The 10 Books I Read in May
Averaging 100 pages each day
I went from a poetry noob to dactylic hexameter, studied under four widely different saints, took a chunk out of the great books of the western world, and FINALLY earned my status as a true Catholic nerd.
Each month here at Crusade for Manliness I challenge readers to choose a number of books out of their comfort zone (mine is 5), read them, and report back. If all this did was get us off our screens it would be worth it, but there are so so many good books out there.
But in May I had an extra challenge, I wanted to work on the foundational habits of my reading life: so for one month only, I doubled the count. I finished 10 books in just 31 days.
10 good books is too many, I don’t plan on doing it again, but here is the list and my thoughts.
Poetics - Aristotle
You may be tempted to think Poetics is largely about poetry. This is not true. In 2025, it would be more correct to say that Aristotle discusses story structure more like a Robert McKee or Joseph Campbell. He outlines what the elements of a story are (in either a drama or comedy) and has strong opinions about which elements are the best and even which types of plots are best. He can make value judgements because he has a stance of what drama and storytelling is for. Poetics is story structure with a telos.
Now, in fairness, most of the stories whose structure he is discussing were in verse in the Greek. Accordingly, he has a much more poetic treatment of syllables and stress towards the end. My translation kept that section in Greek (cause how could that really be translated) so what is already a weird subject for me became completely unintelligible.
He uses many examples. I have read The Iliad, The Odyssey, Antigone, and am roughly familiar with the Oedipus cycle so I could barely follow along. It is probably best to read more than that to get the most out of it.
How to Read Poetry Like a Professor - Thomas Foster
This was much more about poetry and it worked on me. I can see how it would be more useful to structure a class around this book than read it through in 3 days like I did, but I will make my critique anyway that I think the book was roughly backwards.
He starts with the technical stuff and only later gets into things where you are interpreting meaning in poems, voice, metaphor, one of the better chapters was on making you see normal things as strange. In fact, some of the best stuff came in the conclusion. I’m not sure if this is realistic, because I am very much a poetry noob, but I was hoping that this book could show the deeper meaning behind the words themselves.
My biggest takeaway was the rule to read poems following all grammatical conventions, pausing at commas and continuing over line breaks like you would in a novel. The rules like read aloud and read twice were ones I had heard before.
Story of a Soul - St Therese of Lisieux
How had I not read this before? It’s the biggest saintly autobiography since Augustine’s Confessions (which I’ve never finished). A mainly Catholic audience will already know the message of all the little sacrifices of a mostly normal life being enough for a heroic level of virtue. A bit fewer people may know how family focused the story is, Therese’s father gave every daughter to the convent and the sisters love each other deeply. But an aspect that seems talked about much less are the psychological aspects that are implied.
That Therese can remember minor (very minor) sins, writing in her mid to late 20s from before she was 10 implies that it probably bothered her for all those years. And as much as we think of society as more Christian and modest back then, the family was still counter-cultural. Therese prays that her sister not yet a nun will be unable to go to a dance. Her father requests that people not compliment her. A family that acts like this today, just like back then, would be labeled extreme and judged accordingly (even by fellow Catholics).
It was very helpful to have read John of the Cross’ Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul going into this, I felt like even the headier spiritual content had a reference point for me and it didn’t slow me down too much.
The Intellectual Life - AG Sertillanges
This was a re-read for me. I first read this Dominican monk’s guide to thinking in the fall semester, Freshman year of college. Reading it again, I realized it how much it has influenced my strange combination of Catholic and productivity obsessions.
He gets theoretical in the pursuit of truth and a certain humble greatness, but also very practical, down to note taking, and advising that everyone study theology along with whatever else. I agree. He also says that you should learn enough Latin to read the Summa Theologica in the original or else it’s not worth bothering being an intellectual at all… I don’t go that far.
Sertillanges, if I had to guess, would be a little bit against my program here of five books a month. He argues that with very few books, you can still gain a lot of real knowledge, and going deep is better than going broad.
Spiritual Canticle - St John of the Cross
The third step in my quest to read all of St John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle is pretty different from Ascent and Dark Night. Here John is more completely in the style of analyzing his own poem. The chapters are short and based on the stanzas. The poem is longer and draws on more nature metaphors than the Dark Night poem.
There was a lot of good stuff there, and probably works better if you read one stanza/chapter of commentary at a time over weeks and weeks rather all at once. They follow a general progression that is supposed to match the spiritual life, but each commentary is semi-self contained. John will go on fairly distinct tangents making each almost like a sermon or short theological essay.
First Epistle to the Corinthians - St Paul
It’s the bible, what more do you need? Reading an epistle straight through is a good thing to do, but I haven’t since Romans in high school. Obviously, the Church spreads it out over many masses and jumbles the order and that is right and proper because it is a lot to take in. The original audience would have read it all in a row and the problems applied to them directly.
The Corinthian’s issues and Paul’s advice are still relevant (according to the Holy Ghost, who spent valuable grace resources to inspire it). That said, it’s harder to apply it being further removed. It would be helpful to have some tradition to guide us…
Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians - St Thomas Aquinas
The fourth book I read this month by a canonized Saint, not too shabby. I am hooked on commentaries. Obviously, Aquinas is a smart guy, but right from the beginning he shows that there is this elegant structure to the epistle based around sacraments (not all of them but still).
The sections in this commentary are a lot like John of the Cross stanzas except that they are not easily split between verses. Aquinas breaks up the sections by what he believes St Paul’s intentions were. (It is worth noting that St Paul is believed to have appeared to Thomas Aquinas on occasion). But, like John of the Cross, he takes opportunity in some topics to go deeper on the philosophy, on transubstantiation for example. This is a lot of fun, but also very deep and complex. I printed the commentary out on standard printer paper, and wrote many numbers and underlines in the margins.
Aquinas, at times, may be almost too smart for his own good by not numbering his points, subpoints, sub-subpoints, and yes often sub-sub-subpoints. I know that he has this structure in his head because he will describe it in the opening paragraph of each section. This sounds like something along the lines of “Paul does this in three ways, the first way has two parts, and the first part is for three reasons, the first reason is this:”
How to Read a Book - Mortimer J Adler
I should have read this in public, it is kind of funny. However, a joke or prop book it is not. Adler taught at Columbia and the University of Chicago. He served as chairman of the board of the Encyclopedia Britannica and put together the “Great Books of the Western World” list. (Three books from this month are on the list).
This guide starts with a critique of how we teach children to read, which is a mild obsession of mine, but that only lasts 10 or 20 pages. Next, he talks about how to skim books, and tell if they are any good from the title, the description on the back and the table of contents… a very professor-like skill that never gets talked about. But most of the book is how to do— in depth and broken down by genre— the kind of reading that Sertilanges was talking about: slow, deliberate, analytical, and of great books.
In fact, he says (and sells it) that if sentences in a book don’t confuse you, if the content isn’t over your head, then the book isn’t really going to give you understanding, it will only give you facts. If you understand what the book is saying, you understood that concept already, you were just missing facts. I don’t know how to reconcile this idea with the certain “ah-ha” moment I still get even when a book isn’t tripping me up much.
The Aeneid - Virgil
After the Iliad two years ago, and the Odyssey last year, the Aeneid is next. Unlike the Greek epics, this translation (which I also listened to) rhymed. That really captured some of the poetry for me. That said, I didn’t like it as much as Homer’s epics.
I see the parallels between them, that the first half is roaming in the seas and the second half is battle where one soldier has a highly aggressive attitude and big ego, Virgil doesn’t hide these things, but there were also parts where I zoned out and lost the thread. I imagine this is worse in Virgil’s pastoral works. It didn’t bother me that the whole story leads to the greatness of Rome and is basically propaganda, but I didn’t like it either.
Perhaps, I feel guilty because I feel like I should like Virgil, Dante and St Jerome were big fans and they are better qualified judges than I am. I will have to reassess when I read him again one day, but I also think there was more content in Homer that I could recognize from things I had heard of in trivia or referenced in other works.
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
I have been a Catholic nerd for at least five years now, but I have only now finished Lord of the Rings. I only started it last year after reading the Hobbit. I don’t think all Catholic have to read it, but the desire I (somewhat) had (and know some others do have) to NOT read it in protest is misplaced.
There are not many pieces of media that unite a American Catholic culture in this time of modernism and straight up liturgical crisis in some places. And then there is the value that fantasy has as a genre. It touches the same part of human instinct as the “re-enchantment” movement, or Catholic men’s love for medieval times, or just large vistas of nature. Fantasy does all of these things by it’s nature. I don’t know for sure if LOTR is the single best and most Catholic piece of fantasy fiction, but if there is a better and more Catholic book, that book is not as famous.
What I do know is that I hope to have kids on day, and after reading them the Hobbit, but before letting them see the LOTR movies, I hope to read this very long book again, to them, out loud. Some of the chapters are pretty long, but at 62 chapters that is just over two months.