Books

Abraham Lincoln

Carl Sandburg poetically tells the story of the United States’ sixteenth president. 

It’s a great and good book about a great and good man, but it’s almost kitschy in its self conscious effort to mythologize. Sandburg clearly wanted for it to pass as a proper biography, but it seemed to me that his real goal was to write an American Aeneid. 

One of his unspoken theses is that Lincoln, much more than the founding generation, represented the genesis of the true American spirit at its finest. 

The Prairie Years section, especially, is distractingly poetic in its language. And then after hundreds of pages of getting used to the flowery prose, the book transforms into a direct journalistic account of Lincoln’s role in the war. 

But these are just quibbles. It’s an incredible story of a peerless man at a pivotal time. The book delivers, even if it’s quirky and unabashedly partisan. 

Recommended for fans of history and biography.

Of Mice and Men

Two migrant workers have a bad time settling into a new gig. 

Steinbeck is a strange animal. His prose is great—sharp, direct, and natural. The stories are good. Nothing mind blowing, but always solid. The characters are especially memorable, but even adjusting for that, his books hit way harder than you’d expect. There’s some secret alchemy to them that just reaches into you and torques your insides. 

It feels more like a gigantic short story than a novel. It’s all one big push to a single big idea. And holy shit, when you get there it’s so intense. 

This was my first pass through it. I don’t want to spoil any of it, but the ninth grade English teachers were right about this one. I finished it around a week ago and I still can’t stop thinking about it. Pound for pound it’s one of the best books of all time. 

Strongest recommendation, a universal must read book.

Right then, I'm going to have to push this up my reading list.