The Five Best Books I Read in 2023
Here are five (check, six) awesome books that you should read next year.
The love of short lists will never get old. This one, however, holds a special place in my heart.
I love reading, and love getting better at reading. As I’ve said more times than I can remember, there is nothing that has informed my content more than the books that I read and the people I allow to occupy space in my head. They have provided an invaluable voice on how I see myself, the world, and what I want to do in the future. The point of these lists is to give you the best of this material, and how it can hopefully shape you to do the same.
In total, I wanted to read 52 books this year. I accomplished that mission and then some, which was a very pleasant surprise. My biggest concern was upping the ante from the previous year to a point where it would dilute the overall quality of the material that I read. While this was the case in some of the books that I read, it wasn’t nearly the case in all of them. This was my favorite year of reading that I have ever done, and I hope that trend continues to move upward in that direction.
The biggest reason I can attribute to this would be that all of the reading that I did (for the most part) was done with a purpose. I wanted to do specific research on specific topics, most of which centered around narcissism and our culture’s obsession with the Self. I did that, and it proved to help tremendously in building out a monster skeleton for my next book. I’m already about 50% of the way done with it, and I hope to publish it at the end of next year.
Additionally, I did something that I had wanted to do for a long time, but simply had not prioritized. I dove into fiction again for the first serious time in a long time this year, and it was wonderful. It lubricated a part of my brain that had not moved nor functioned properly in a long time, and unlocked a lot of pent up creative ideas that I had. It feels like a muscle group has finally awakened to help out the rest of my brain. It’s awesome, and I am going to do my best to keep working in those veins going into this next year, with the goal of hopefully making a creative fiction work of my own by year’s end.
That fiction reading, combined with the intentionality of my non-fiction writing, informed a lot of my reading going into this next year. For the focus on next year’s work, I intend to focus on work that centers around human suffering and triumph, and what makes people go through those things to become the inspiration that they are today. My research will be centered, essentially, on what makes a modern hero, and the one quality that I believe to undergird all of them. I’m confident in my assertions, but I’m interested to see what more I can find out.
But, until then, my best books list for 2023 is in, and it’s a heater. These books go all over the place, and I’m very confident that a person who is curious about the subject material will find enjoyment out of all of them. They are in some cases very hard, in some cases very easy, to read. However, they will all challenge you, inform you, and do the best they can to educate you about some of the most complicated matters of life.
I enjoyed them tremendously, and I hope you do too. So, without further adieu, here they are.
Honorable Mention- The Terminal List, Jack Carr (2018)
Before last summer, I had stopped reading fiction almost entirely. I had no direction of where to take my reading. Nothing interested me. It all seemed too far-fetched, too artistic, too airy-fairy, to beyond the pale of what I would consider entertaining. Nothing at the bookstores that I visited broached my interest. I didn’t think it was in the cards for me to get hooked into a brand of book that I once loved.
And then Amazon Prime happened. Over the prior summer, all anyone was talking about at my boxing gym, Archetype Boxing Club, was a new show they had seen that was apparently one of the most badass series in the history of streaming. It was starring Chris Pratt as the main character, and had people like Taylor Kitsch and JD Pardo as the supporting cast. It was apparently ridiculously violent which, in a boxing gym, is always a solid strategy for popularity. I took the feedback for what it was, stored it in the back of my mind, and pressed on.
Over the next few months, the name Jack Carr kept coming up. Joe Rogan had him on his podcast multiple times, as did many other people. I quickly readied the name of that heralded Amazon Prime series, The Terminal List, was the name of Jack Carr’s debut book of the same name. This struck me as odd. No one, particularly people at a boxing gym, think novelists are deserving of a streaming series, let alone one that appeals to that demographic of people. Most of them suck, or at least appeal to a different breed of people.
So, while I was at The Painted Porch, Ryan Holiday’s bookshop in Bastrop, I saw a rugged and used copy of Carr’s book detailing the series of James Reece, the title character, heading up a whole shelf dedicated to the series. I pulled it out, placed it on top of three others, and bought it. As time passed, I needed a new show to watch. After getting it with my boxing team, they all confirmed that The Terminal List was, indeed, the shit. However, principled as I am, I made a vow to myself that I would never again watch something that had been first written. So, after collecting dust on my bookshelf for more than half a year, I pulled it out, flipped it open, and began to read Carr’s debut novel.
Brad Thor, a serial novelist who is one of the great thriller writers of our time, said that Jack Carr’s (who he helped get into the door of Simon and Schuster) debut novel was maybe the greatest debut novel that he’d ever read. This is a big compliment coming from someone like Thor. He reads a lot of books. He’s a writer himself. This is high praise, particularly from one of the most celebrated writers in a very competitive and hard genre to write in.
However, I am here to officially confirm any and all of Brad Thor’s endorsements of Jack Carr, most specifically the one mentioned. I tore through The Terminal List like nobody’s business. In the words of his friend Joe Rogan, it was fucking riveting. I was hooked from the jump. It read like a movie, the chapters perfectly punctuated like scenes would be. The violence was beautiful, providing a wonderful change from the tone-deaf versions of revenge and war we’ve seen populate the small and big screens.
When I did more research into Jack Carr, I quickly discovered how impressive he was. He’s one of the most well-roundedly smart people I’ve ever seen, knowing many things about many things. After that validation, I was sold. I bought the rest of the series, and am currently on his fifth book in the series now. All of them are great, but The Terminal List, I feel, will hold a special place in my heart for a long time.
In any other listing I would do, Carr’s debut novel would rank much higher. However, it’s not on this list for two reasons. First, the books ahead of it are also really fucking good, which is the primary. Second, I find myself tending to reward one-off books that greatly shaped my perspective and focus. Carr’s certainly did that, which is why it holds as the first fiction book to ever make the list. I have a feeling it will not be the last. His work is fantastic, and I can’t wait to read it for a long time- you should too.
5. Tucker, Chadwick Moore (2023)
I hated Tucker Carlson three years ago. I couldn’t stand him, his flaunty arrogance and hair, and the way he spoke to people. However, that began to change as I began to change, when I realized who Tucker Carlson (and everyone else) really was, and what they were really about. What you will see when you dive into the psychology of any person, but particularly someone like Tucker Carlson, is that they are most likely very complicated and nuanced people. There are a lot of things at work at almost all times.
Three years later, I don’t think there’s a singular cultural figure I value more than I value Tucker Carlson. This is a remarkable change, one that I never thought would ever happen with anyone, let alone someone who seemingly everyone either loves or hates. I think it’s that polarization that brought me to him. As someone who believes polarization to be incredibly important, regardless of what that polarization does, I was eager to see what made it up.
The main reason for the polarization surrounding Tucker Carlson is simple. He grew up as a privileged boy to a single father. His mother abandoned him and his family at an early age to abscond to be an artist. His father was a competent and powerful journalist and media executive. Carlson’s stepmother was the descendent of one of the most prominent food companies in the world. They never had to want for anything. He went to the finest prep schools in the country. He took a job in the media and got famous very young. He married his high school sweetheart and had four children. He traveled the world. He talked to the most powerful people in it. He had everything that most people in Carlson’s position of influencing the public via mass media and political commentary wanted.
But Carlson didn’t want it. After the first 30 years of his life, he began to despise how the people that had defined his entire existence lived- their elitism, their snobbery, their disgust for people who they deemed as beneath them. When Donald Trump did the same thing in 2016, the switch finally flipped. Carlson finally figured out why everything in the world was happening. He began the media version of Nostradamus, masterfully pivoting his show from what was a fervent neoconservative worldview to a nationalist populist, igniting both fury and passion from both sides of the political aisle.
And, most remarkably of all, as detailed by his good friend Chadwick Moore, his lifestyle became a lot better as a result. He moved (albeit after Antifa attacked his home and family) to some of the most remote parts of the country, permanently relocating his life and his studio to get out more towards the things that he valued. He doesn’t own a television, operate any of his own social media, or listen to podcasts. He gets out in nature. He has coffee with his wife every morning. He talks with his brother and his father daily. He has localized his life to such an extreme that no one can touch him.
This was most evident when he was fired from Fox News after giving a speech at the Heritage Foundation. Getting ousted on the same day as his much-lampooned folly Don Lemon, people thought that they were pulling the plug on Tucker Carlson. Instead, they gave their worst enemy a gateway to be a pioneer of X Streaming, using Elon Musk’s newest contraption to broadcast his message to the heights of more than 400 million views in a manner of weeks, 100x-ing his nightly numbers on Fox.
What I love most about Tucker Carlson is how he finds value in things that are real. When you look around and analyze the world, there are very few people that choose to do this. They put their faith in things that are far-reaching- money, status, power, etc. Carlson chooses to put himself in the things that are within five feet of him- his family, his faith, the nature that surrounds him, his work, his staff, his nation. Carlson is far from a person who is perfect. But he is certainly a person that is real, someone who has rejected every social norm that seemingly every person is prescribed to follow in our current orthodoxy. He is someone that should be admired for who he is, not for whom he wishes to be.
4. The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis (1941)
As I officially was reborn again in April, I wanted to do work beforehand to make sure I knew what I was getting into when it came to my renowned interest and dedication to my faith journey. The person that I, and seemingly every other Believer, was drawn to was C.S. Lewis. Having known Lewis primarily, as most people do, from his Chronicles of Narnia books, I was skeptical about what this man could teach me about anything related to the realm of my new reality.
It was Lewis’s backstory that most intrigued me as I was going through the process. Lewis, like me, was a Born-Again Christian, having been an atheist most of his life before moving towards faith after seeing the horrors of war and the collapse of society into totalitarianism in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Lewis, therefore, did not come to faith ideologically, as most early Believers do. Rather, he had to come to faith the hard way, the only way that I, and many could do so:
By seeing that it was the only option that made sense.
Through his own discoveries and recognitions about faith as it acted in the world, Lewis wrote constantly about how faith and the real world intersected. A big reason why his children’s book series was so popular was for this reason. A messianic figure, the only person who could save the world, was the constant throughout the entire cast of characters. Some stayed loyal to him, but most didn’t. Those who did were rewarded with eternal life. Those who did not went away from him, getting their misguided wish at the end of the adventure. It’s the Bible, just with a talking lion instead of Christ.
Knowing this, I purchased the multi-book series of Lewis’s canon on theology, reading every one of his magnum opus, Mere Christianity, which I expect to tackle sometime next year. All of them proved to be very insightful, helpful, and raw. I began to see Lewis’s side of where he was coming from, even though our denominations of faith are very different with him being a Catholic and me being an Evangelical Christian. However, there was one subject that I never thought I would agree on that he made me see clear as day.
Even as I dove deep into my faith, I never was able to draw the recognition between the real world and our walks and talks of things like demons, evil, and Satan. I thought that was an old wive’s tale, something that was used only to scare people back in the day when they didn’t have things like empiricism and science to fall back on. However, with one book, Lewis made me not only recognize that I was wrong, but that I was so wrong that I needed to shift my entire worldview.
The Screwtape Letters is written from the perspective of Wormwood, a demon who is writing letters to “Screwtape”, his master. Wormwood is on an assignment from Screwtape to convert a human test subject from a Christian into a nonbeliever, one who will turn his back on God for the Satanic side of evil. The way that Wormwood chooses to do this is by using the world around him, our beloved Earth, to confuse his victim in order to turn him away from God’s grace and bring him into the clutches of the Enemy.
Even though the book was written more than 75 years ago, it’s absolutely stunning to see how relevant and longstanding the temptations of this world are. From everything to believing the lies that people tell about us, to knowing how humans are tempted to give up and lose endurance, to the provocations of anger and lust, every way Wormwood pokes his victim is exactly how all of us are poked.
Even more terrifying, it shows how easy it is to do so, to worm your way into the clutches of the people that want nothing but the worst for you. If nothing else, The Screwtape Letters shows you that evil is not only real, but way more accessible than most could ever hope to realize. This is a very scary thing, but also a thing that everyone should be aware of.
When growing up, we would visit family in Cincinnati and drive past a billboard that said “Hell is Real”. If only they knew just how right they were.
3. Never Finished, David Goggins (2022)
When I first saw David Goggins, I thought he was a caricature, like a bad character in an even worse movie. He seemed to be too unreal, too outlandish to even exist. The crazier part was that, as I dove more into Goggins’s life, it turned out that I was more right than I ever anticipated. David Goggins blew away all my expectations, which were very high given what people had said about him for years. As I dove into his first book, Can’t Hurt Me, my overwhelming feeling about any and all things David Goggins was complete and utter disbelief. I was right to believe that he was a construct, because David Goggins had to construct everything about his life from the ground up.
However, when Goggins announced via his Instagram that he was publishing his second book with my ill-fated publisher, Scribe Media, I couldn’t help but initially cringe. His first book had gone so hard, changed so many lives, and made him one of the most helpful and relatable self-help influencers in the world, that I didn’t think that he had anything left to give. I thought he had emptied the clip, dropped the mic, leaving the rest of the world in awe. I didn’t think there was much more to say about David Goggins. He was still a beast, one of the greatest examples of human striving the world has to offer. But I thought, from what I had seen, that his story had been told.
But, in true Goggins fashion, he proved me, and a lot of other people, wrong once again. Never Finished proved to be one of the few creative works that was rightly deserving of a sequel. It’s one thing to tell the story of an underdog story and how that person came to transcend their circumstances. It’s quite another to tell others how you kept that dog in you when you crested the top of the mountain.
Yet, surprisingly, Goggins’s second book did not do either of those things. Instead, in a wild third route, it showed how Goggins, on a never-ending quest to show how suffering is the greatest teacher, broke himself down even further than he already had, made himself suffer even more, to prove that he could go through a secondary transformation when he never had to do anything else again. In his own words, he’s addicted to it. He feeds off of it. This is who he is.
The thing that impresses me so much about David Goggins, the thing that won me over, was that, regardless of where he is, he never feels like he has made it. This stands out to me because I know I can never be that person. I don’t want to be that person. He chases misery and unhappiness. He is happiest when he is going through the worst things in life. He has destroyed most everything around him over the pursuit of greatness.
Most people in a position like David Goggins, when they’re such a dog at a certain area of life, would never own this fact. They would say that they have it all figured out, that their family is great, that they see their children enough, that their wife really loves them, that they really take care of themselves. All of these things, for all people who have Goggins’s wiring, are liars. Goggins himself, who is far more honest than these people, is not.
David Goggins knows who he is totally. His identity is crystalized with the fire of his own soul, one that will never be put out by anyone, and much less himself. He knows that he’s not everyone’s cup of tea, that he makes a lot of people uncomfortable. His ownership of that fact, his willingness to tell quite literally everyone to go fuck themselves, is the type of courage that I admire, regardless of the fact that I would never choose his lifestyle myself.
David Goggins is the owner of what I believe to be the single greatest dedication in the history of publishing, which opened his first book, Can’t Hurt Me- “To the little voice in my head that will never, ever allow me to stop.” The funny thing is, he’s right. I don’t think he will ever stop. And I, and the other people who love him, don’t want him to either. Goggins is a shining beacon to a simple reality- when you go hard enough at something, more people will hate you than love you. And, when this happens, you’ll be far better off.
2. Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson (2023)
Considering that I’ve already beaten you good people over the head with an entire article and podcast dedicated to what I learned from this book, I will try my hardest to try a different tactic.
There is perhaps no greater influence on world life today than Elon Musk. Even though someone like Donald Trump forces everyone to have an opinion of him, not everyone is affected by him. The same cannot be said for Elon Musk. He is currently offering wireless internet to people in the Middle East and the Ukraine via satellites that he owns. He has democratized the electric vehicles that seemingly everyone wants to drive. He owns the social media company that single-handedly swayed the last two Presidential elections. If there is a notable space in the culture and in life, Musk is almost certain to have a hand in shaping that narrative.
When Isaacson set out to craft the definitive biography (to this point) of the most influential man in recent human memory, he set out with a theme that would define throughout the book- what type of person is Elon Musk? Is he a hero, or a villain? Someone to admire, or someone to fear? With Musk, he acutely saw a dichotomy that was emerging, particularly after he bought Twitter and rebranded it as X. Was Musk a Bond villain-type lunatic, or was he going to drag us kicking and screaming into the saving of the world like a modern-day secular Messiah?
I think the brilliance of Isaacson’s work with Musk, as he did in his biography on Steve Jobs, was that he was able to thread the needle between both personas to show that Musk is simultaneously both and neither of those things. He is not going to destroy the world, nor will he save the world. He is, however, doing one thing by balancing both of the extremes that we can all look to:
Become better versions of ourselves.
I don’t run in any of the circles or occupy any of the same spaces as Elon Musk. We couldn’t be more opposite from what we do and how we act. However, what I felt after reading a biography about a man I had nothing in common with was something I didn’t think would happen- inspiration. Elon Musk, like he has done his entire life, lit a fire under everyone he seemed to touch, kickstarting them into gear and making them push themselves to achieve more.
I’m not sure if Elon Musk is going to survive the hellstorm that’s currently engulfing his life. He’s currently in a custody battle with his favorite child, also named X, with his on-again-off-again girlfriend Grimes. Seemingly everyone in the political establishment hates him. Silicon Valley has almost-universally condemned him as well. He doesn’t have a religion, so no god is coming to save him. It’s all up to him to pull off the impossibility that is his life.
But, strangely, one of the things I learned from Elon Musk throughout this book is that he, perhaps more than anyone, is both a creator and incubator of controlled chaos. He does not like to be bored, to be deemed as somehow unuseful, to be seen as someone who is content with the status quo. So, therefore, to all who know him best, he has spent his life, both for better and for worse, doing everything he can to upend every single one that he comes across.
It is this phenomenon around Musk that makes him so loved and hated by so many different groups of people, and why he is so important in our time. There is perhaps no greater sin that our current Expert, Faux, and Ruling Classes have committed than to reinforcing and setting poor standards. “The way things work” has done nothing but drag us kicking and screaming into cultural rot and tyranny.
To invert this, the most efficient way would be the promotion of someone that strictly does NOT follow that orthodoxy, that pushes against the grain so aggressively that he makes himself seem more often an enemy than a friend. This is the purpose that Elon Musk serves. Change does not happen without change agents. And, I believe (and he does as well) that he is perhaps the one we need to deliver the greatest shock to the existing system.
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman (2020)
Ben Shapiro has stated publicly that he reads about five books every single week. I have no idea if this is true or not, but given how smart Ben is, I wouldn’t put it past him. The ability to consume information and, more importantly, to use it, is something he does quite effectively, no matter if you agree with him or not. If most people could read five books in a week, and do all the other things that Ben does along with them, they’d probably be really fucking successful too.
However, with me usually struggling to get one book in a week, these statistics are nothing short of amazing. That’s a shit ton of stamina, and a shit ton of precision. A good portion of the books I read turn out to be terrible, so I can’t imagine some of the tripe that Shapiro and people who are wired like him have to sort through in that process.
But, on the flip side, it also means that the better the book in Shapiro’s rotation, the better it most likely stands in the overall pantheon of books that are really, really good. And, recently, Shapiro has sung the praises of one book in particular. This book, according to Shapiro, is the single-best book he’s read in the past 10 years. If you do the math, that’s first place out of exactly 2,600 books. A pretty high mark. The crazy thing is that, after reading it myself, he wasn’t exaggerating in the slightest.
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is probably the greatest book I’ve read since I read 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson back in 2020. I bought it on recommendation from Shapiro and several others because of their intensity about it, and it had a very similar effect on me. It totally blew me away. Out of any book I had read, and out of any person that had written them, it was this book more than any other that was able to articulately explain to me why our culture had done what it had done in the last couple of years to drive itself completely off a cliff.
Truman’s book was so straightforward, so matter-of-fact, so good, that I knew I needed to do further work with it. In my next book, Truman’s catalog proved to be essential, and perhaps the linchpin, in making the argument that I make. Truman’s argument, that a combination of internalized narcissism (mostly cataloged in a movement known as Expressive Individualism), plus a detachment of religious thought from the broad cultural context, is the reason for the mad derangement we can’t seem to spark ourselves out of, is perhaps the best I’ve heard at explaining how things in our world have gone so ary.
Citing some of the most brilliant minds of the last two centuries in psychology, philosophy, medicine, theology, and politics, Trueman weaves together a cohesive argument as to why we seem to be headed towards self-destruction via untrammeled and repressive individualism. We have taken things too far, he argues. To go backwards does not mean to become luddites, but rather to know and appreciate what got us here before our internalized narcissism took place.
This is a bold claim to make for everyone, both left and right, secular and religious. However, it needed to be said. As I baked in Trueman’s words for months after I put the book down, I began seeing this trend everywhere I looked. It’s truly seeped into our culture so much so that I don’t believe it can be removed unless we all collectively look towards paying attention to it. But, to Trueman’s eerie point, that is exactly the problem. We’ll see if we can fix it. I look forward to at least trying my best to do so.
Happy reading. One more conversation, one more podcast, and then we begin anew. See you all in 2024.
Sam