, my mother knew exactly where Rwanda and Zaire and Somalia were, as opposed to where I was. And that calmed her down. So I got to watch her do that. And that’s always set me on my course to, if there’s a threat out there, if there’s something I’m really scared of, something in the news, well, study it, figure it out.

Brett McKay: Has writing about the survival stuff, has it nudged you to learn some survival skills yourself? Like how to start a fire without matches and how to filter water and things like that.

Max Brooks: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, it’s funny. I’ve become friends with Les Stroud.

Brett McKay: We’ve had Les Stroud on the podcast.

Max Brooks: Isn’t he awesome?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Max Brooks: I mean, Les is the real deal man. Les, like that’s the good part about growing up in show businesses. I can spot bullshit a mile away. So when I see some of the other survivalist reality shows, I’m like, oh, you’re a total fraud. Whereas Les, what I love about Les is he’s not afraid to fail on his own show. Remember on episodes of Survivorman, I would say at least a third of the time, he’ll try something and be like, no, this is too hard. I’m going to get killed. I can’t do this. I have to retreat, which then validates when he succeeds. And so I’ve always been a devotee and studying him, I’ve learned how to start. I don’t know how to start a fire with two sticks, but I can do flint and steel and char cloth, purifying water, big deal. Because I also, I live in Southern California and back to talk about my mom. My mom was a survivalist. It wasn’t called survivalism back then. It was called just being ready for an earthquake. So we always had a survival kit. We always had a survival plan. If there’s an earthquake, where do we meet? We had basic skills on how to disinfect a wound on what to eat and what not to eat. So my mom always knew that stuff. And to us now we call it prepping. You’re a prepper. But the truth is it’s literally just how poor people used to grow up in the great depression. And she was a depression kid.

Brett McKay: Right. Let’s talk about the Minecraft books. I really enjoy these. What I like about them is one, I got to like it’s something I can share with my daughter, right? And talk to her about that. It’s been fun, but also they’re fun to read. And what you do with them is with each chapter, there’s a lesson that you’re trying to explore about how to deal with change and how to deal with uncertainty. And one of the big themes in the island, which was the first one is learning from your mistakes, because in a survival situation, you’re in a new situation, you’re going to make mistakes. You don’t know what you’re doing, but mistakes in a survival situation can get you killed. So how do you make sure when you’re put in this new situation of uncertainty that you don’t make a mistake that will kill you or make things worse?

Max Brooks: Well, I think in a life or death situation, you have to be very cautious. Obviously one of the greatest sci-fi novels ever written for me was A Tunnel in the Sky by Robert Heinlein. And it’s in the future where kids have to go on a survival test to alien planets. And the theme of it is don’t be a tiger, be a cockroach. So don’t try to be all macho and cool. I’m gonna dominate man. No, no, no. You have to accept your natural place in the food chain and be a quiet looker and listener. So in situations like that, in life or death, no, no, no. You do not stride boldly into the light ’cause that’s where the saber-toothed cat is waiting for you. But in any other non-life or death situation, you have to take risks. You have to fall on your ass. You have to be humiliated and fail miserably. Millennials used to have that phrase, epic fail, as in like, well, I’m never going to have an epic fail. Well, then you’re never gonna live your life. You have to be in situations where you will fail miserably and spectacularly and then learn to recover ’cause that’s the only way you’re gonna move forward.

Brett McKay: How have you learned to not beat yourself up over your mistakes that you’ve made in your career?

Max Brooks: I am still learning because I know that even though I’m sitting here in the Attic recording this, if I were to say, oh, well, I’ve learned how to do this, somewhere telepathically, my wife would roll her eyes. So yeah, I beat up on myself a lot. I’ve always said that the only criticism of my books that hurt the worst are the ones where I agree with it because I get a lot of criticism and I’m like, yeah, whatever. But sometimes if I agree with a specific one, I’m like, oh, goddammit, they’re right. So yeah, no, I beat up on myself a lot. And, ’cause remember, the lessons of the island that I put in for, I always say Jack Black ’cause he read the audio book, the lesson for this characters are lessons that I’m still learning. I am not this wise sage sitting on a rock saying, oh, look at all the things I’ve mastered. I ain’t mastered nothing. These are the things that I know are right and I’m working towards. Will I ever master them? Who knows?

Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that at the end of the book, you lay out all the rules. There’s good stuff for anyone to know, but I’m glad that my daughter’s reading this stuff. Keep going, never give up, panic, drowns thought, don’t assume anything, fear can be conquered, anxiety must be endured. When the world changes, you’ve got to change with it. So it’s great stuff. And then in the second book, The Mountain, so the island, for those who don’t know, this is like a soul character who finds himself on the Minecraft island. I mean, he’s just bewildered. The opening line is like, why is the sun square? Why are my hands rectangles? What’s going on? And then it’s his journey of learning how to survive on the island. And then the second one, The Mountain, this is where he gets a friend. And then you bring in the social element of survival. And I think that’s where you shine with your work with like World War Z is exploring the social factor when it comes to survival and a disaster situation. How important is the social factor in surviving?

Max Brooks: It is incredibly important. And let’s clarify, I say this as someone who is anti-social. I am an anti-social, recluse only child, grew up in my room, would be very happy if I didn’t have to deal with people. You know, that moment in Castaway where Tom Hanks looks at the island and it’s just him. I was like, ah, awesome. But I know that is not how we survive. First of all, it starts with our basic evolution, which my mother was really fascinated by and would read to me books about primitive humans. We are in the middle of the food chain. We are not tigers. We are apes. Apes are in the middle of the food chain. And the only way we were able to thrive was to work together.

Max Brooks: And that has not changed. That’s why in The Mountain, I have the lesson that friendship is a survival skill, right? It’s not just about like, hey, dude, you’re really cool. Let’s hang out. It’s like, no, we need each other always. And one of my favorite movies is Jeremiah Johnson, Robert Redford. And you can be seen as sort of man on his own, man against the world, man by himself, which is bullshit because in the movie, he learns from other trappers when he’s coming up who teach him how to survive. And we all need that, whether you are a parent or whether you are in a job or you’re in the army. I, as a novelist, it looks like a solitary profession, but it is not. I have an amazing editor and I have a great team over at my publisher. And every day I get up when I’m researching a book and I talk to experts who helped me out and I bounce ideas off my wife who says, oh, you could do better with that or no, you’re on the right track. So you’re never alone and you got to embrace that. It’s great to be an individual and you should be, but you have to know the limits of your individuality and be man enough to admit when you need help.

Brett McKay: Right. Yeah. There’s this idea of the lone wolf. If there’s a lone wolf, he got kicked out of the pack because he was annoying.

Max Brooks: And he’s gonna die.

Brett McKay: And he’s gonna die.

Max Brooks: And I mean, this is one of the things I also hate about so many post-apocalyptic stories is this notion of like the lone badass, just taking names and laying down the law. And anybody who really believes that in a zombie apocalypse, they’re going to be the lone badass. I invite them to look at the average age of your local Somali warlord and see how long they live. Because if you want a zombie apocalypse, look at a failed state. You don’t see a lot of 80 year old Somali warlords.

Brett McKay: So you got another Minecraft book coming out, The village. What are you exploring in this one? It seems like things are getting even more complex.

Max Brooks: Oh yeah. This is the natural progression because obviously book one, you have to learn to live with yourself, figure yourself out. Book two, you got to learn to be a good friend, how to compromise and how to communicate and don’t lose all of yourself, but how much of yourself you got to give to work with somebody else. Book three is The Village where they come to a village and they learn how to be citizens in a community. And that is so important right now, because I see it all around me. I see it in think tank world. I see it as a parent. I see it when I turn on CNN, we are in a national crisis where we have forgotten what it means to be a citizen. We are all out for ourselves and we are on the road to ruin. And so I am trying to impart all the civics lessons that should be taught in schools about how to be a voter, how to be a customer, how to live in a village with other people, which are all really critical ’cause and Minecraft, if looked at from the right lens teaches you all those lessons. So like, what is the marketplace and capitalism and why is money good and how could money be bad and what is crime and punishment and why we need cops? Why do we vote?

Brett McKay: No, yeah, there’s some great stuff in here. You talk about economics. So one of them is talking about specialization moves everyone forward. It’s not the money that’s evil. It’s what people might do with it. You gotta understand supply and demand. And what’s interesting, my… You learn this when you play Minecraft. It’s been interesting to see how my kids, they learn how to, there’s a business that goes on there and you can trade with other people to get things that you need. And then also you have to deal with crime and punishment that you can steal from other people in the realms and you have to figure out how to deal with that. So yeah, I think it’s a fun game and it’s a fun series of books and it’s really cool what you’ve done with it. Where can people go to learn more about the new book and the rest of your work?

Max Brooks: Just follow me on X and my website, maxbrooks.com. And I mean, I sound like a 1980s commercial that I grew up in. Wherever books are sold, but you know, wherever books are sold, you’re probably going to see the Minecraft books and maybe hopefully something else with my name on it.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Max Brooks, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Max Brooks: Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Max Brooks. He’s the author of several books, including World War Z and the recent Minecraft series. They’re all available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, maxbrooks.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/maxbrooks. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. We find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’ve done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review of a podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.