Since he’s become President, Donald Trump has tweeted book recommendations for Americans, a virtual book club of sorts. However, in Ben Sasse’s “The Vanishing American Adult,” the Nebraska Senator has his own list of books for any well-read person. (No, “The Art of the Deal” didn’t make the list.)
Category One: God
First eleven chapters of Genesis
Matthew is the grittiest gospel
Romans is a systematic theology of the whole Bible
Martin Luther’s Commentary on Galatians
John Calvin’s The Institutes of Christian Religion
Category Two: Greek Roots
Aristotle’s Ethics
Plato’s Crito
Homer’s the Odysset
Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War
Sophicles’s Three Theben Plays
Category Three: Homesick Souls (or Fundamental Anthropology)
Augustine’s Confessions
Anselm of Canterbury’s Why God Became Man
Martin Luther’s In Bondage with the Will
Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile
Category Four: Shakespeare
Romeo and Julie
Hamlet
King Lear
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Category Five: The American Idea
Lincoln’s Declaration of Independence
The Federalist Papers
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858
Category Six: Markets
Aristotle’s Politics
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations
Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846
Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel
Category Seven: Tyrants
Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto
Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism
F.A. Hayek’s This Road to Serfdom
George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
Category Eight: The Nature of Things
Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things
Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Euclid’s Elements of Geometry
Category Nine: American Fiction
Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn
Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop
John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath
James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
Image Credit: Gage Skidmore on Flickr