Podcast: The Daily Stoic
Episode: Thomas Chatterton Williams on Practical Philosophy and Embracing Contradiction
Here’s a list of all the books mentioned in this episode, complete with an Amazon buy link and quotes from the episode.
Aesop's Fables
Buy on Amazon"So he took money that in retrospect I realized he didn't always have, and he paid us handsomely, for our age, to sit and study and to read Aesop's Fables when we were really young and then to get on to more sophisticated things later."
War and Peace
Buy on Amazon"You know, when you immerse yourself in War and Peace or something like that, it requires hours and hours of investment before you start to feel this world that Tolstoy conjured up around you out of sheer language."
Wuthering Heights
Buy on Amazon"It was very difficult for me to see, even as somebody coming from a house full of books, why at that age I was reading Wuthering Heights, for example."
The Lottery
Buy on Amazon"So, my dad, when one of the—I mean this is probably a little bit cliché or maybe obvious to some of your listeners, but when I was 15 or 16 and my best friend and I were studying all the time with my dad and we were navigating our social context and trying to figure out how to manage and maneuver around peer pressure, my dad gave us Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, this short story about this public stoning, you know that the whole town participates in."
The Lottery
Buy on Amazon"So The Lottery is something that I can still see myself sitting at the kitchen table and him handing to me on a Xerox printout to think through and underline and then talk about later when we were done."
Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed
Buy on Amazon"For my dad, like enormously impactful books for him were like Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, which I have to admit I used to talk to him about Maimonides and stuff, but I never actually read."
The Brothers Karamazov
Buy on Amazon"Then I read The Brothers Karamazov and it was just an astonishing reading experience for me, and it kind of shattered my faith."
The Story of Philosophy
Buy on Amazon"Basically, before the age of 10, the story that we’ve always understood from him was that in a neighbor's house, he came across a copy of Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy."
Between the World and Me
Buy on Amazon"But there's an astonishing kind of passage in Between the World and Me where he basically sees a kind of caricature of an upper-class or wealthy Frenchman in a beautiful car smoking a cigarette."
The Children
Buy on Amazon"And I was reading lately, I've been reading David Halberstam's book, The Children, on the sit-in movement."
Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race
Buy on Amazon"And that's actually really one of the main arguments in my second book, Self-Portrait in Black and White."