Here are the books mentioned in this episode:

Mythology by Edith Hamilton

This is the best starting point. Edith Hamilton collected tales from a variety of sources (Hesiod, Homer, Ovid, and others) to present the full stories of many of the gods you’ll come across in your reading. Edith also highlights both the Greek and Roman names of the gods. Here’s my podcast episode about this book:

Theogony by Hesiod

Hesiod was either a contemporary of Homer or was very close in the timeline. His book Theogonycovers the genealogy of the gods. This is very helpful in understanding which god gave birth to which god. This knowledge oftentimes provides insight into character qualities of the gods (for example, memory gave birth to the muses). Here’s my podcast episode about this book:

The Homeric Hymns

This is a collection of 33 hymns to the gods. These hymns contain a variety of stories about those gods. I found this to be a very entertaining way of learning about the Greek pantheon. Here’s my podcast episode about this book:

Greek Epic Fragments

Did you know that Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey are just two works out of eight total that compose the Trojan Epic Cycle? The six other works are lost to us, but many authors (Aeschylus, Pindar, Euripides, and Herodotus among others) referenced these epics, providing fragments we can access. Additionally, a writer named Proclus compiled plot summaries of each of the six lost works in his collection called Chrestomathy. This has left us with general outlines of what these six works contained, and they are presented in this Loeb Classical Library book. Some of the stories are the Judgement of Paris, the kidnapping of Helen, the Trojan Horse, and the death of Odysseus. Here’s my podcast episode about this book:

I meet with some guys a couple of times a month to hang out and talk about life. Last week, we discussed our different practices for journaling. One of the guys has journaled for most of his life. Another uses social media as his journaling medium. I tend to journal by hand about once a month. I used to journal much more frequently.

On the way home, I was thinking about my journaling practice and realized that I’ve shifted a lot of my journaling to books. I use physical books as my journals. I write in the front, in the margins, at the end of chapters, and in the back. On a second reading, I’ll use a different color pen so I know what stuck during each of the readings. When I flip through books on my shelves, I can see the questions I asked the author, the ideas I encountered for the first time, things that made me angry, and pages that have changed my life.

But it’s not just what I write in my books that turns them into journals. It’s also what I put into those books. I try to add keepsakes and bookmarks between the pages. I like the idea of being surprised by these things when my future self takes books off my shelf.

I wanted to share some of the things I place in books in the hope that you also pick up this peculiar habit of treating your books as journals:

Plane Tickets

I love adding plane and train tickets to my books that correspond to travel I took while reading the book. I can usually visualize reading that book on that particular trip.

Stuff Your Kids Make

My books are filled with bookmarks, notes, and stickers that my daughters have given me while reading the books. Those are an absolute delight to discover later on.

Notes from the Author

This particular book is my hinge book, the book my entire library hinges upon. I read it when I was 18 and emailed the author a few years later. I printed his reply and keep it in the back of the book. It also includes the email I wrote to him describing what the book had meant in my life.

Photos

Printed photos are rare these days. This is a photo of my grandparents that I keep in one of my Bibles. I know it’s there when I look at that Bible and I love opening it up and seeing them.

Inscriptions

If someone gifts you a book, have them write a note in the front. I cherish these inscriptions.

Concert Tickets

My books are littered with concert tickets. Sometimes they are relevant to the content of the book and other times they are concerts I attended while reading the book.

Stickers

I had a little fun with this one adding a Parental Advisory sticker to The Song of Solomon.

Writing in your Books

In the front cover of each book, I write where and when I purchased it and when I read it. A few years ago, I recorded a podcast episode with more details about my note taking practices in books:

One of my favorite things is to discover other people’s keepsakes in second-hand bookstores. It’s such a wonderful surprise when you open a book and a newspaper clipping, note, or bookmark pops out from decades ago. What do you add to your books that turn them into journals?

In this episode, I talk about the difference between sophia and philosophy (a love of sophia), means vs ends, and virtue bridging the knowledge and love gap.

I’ve just finished reading Euthydemus, my 23rd Plato dialogue. I started my Plato Project attempt to read the philosopher’s complete works in August of 2025. I have 12 dialogues remaining. It’s been a challenging but deeply interesting journey into philosophy.

In the Euthydemus dialogue, Plato pits two Sophists, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, against Socrates to show different paths to wisdom and virtue. At a simplified, high level, Sophists seek victory, to win the argument whether it’s true or not, and the philosophers seek truth above all else. The two paths lead in very different directions.

The tagline for my reading project is “To Seek Truth in the World’s Great Books,” so this contrast between the Sophists and philosophers peaks my interest.

The Sophists show up often in Greek literature. Euripides, Aristophanes, and Plato mention them often. Their reputation is that of charging money to teach their students how to win an argument irrespective of truth. You can see how this would be an enviable skill in Athens in order to win political and legal arguments. If you wanted power, you would enroll in Sophism 101.

But it contrasted sharply with the pursuit of the philosopher. It’s one thing to have sophia, or wisdom. It’s another thing to love (philo-) that sophia. Virtue is tied to wisdom, so the philosopher is seeking truth over victory in an attempt to guide the soul towards the good and virtuous life.

I love that contrast between sophia and the love of that sophia. After college, I found myself in a bit of a mental crisis where I knew that I needed to test the ideas I had picked up during my life. This primarily dealt with issues of faith. I had the sophia, the knowledge in my head, but deep down I worried that if things got tough, that sophia would not suffice. I needed to actually love that wisdom.

It is a little odd to talk about love and wisdom together. Despite the word meaning exactly that, I often think of philosophy as a pursuit of ideas. It’s an intellectual endeavor, not an emotional or spiritual one. Yet Plato’s dialogues show that it’s not merely an intellectual endeavor but that it’s personal, in that it’s between people, not someone pursuing philosophy alone in a room. And it’s also deeper than just ideas. It’s a love of wisdom.

I understand that. My post-college crisis was an attempt to test ideas so that they could move from my head to my heart. I wanted to be the kind of man who didn’t just speak intellectually about ideas and faith, but one who would speak from love and experience. I didn’t just want to believe, but to believe in order to be transformed. I wanted to speak from the vantage point of transformation because it would be truth that I had experienced, not just believed at an intellectual level.

Perhaps experience is the connector between love and wisdom. If the goal of philosophy is virtue, then virtue is putting that wisdom into practice. It’s daily experiencing wisdom. When you speak of that wisdom, it’s not in a way to gain power or win an argument, but it’s from an experience of that wisdom that has led to a love of that wisdom. You truly become a philosopher.

Plato’s goal in Euthydemus is to teach virtue to a young man. He’s testing the Sophist and the philosopher to see who can do that best. What we see is that the tactics of the Sophists lead to confusion and ignorance. Those tactics certainly do not lead towards virtue but instead lead a person away from it. However, the tactics of the philosopher are meant to lead not just to wisdom, but a love of that wisdom through virtuous living. It’s the experiential factor leading to a love of wisdom.

In my recent article, I walked through the Path of Candide by Voltaire. This hilarious satire was written as a response to a particular idea about optimism put forward by Leibniz early in the 1700s. That idea met the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that shook Voltaire’s acceptance of the idea that this was the best of all possible worlds.

Voltaire’s response was to explore optimism through the use of satire. The result is a work considered to be one of the key texts of the enlightenment. In this episode, I consider the path to Candide, talk a bit about the story, and share the one thing that stuck out to me most about this short Great Book.

I just read Candide by Voltaire for my Short Great Books reading group. As I shared last week, Candide is “an absolutely lovely tale of ‘rape, pillage, murder, massacre, butchery, religious intolerance and abuse, torture, hanging, storm, shipwreck, earth-quake, disease, prostitution.’”

It’s a satire where despite these horrors, Voltaire keeps you cackling with delight. This satire was a response to philosophical ideas, worldviews, and an utterly devastating earthquake. Here’s the genesis of the story:

1710: Leibniz’s Optimism

The subtitle for Candide is “Optimism.” Voltaire was referring directly to the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who said this world created by God is the best of all possible worlds. The ramifications are that everything happens for a reason, that there is a certain inability to change what will happen, and that “all is well.” This is known as Leibniz’ optimism. (While reading, I found myself considering how often I respond to situations with “It’s all good.”)

1755: Lisbon Earthquake

On November 1, 1755, 40,000 to 60,000 people were killed by an earthquake that struck the Portuguese capitol of Lisbon. Though in Geneva at the time, Voltaire was deeply impacted by this catastrophe and began to question the idea that “all is well.” Can this be the best possible world if this level of devastation can occur?

1756: Voltaire’s Poem

Voltaire responded to this tragedy in 1756 with a poem entitled “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” where he questioned Leibniz’s ideas:

Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts—
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?1

Voltaire's Poem

1756: Rousseau’s Letter

In August 1756, Jean-Jacques Rousseau responded to Voltaire’s poem with a letter in which he defended optimism and divine providence by stating that mankind was at fault. He said that people were not meant to live so closely together in packed cities but were instead meant to live in more rural, natural settings. Had the Portuguese been living that way, the death toll from the earthquake would not have been as high. Don’t blame God; blame people.

Rousseau's Letter

1759: Publication of Candide

Voltaire’s response to the philosophy of Leibniz and Rousseau was to write Candide, a short work of satire. In Candide, we follow a protagonist aptly named Candide. The name itself conjures ideas of innocence and an openness to ideas. Candide is heavily influenced by the optimistic philosophy of Pangloss, who despite circumstances, continually reassures Candide that “All is Well.”

In the subsequent pages, we’re met with unspeakable atrocities and Pangloss’ continual view that “All is Well.” Through the countless horrific occurrences, we see Voltaire testing optimism against reality.

I found the medium that Voltaire chose, satire, to be a very interesting choice. He could have simply written a philosophical treatise in response to Leibniz and Rousseau, but it would not have had the impact of this memorable story. He also could have responded by letter to Rousseau, but he chose a style with ties to Cervantes and Aristophanes. Voltaire was likely working around speech restrictions in this choice, but it was smart move and he blanketed the major markets with copies before it could be properly censored (though that didn’t stop the Roman Catholic Church from adding it to its Index of Forbidden Books in 1762).

The conclusion of Candide was a pleasant surprise. Satire by definition is critical, yet that spirit departs in the final Qohelet-like admonishment to tend one’s garden. Biblical references abound throughout the story with close connections to the Garden of Eden, the expulsions from Eden, and the lost sheep.

Books come from books. That is a central observation from this reading project. That’s why I’m reading the Great Books in chronological order. I want to see how ideas have been stated, refuted, altered, and considered across time. In Candide, we see a microcosm of the great conversation with Voltaire grappling with ideas that came before him and experiences that left him shaken. The result is a work considered to be one of the key texts of the Enlightenment.

September 2026 Reading

Plato’s Republic

I spent the month of September reading Plato’s Republic. I started with the John M. Cooper Complete Works there on the left (translation by G.M.A. Grube with a revision by C.D.C. Reeve) and am currently working my way through Allan Bloom’s translation and essay on the right. My goal was to read it three times during September, but it’s a lot longer and harder than I anticipated.

I’m really glad that I read a number of Plato’s dialogues before reading The Republic. It gave me a good introduction before reading this much larger and more comprehensive dialogue. And in turn, it has helped me better understand his other dialogues that I have read. This is his greatest hits and I touches on a number of topics from his other dialogues but in a manner that is more concise and focused.

October 2026 Reading Plan

Plato • Voltaire • Lao Tzu

The next book for the Short Great Books Reading Group I lead is Voltaire’s Candide. I’ve never read it and don’t know what to expect, but I have a few days to read it before we meet on Monday.

After that, I’m back to Plato. I still need to read the interpretive essay in Allan Bloom’s Republic translation. I may then take a quick Plato break to read Lao Tzu, an author who lived nearly 200 years before Plato (and who I mistakenly skipped on my chronological read-through of the 200 authors on my Great Books list). I’ll mainly focus on Plato during October & November this year. In December, I’m going to be reading books about trees!

I may return to some other dialogues before beginning my 3rd reading of The Republic. Here are the dialogues I still have pending for Plato:

• Euthydemus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Meno, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias, Menexenus, Clitophon, Timaeus, Critias, Minos, Laws, Epinomis, Letters, Definitions, On Justice, On Virtue, Demodocus, Sisyphus, Halcyon, Eryxias, Axiochus, Epigrams

Recently Acquired

September Book Purchases

My wife Stephanie (Check out her music here) and I travelled to Scotland during September and I visited some of my favorite bookstores. Here are the books I purchased for my library. Let me highlight a few of them:

Aeschylus Loeb II - I consider his Oresteia trilogy to be one of the most important works ever written. When I saw this edition at a pre-owned price, I jumped on it.

George MacDonald - A Short Life by Elizabeth Saintsbury - George MacDonald is my wife’s favorite author and we named one of our our daughters the same name as one of George’s daughters. There are some nice photos in that book.

Malcolm by George MacDonald - There is an incredible inscription in this copy of Malcolm that I purchased in Aberdeen. Check it out:

Bookish Adventures

When I hit the ground in Edinburgh, I make my way around my bookshop loop. Here’s a note I wrote about that beloved loop:

Here are some other bookshop and book-related photos from September:

I have reason to believe that the Babylon Bee may have been tracking my early childhood delinquent reading habits. In an article last week titled “Sinful, Rebellious Homeschooler Stays Up Past 9:30 To Read ‘Chronicles Of Narnia’,” they nearly perfectly captured my earliest reading memories. As a child, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d turn on my fish tank light, grab a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (the exact copy in the photo above), and clandestinely read the first book of the Narnia series. I wasn’t homeschooled, but everything else in this article is spot on.

Those were magical days that instilled a deep love of reading into my life. That love was snuffed out during middle school and high school when reading became a chore. I recaptured that magic in college. I’m pretty sure that part of my desire for reading now is simply an attempt to recapture that early joy of reading under a fish tank light.

I’m so thankful my parents bought the Narniad (The Chronicles of Narnia) for me and placed it in my bedroom. If you have kids, place books where they play and sleep. And maybe even leave some lights where they can explore those books on the nights they can’t sleep. It just might be the spark to lifelong reading.

I’ve come up with a super easy litmus test to determine if what you’re visiting is a legit bookstore. Do they have books in piles on the floor?

If so, go in. If not, beware.

You’ve been to the perfectly curated bookstore. Clean shelves, nothing out of place, sterile, joyless, soul-killing. You won’t find a treasure there. You’ll find books the owner thinks you ought to read based upon their viewpoint, favorite genre, or author type. These bookstores do not have books in piles on the floor.

When you enter a bookstore with books in piles on the floor, the bookseller will likely be so engaged in the book they are reading that they’ll probably forget to welcome you in. Their point of sale system will date from the early 1800s and the smell will be that of rich mahogany and old books. There will be books in unreachable places with no ladder in sight.

The average customer will not pick through those books in piles on the floor. This greatly increases your chances of finding a hidden treasure. The bookseller places more value on cramming as many books in the store as possible than offering walkable paths through the aisles. This is the utmost level of respect the owner can show to you the book lover.

The only trouble with bookstores that have books in piles on the floor is that visiting them leads to a house filled with books in piles on the floor.

In this episode, I pull 7 books from my shelves and talk about what they meant to me, how I got them, and what I found inside (I use fun items for bookmarks). It’s a representative sample from my larger library.

I lead a monthly reading group at Landmark Booksellers called Short Great Books. For September, we discussed My Ántonia by Willa Cather. It’s a story set in the plains of Nebraska and it’s a nostalgic look at life in 1880s through the lives of immigrant families from Bohemia, Norway, Austria, and Russia. We get to know their fears, hopes, and struggles.

The story is presented as an account by Jim Burden, an orphan sent to live with his grandparents who live in Nebraska. Upon arrival, he meets Ántonia, a newcomer from Bohemia, and a few years his senior. Jim is writing his account later in life, so he’s looking back at his memories of his time in Nebraska in of his vivacious friend Ántonia.

Ántonia embraces her new life and the challenges that come with it. Her father doesn’t fare as well. He was well-respected in his Bohemian hometown and he finds the Nebraska farming life unnatural and difficult. He takes his own life with a gun on a cold bed.

Later in the novel, Ántonia lays down on a bed and takes a different path. “There, without calling to anybody, without a groan, she lay down on the bed and bore her child.” A bed of suicide for her father becomes a bed of life for Ántonia. She goes on to bear 10 more children.

I wonder if part of Jim’s account is an exploration of why he didn’t pursue Ántonia romantically. He’s in an unhappy marriage when we meet him as an adult. As a youth, he struggles to know what he wants. Ántonia is the opposite. She has a strong sense of self. Deep down, she knows what she likes and doesn’t like. Later in life, Jim says of her “Antonia had not lost the fire of life.”

I really like this novel. I first read it after Christmas in December 2001 and for a second time in preparation for this latest reading group. It’s one of those books that stirs up memories and nostalgia. I found myself getting lost in my own memories. The book reminded me of Theo of Golden, yet I can’t quite put my finger on the reason why.

I also thought a lot about the experience of my forebears, Norwegians and Germans who settled in Wisconsin in the 1800s. I wondered if their experiences matched those in this book. I tried to imagine the heartbreak of leaving a homeland, the struggle to start from scratch, and the experiences forging a new path.

There are a few fantastic lines in this book:

“I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, this is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

The older I get, the more I relate to this line about specific people in my past:

“…some of the figures of my old life seemed to be waiting for me in the new.”

“Aint it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other?”

Ántonia loved life, people, and even trees (this is what she said about trees):

“I love them as if they were people”

Willa Cather is on my Great Authors list and so I will be reading her again in the future. I look forward to reading My Ántonia for a third time and reading Cather’s other works. It’s a special thing for a novel to open up your own past as you get lost in its story.

If you live in Franklin, join us for the final three reading group meetings for the year. Or, feel free to read along on your own if you’d like some book suggestions. Here’s what’s on tap for the rest of 2026:

• Candide - Voltaire

• Jason and the Argonauts - Apollonius

• The Nutcracker and the Mouse King - E.T.A. Hoffmann

For instance, I keep seeing references to the definition of self-control, something the Charmides dialogue focuses on. Courage is also referenced quite a bit, something the Laches dialogue covers. These references in The Republic have been helpful in answering some of the questions I still had after reading those other dialogues.

In this episode of the podcast, I talk about a few of the connections between Plato’s Republic and Ion dialogues. In Ion, Plato has Socrates question a rhapsode named Ion about his expertise in performing the poetry of Homer. The Republic (written 5 years after Ion) helps answer some questions I had after reading Ion.

This is episode 300 of the podcast, and I can’t think of a more perfect topic to mark the milestone. One of my main goals with this reading project is to make connections across the books that I read, and here, I get to connect different dialogues by Plato and share how they inform one another.

If you’re interested in learning more about Ion, here’s a wonderful discussion I took part in with the brilliant minds over at Ascend - The Great Books Podcast:

I love listening to music while I read. I’ve always done so, but recently, I’ve begun paring specific music with specific Great Books. The practice gets me in the right headspace for reading and also helps me to recall the books later on. I select an album or artist and listen to that exclusively while reading a particular book.

I’m currently reading Plato’s Republic and have settled on The Dave Brubeck Quartet as my musical accompaniment. I’m spending the entire month of September in The Republic, so my plan is to listen to as much of the Brubeck catalog as possible while reading.

Why Dave? I had a friend in high school who drove a Nissan Maxima with a 6-speaker Bose stereo system. At that time, Bose bestowed a CD of tracks to show off the system. One of the songs on that CD was Take Five by The Dave Brubeck Quartet. It sounded so good on that stereo.

In 2019, I took 52 weeks and listened to a different jazz artist each one of those weeks. One artist on that list was Brubeck. I instantly recalled Take Five and enjoyed listening to his other pieces.

For me, jazz reminds me of a period of deep intellectual curiosity in my life. During college at The University of Georgia, I spent countless evenings studying at the Jittery Joe’s coffee shop in Athens, GA. They always had jazz playing on the speakers. When I think of pursuing the intellectual life, I think of those evenings drinking coffee, reading, and listening to jazz.

Plato is hard for me. I’ve decided to read his complete works and I’m near the midpoint, but it usually takes me reading a particular dialogue three times before I begin to understand it. Prior to The Republic, I’ve been listening to Apple playlists called Relax, Focus, or Calm. I like them, but I wanted something different for The Republic.

Each morning, I wake up about an hour before my family, brew an absurd amount of coffee, turn on music on an old Bose Wave radio (that Maxima encounter at play), prepare my 0.38mm Muji pen, and open my book. As Dave Brubeck plays and the aroma of coffee invites me in, I’m taken back to the joy of reading and learning. The atmosphere tells my brain to get ready. It’s about to get exciting.

And it has been exciting. Despite the difficulty, I really enjoy Plato. The ah-ha moments more than make up for the frustration of not understanding during initial encounters. The more dialogues I read, the more I’m able to connect Plato’s ideas across his works and see how some dialogues actually answer his other dialogues.

My hope is that each time I hear Brubeck in the car, in a store, or in a coffee shop, I’ll think of The Republic and what I learned from Plato.

In this episode, a provide a quick introduction to the dialogue, walk through the main ideas, and close with Socrates’ conclusion.

Translations Mentioned:

• Plato Meno and Other Dialogues / Robin Waterfield / Oxford World’s Classics

• Plato Complete Works / Rosamond Kent Sprague / Hackett

August 2026 Reading

Plato • Melville • Cather

I continue to work my way through the complete dialogues of Plato. I spent this past month focused on the following dialogues:

• Charmides (on self-control)

• Laches (on courage)

• Lysis (on friendship)

• Alcibiades

• Hipparchus

• Rival Lovers

• Theages

I covered Charmides in my most recent podcast episode and embarrassingly referred to the dialogue as Charmenides (with an extra “en” in the middle) the entire time. I tried to re-record the episode and just couldn’t get it how I wanted it, so I added a mea culpa at the start and asked listeners to think Charmedies when I said Charmendies. Doh!

For Charmides, I read it first in the John M. Cooper edited Complete Works and then read it a few more times in that top book there in a Robin Waterfield translation.

I also read Billy Budd by Herman Melville and My Ántonía by Willa Cather for the Short Great Books reading group I lead at the start of each month. It was my first reading of Billy Budd and my second of My Ántonía. I really like My Ántonía.

Special Podcast Episode

Plato’s Ion • Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

I’ve been a listener of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast over the past few years. They’ve helped guide me through Homer and some of the Greek Tragedies. It was therefore quite an honor to join them for a discussion on Plato’s Ion dialogue about art, inspiration, and philosophy. You can read their Substack here - - and watch the episode above. If you prefer to listen, here’s a link to the episode.

September 2026 Reading Plan

Plato’s Republic

I’ve decided to focus the entire month of September on Plato’s Republic. My plan is to read it three times. I’ll start with the John M. Cooper edited Complete Works, move to Bloom’s translation and introduction, and then finish with the Robin Waterfield translation in that Oxford World’s Classics version. I’ve also heard that one should read Against Eratosthenes in Lysias before reading The Republic, hence the green Loeb on the top.

In October and November, I’m going to try to make it through as many of the remaining dialogues as I can. Here’s my current status:

• Read - Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Parmenides, Philebus, Symposium, Phaedrus, Alcibiades, Second Alcibiades, Hipparchus, Rival Lovers, Theages, Charmides, Laches, Lysis, Ion

• September - Republic

• Yet to Read - Euthydemus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Meno, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias, Menexenus, Clitophon, Timaeus, Critias, Minos, Laws, Epinomis, Letters, Definitions, On Justice, On Virtue, Demodocus, Sisyphus, Halcyon, Eryxias, Axiochus, Epigrams

Recently Acquired

August Book Purchases

Here are the books I added to my library during August:

• Lysias - I purchased this in order to read Against Eratosthenes before reading The Republic

• Orphic Collection - This is the latest work in the Loeb Classical Library and someone mentioned that Plato references this quite a bit, so I thought it’d be good to have in the library.

• The Republic - Robin Waterfield translation - I’ve really come to like Robin Waterfield and wanted his translation for September’s focus on Plato’s Republic.

Bookish Adventures

I had a fun book meetup with three other guys pushing the reading envelope around the world. We met up in Franklin, TN and visited The Great Wall at Landmark Booksellers.

I have a new podcasting station setup in the corner of my office. This gives me a nice spot away from my working desk dedicated to the podcast. This also allows me to record video podcasts. I’ve noticed shift in user behavior around podcast consumption. Audio listens are down and video views are up. It was time to make the switch after 9 years!

I set aside one post per month to highlight my reading life. Books of Titans is a reading project aimed at seeking the ancient paths by reading The Great Books by 200 Authors chronologically over the next 40 years. Thank you for following my journey.

Charmides* is a dialogue of search and the search is for a definition of the Greek word sophrosyne. It’s a word that encompasses the spirit behind the famous sayings at Delphi of “Know Yourself” and “Nothing in Excess.” Translators have rendered it self-control, moderation, prudence, temperance, and discretion.

In this episode, I walk through the attempts by Socrates, Charmides, and Critias to define sophrosyne. It’s a fascinating journey that may not leave us with an exact definition, but that does get us thinking about knowledge and action.

*Quick, embarrassing note: I mistakenly refer to Charmides as Charmenides throughout the podcast episode. I didn’t realize the error until I had finished recording. Mea culpa. I got Parmenides and Charmides mixed up. Any time I say Charmenides, just think Charmides in your head.

Translations Mentioned:

• Plato Meno and Other Dialogues / Robin Waterfield / Oxford World’s Classics

• Plato Complete Works / Rosamond Kent Sprague / Hackett

• Plato Collected Dialogues / Benjamin Jowett / Princeton University Press

In 2018, part of my working life combined with this reading project. My wife and I were new to town and were perusing the shelves at Landmark Booksellers in Franklin, TN. We were crouched down, looking at the bottom row of a set of shelves when the owner, Joel Tomlin, came up and asked us where we were from. We got to talking and my wife put in a plug for my work. She told Joel that I could build an e-commerce website if the store was in need of one.

It turns out they were and that started what has now been 8 years of work with Landmark Booksellers. I am now the business manager, handling technology, finances, and business direction. Landmark has a fabulous team of literature lovers and owners who have created a true “booklover’s paradise.”

My time at Landmark has given me a lot of hope for the future of bookstores. I’ve seen a deep hunger for the classics and a community come together around book events. We sell our fair share of new books, but our customers come from all around the world and oftentimes leave with the best works from the past. Reading is alive and well.

I hope this trend continues into the age of AI. I actually think that as AI becomes more deeply integrated into different parts of our lives, that there will be a reaction against the artificial and a move towards the real. People will gravitate to physical, tangible books they know for certain were not written or even edited by AI.

Here are some of the AI-proof sections at Landmark:

The Great Wall

In 2024, we introduced The Great Wall at Landmark Booksellers. It’s a collection of the Great Books presented in chronological order on four, well-lit bookshelves. It’s become a hit at the store. It’s truly an amazing thing to look at a set of books and see how ideas have spread over time. It’s the only bookstore I know of with this type of a curated presentation. We’re essentially using the list of authors and books I’m working my way through over the next 40 years for this reading project.

Last week, wrote about a frustrating trip to Barnes & Noble highlighting the difficulty of finding some of the Great Books in the popular bookstore chain. They were strewn about the store in a way that would have been difficult for someone not knowing that Homer would be under Poetry, Frankenstein under Horror, and Plato under Philosophy.

We make it easy at Landmark. The best books written by humankind are in one spot and in chronological order.

The Inklings Section

When I found out that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien had been friends at Oxford, I wanted to study at that magical place. As I learned more, I discovered that Lewis and Tolkien were part of a larger group of authors who regularly met and encouraged each other’s work. Many of those authors had been inspired by an earlier Scottish writer, George MacDonald. They called themselves The Inklings and George MacDonald was the Father of the Inklings.

We’ve collected many of these authors together in our Inklings section of the store. This section is naturally flanked by Mythellaneous, Rabbit Room books, and Wendell Berry. Our visitors love seeing these authors who so deeply influenced one another in one section.

The Office

Landmark is owned by Joel & Carol Tomlin. They started the bookstore in 2005 out of a love for books and desire to work a business together. Joel has collected rare books that reside in this beautiful office. Many of our author events take place here where the author sits in the big leather chair and meets & greets attendees. The office takes people back a few hundred years.

A Note on Curation

When you enter a bookstore, do you usually know what you are looking for or are you hoping for a little bit of help? One surprise at Landmark has been the importance of our booksellers in guiding shoppers to the right books. I receive an email every single time someone purchases a book from the bookstore. I love looking through those orders and I can usually determine who is working at the time based upon what people are buying. Customers really appreciate book suggestions and act on them.

My wife and I will sometimes sit down to watch a movie only to wind up not being able to decide on a film. It’s like we need a curator to guide us to the correct movie amidst the insane abundance of choice. A good bookstore does that through curation and recommendations. It does it through hiring knowledgeable bookworms.

I find it very interesting that our Nashville Amazon bookstore closed down a few years ago. That bookstore was optimized to the T. They had all the data. They knew that people who bought book A would also buy book B, so they placed those books together. They knew which books were selling and which ones weren’t. But there was no warmth. There was no personality. It felt like walking into a warehouse. The staff member didn’t even bother to say hi. The optimized bookstore eventually closed down.

I have high hopes for bookstores moving forward. We are storytelling and story-loving people. That will not go away. And while an iPhone can be an absolutely all encompassing device that consumes hours of attention a day, there’s nothing that can replace the pure joy of having your imagination ignited while reading a physical book.

Visit your local bookstore. There are good things in store. Literally.

Landmark Booksellers | 114 East Main Street, Franklin, TN 37064

I’m closing out my biweekly summer podcast schedule with an episode about my top 5 favorite Loeb Classical Library books. Do you need these if you don’t read Greek or Latin? Why collect these when there are plenty of alternatives? I address these questions and show you my top 5 (with 2 bonus books at the end) in this video podcast recorded in the Books of Titans Library.

As part of this reading project, I decided to read all of Plato’s dialogues. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, there are 45 distinct dialogues and other works. So far, I’ve read 21 of those 45.

I came into this Plato Project with almost no previous exposure to Plato. I was coming in blind. I quickly realized that Plato was continually referencing earlier philosophers. I actually stopped reading Plato last year to read those early Greek philosophers before returning to Plato again this year. That ended up helping tremendously.

In this article, I’d like to share some observations from my time with Plato. These have helped me to better understand the purpose of the dialogues and how they are structured.

Philosophy is Personal

When I think of philosophy, I think of ideas. It’s quite startling to realize that the majority of Plato’s dialogues are named after a person, not an idea. Here are some examples of titles placed into different buckets:

• Early Greek Philosophers - Parmenides, Protagoras, Gorgias (8 total dialogues)

• Contemporaries of Socrates - Charmides, Alcibiades, Phaedo (20 total dialogues)

• Themes or Ideas - Apology, Statesman, Laws (+/- 14 dialogues)

• Others - Hipparchus, Sisyphus, Minos (3 dialogues)

That means that just a little under 30 dialogues are named after a person. These were not random choices. They are the starting point of each dialogue. Plato chose each philosopher, friend, or contemporary on purpose and it’s important to try to get to know about these people before approaching the dialogues.

There’s another aspect of the personal nature of the dialogues. Plato teaches philosophy through discussion. These are not one-way lectures. They are two-way (or more) conversations. Philosophy doesn’t occur alone; it’s always in dialogue.

Aporia

I just learned about this term in Robin Waterfield’s introduction to Charmides, Laches, Lysis, and Meno. I posted about it last week and had some helpful responses from other readers on what aporia means. I wanted to share them here:

Plato’s dialogues typically end in aporia. They leave the person in the dialogue in a state of confusion or in a state where they realize they know less about a given topic or idea than they thought they knew going into it. It has the same effect on the reader.

Waterfield suggests that Socrates believed “aporia was good for the soul.”

The Elenchus: Method of Inquiry

The elenchus is another term I picked up from Robin Waterfield. It means testing or challenge and it is the method of inquiry used by Socrates. The questions Plato places in the mouth of Socrates are meant to test and challenge the person to see if they truly understand what they believe.

In my first corporate job, I remember attending a meeting where one of the executives asked painfully basic questions. These were questions that interns would have been embarrassed to ask, and yet in asking them, this executive exposed the fact that very few people in the room could actually articulate answers to these most basic of questions about the business. By appearing unintelligent, he addressed and exposed ideas we all needed to understand.

Through Plato, we see a variety of people challenged in their knowledge, oftentimes of basic ideas. This elenchus is what leads to aporia.

Definitions

Something else that Waterfield points out in his introduction is that people didn’t have nice Oxford dictionaries sitting around in Ancient Greece. Part of Plato’s purpose was to determine definitions for key terms and ideas to establish a standard from which to base discussions. Many of the questions Plato has Socrates ask are there to establish a definition both broad enough and limited enough to encompass the essence of the idea.

Remembering Plato

One of my foremost goals for this reading project is to remember what I read. The items listed above provide some keys to assisting in remembering Plato. We tend to remember stories more than lectures. Since many of these dialogues are named after a person, that provides an excellent starting point for recollection. Who is the person named and what was the topic in which Socrates set the elenchus?

From there, how does the elenchus lead to aporia in that particular dialogue? One thing I do to assist with my disobedient memory is to set aside a page in my yearly Everything Notebook to list out the Plato Dialogues I’ve read and the main idea or question by which to remember them by:

What I need to begin doing is to also list both the idea and the person. Each dialogue has a main dialogue partner or partners. Plato chose each of these people for a reason.

Start with the person and that may help you remember the idea from the dialogue.

Reading Order

I’m reading the dialogues in the following order, as presented in Plato: Complete Works by J.M. Cooper. I’ve bolded the dialogues I’ve read and have italicized the ones I have yet to read.

1. Euthyphro

2. Apology

3. Crito

4. Phaedo

5. Cratylus

6. Theaetetus

7. Sophist

8. Statesman

9. Parmenides

10. Philebus

11. Symposium

12. Phaedrus

13. Alcibiades

14. Second Alcibiades

15. Hipparchus

16. Rival Lovers

17. Theages

18. Charmides

19. Laches

20. Lysis

21. Euthydemus

22. Protagoras

23. Gorgias

24. Meno

25. Greater Hippias

26. Lesser Hippias

27. Ion

28. Menexenus

29. Clitophon

30. Republic

31. Timaeus

32. Critias

33. Minos

34. Laws

35. Epinomis

36. Letters

37. Definitions

38. On Justice

39. On Virtue

40. Demodocus

41. Sisyphus

42. Halcyon

43. Eryxias

44. Axiochus

45. Epigrams