Episode · The Daily Stoic · 2022-09-20
Ryan Holiday & Thomas Chatterton Williams: books mentioned on The Daily Stoic
Thomas Chatterton Williams on Practical Philosophy and Embracing Contradiction
Thomas Chatterton Williams discussed Aesop's Fables, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides, Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed by Daniel Frank and others, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, and The Children by David Halberstam, and criticized Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Ryan Holiday recommended The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and discussed War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoi.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
-
Aesop's Fables
Discussed“and to pay us handsomely um for our age to to sit and and and study and to read Aesop's Fables when we were really young and then to get on to more sophisticated things later.”
Where to get it
-
War and Peace
Discussed“It's you know, when you immerse yourself in War and Peace or something like that, it it requires hours and hours of investment before you start to feel this world that Tolstoy conjured up around you out of sheer language.”
Where to get it
-
War and Peace
Discussed“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.”
Where to get it
-
The Great Gatsby
Recommended“And so I feel like we also have this kind of one-fits-all, like everyone should read Great Gatsby in high school.”
Where to get it
-
Wuthering Heights
Discussed“And it's very difficult for me to see, even as somebody who was coming from a house full of books, it was difficult for me to see why at that age I was reading Wuthering Heights, for example.”
Where to get it
-
The Lottery
Discussed“So, um my dad when one of those I mean, this is probably a little bit cliche or or it's maybe obvious to some of your listeners, but when I was 15, 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”
Where to get it
-
Guide for the Perplexed
Discussed“for my dad, like enormously impactful um books for him were like Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, which I have to admit I I I've I used to talk to him about Maimonides, but I never did actually read um Guide for the Perplexed.”
Where to get it
-
Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed
Discussed“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.”
Where to get it
-
The Brothers Karamazov
Discussed“and then I read The Brothers Karamazov and it was just an astonishing reading experience for me and it kind of shattered my faith”
Where to get it
-
The Story of Philosophy
Discussed“And so, he basically was under the age of 10, and the story that we've always understood from him was that he in in a neighbor's house, uh he came across um a copy of Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy.”
Where to get it
-
Between the World and Me
Critiqued“Um but there's an astonishing kind of passage in Between the World and Me where he basically sees um a kind of caricature of an upper class or wealthy um Frenchman in a in a beautiful car smoking a cigarette and he imagines him going on to have some type of amazing night and kind of living this kind of”
Where to get it
-
The Children
Discussed“And I was reading lately, I've been reading David Halberstam's book, The Children, on the sit-in movement.”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (2) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
Plugged Self-Portrait in Black and White
“And that's actually really um one of the main arguments in my in my second book, Self-Portrait in Black and White.”
Plugged Self-Portrait in Black and White
“And that's actually really one of the main arguments in my second book, Self-Portrait in Black and White.”