5 Thought Provoking Books To Read

Right now I’m in the midst of reading a novel and a non-fiction. The novel, a classic, is uninteresting and seems to me to involve cheap tricks to develop a layer of drama. The non-fiction, an obscure scholarly monograph, has been thought provoking, which I define as: it causes me to often put the book down to look things up or ponder what I’ve read. To me this is the mark of a good book. If you ever find such a book, savor it, buy it, and reread it. Here is a list of five such books I have had the pleasure of reading that provoked extensive thinking in me.

Oranges by John McPhee

Oranges is a ridiculous book. It’s ridiculousness is in how captivating a book literally about oranges can be. I was frequently stunned by the information on oranges John was able to dig up. His writing style is straightforward and powerful; a narrative prose, but about facts. It’s a short book, 149 pages, but in 149 pages you learn more about a single object than you ever thought possible. It made me wonder how many other things, mundane things, I know absolutely nothing about and take my knowledge of their existence for granted. And if I know almost nothing of the depth of mundane things then how ignorant am I of complex things?

I saw things differently after reading Oranges. The book was a metaphorical mic drop, “You think you’re so smart? Read this.” I know now I’m not so smart, that I need to look things up, and then look deeper, and look again, and again. And if I ever think I know about something, I think back on Oranges and reassure myself that you can never know enough about something, even when you think there is nothing left to know.

Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski

This book was painful to read. Not because of any difficulty involving the text, but because of the emotionally heavy material. I’ve read a lot of history, but few things have been as gut wrenching as Imperium. The book is about the post-war Soviet Union and its satellites and how they have fared up until the fall of the empire; it is viscerally and terrifyingly real. If you ever want to know how bad life can get, then I recommend this book over The Gulag Archipelago. I’ve read the gulag book, and it was frightening, to say the least, but Imperium showed me worse. I was hooked from the very first story which was about a group of Polish kids who waited overnight in the middle of winter for the possibility of candy, but all they got for their misery were tin cans that still smelled fruity.

I read this book during the first weeks of the pandemic lockdowns, and it made me feel infinitely better about my situation. It gave me perspective, which is a fabulous gift to receive from a book. A book that helps you define your situation as nothing at all to complain about deserves to be read and contemplated. And, depending on your political views, a serious and sober reflection on the reality of what life was for people living under the umbrella of the Soviet Union would make this book required reading for anyone who partakes in political conversation.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Now here’s a novel I recommend! Don’t worry, it’s not hard to read, being a classic and all, but it spoke to me like no other classic has before or since (with the possible exception of 1984). Not only did I find the novel to be one of the funniest I’ve read, but it was also the best written. It was so well written, in fact, it spoiled many other novels for me precisely because their authors did not take the pains Flaubert did with Madame Bovary. Flaubert wrestled and labored with Madame Bovary like so few novels have been. He was extremely focused on style, or, in other words, finding the right word. So large was his task he would sometimes take hours, or days, to find the correct word. We are all the richer for it.

Yeah, yeah, so what, you say, a lot of writers are great, but what I really thought about when reading the book (other than the story itself, which is clear) is how much I wish other novels were like this one. Madame Bovary reveals the written word’s best quality: completion. When you are writing, you are not communicating live. You have time to complete your thoughts. Books are reflections of thinking, rethinking, thinking over, rewriting, changing of mind, synthesizing new thoughts, editing, condensing, correcting. The best chance you have at being understood is to write. It is writing’s one advantage over every other medium. It’s the same principle why we enjoy a film or TV show over reality TV or home videos. Reading and writing should be taken more seriously by its consumers, but we have a knack for rushing a thing. Flaubert’s masterpiece encourages us to seek better mastery of our own.

Lincoln’s Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk

I haven’t read many books about Lincoln, and I know there are many, but this biography made me see Lincoln in a new light. When I read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Lincoln, I concluded that he would have been a fascinating person to invite to dinner and listen to. With Mr. Shenk’s book, I saw Lincoln as a real person with struggles and someone I could relate to. Shenk also revealed a bit of the historian’s craft, by covering some of the historiography of Lincoln, which was a fascinating bonus in and of itself, including one hilarious part where Shenk visited a troupe of Lincoln impersonators.

Who was Lincoln, really? With each biography of someone, you only get to know a fictional character the author creates and you in turn create based on your impressions. There’s no way to know someone from history thoroughly. By the end of the book, Shenk, who is vastly learned concerning Lincoln, is still pursuing a mirage, as are we all. Did you know, for instance, that Lincoln was known for inappropriate jokes? Very few remain in the record, they have been stamped out of history for the most part. Who knows how we would look at Lincoln today if we had all the information about the man. Who else in history do we know far less about? Lincoln has been examined and studied to death, but how many more figures do we have biographies of that we simply do not know as well as we tell ourselves, who haven’t been studied by as many scholars. Like McPhee’s book on oranges, so too do we know little about other people. How well do you know yourself? How thorough could your own autobiography be?

A Mencken Chrestomathy by H.L. Mencken

When I read Mencken, I can’t help but feel how dumb I am. His thinking is on a level deeper than I can ever reach. The connections he makes, and his fluid way of revealing them, serves to create new thoughts on almost every page. It’s masterful because so many of these new thoughts are almost an aside to what he is really getting at. You absolutely have to read his reflections on William Jennings Bryan. Never before have I come across someone beaten so far down by words.

Mencken was a rare genius, and a student of the truth. One of the few people to actually go to the German (eastern) front in World War I to examine the realities of whatever propaganda was going around at the time. He was an exemplary journalist and America’s greatest iconoclast. His book is some of the very best thinking and writing you might ever be able to get your hands on. Like every other book I’ve listed, Mencken again made me realize the shallowness of my own thinking. Because when you’re a “smart” person you learn quickly. Because you learn quickly, you think you’re smart. The problem usually occurs when you have to remember something, then you realize you don’t actually understand, you still have to go back. Then you start to see how little depth you have the deeper you go into things. And then you begin to realize your quick learning was often because of a good teacher, and that left on your own, you don’t see the same rapidity. Without the handholding, are you really any better than others? Mencken was a true self-taught, hardworking genius (the first American to laud Nietzsche as well). He shows what’s available to the brain if a smart person puts it to work. I will note here as well that there is a good interview of Mencken available on Youtube.

Conclusion

In America, we often see genius (and I say this because of the variety of television shows that portray this) as someone who figures things out right away. We don’t praise hard work nearly as much. I’d rather a character who was smart through tenacity, than someone who is a gifted genius where everything is learned as if by magic. Each book I have listed here is an example of intelligent hard work: in history, in storytelling, in facts, and in observation. Of the hundreds of books I own, these are the most thought provoking that I actually recommend others to read. Please enjoy the gift these authors gave to us.