BONUS | 3 High School Books You Need To Read Again
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Three books that I read in high school that I'm rereading now, and you should too. All right, so actually this year is the 100-year anniversary of... The Great Gatsby, this is the copy that I read in high school. I actually, there's a new 100 year edition published by Scribner's that's really, really good. This is the edition that I reread. As the ancients said, we never step in the same river twice. So I'm not the same person I was when I read this when I was 15 or 16. I'm not the same person I was when I reread it when I was 25 or 30 or 35. And rereading it now for probably the 10th time, I'm a different person.
And you know, you always take different things from the books what i like about this is my edition you can see the different color highlighters the different color notes i clearly spilled food on it at some point when i read this in high school i thought it was about the jazz age i thought it was about corruption i thought it was about power i thought about it was the american dream and as i read it when i'm older i'm struck even by just the first lines in my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that i've been turning over in my mind ever since Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you have.
When I graduated from high school in June 2005, my aunt gave me a copy of Man's Search for Meaning. Ryan, this is one of my mom's favorite books. I think there is great value between these covers. I wanted to pass on part of your grandmother to you on your graduation. Congratulations on your life path. This is one of the most incredible books you will ever read. Viktor Frankl is in three different concentration camps. He loses his family, he loses his wife, he loses his life's work, and yet he comes out of it convinced that life does still have meaning. That while struggle is unavoidable, our job is to take that struggle and that suffering and to turn it into something. This is one of the best-selling books of all time for very good reason.
This was an incredible man with an incredible story. There's also a sequel, basically, to this book that came out during the pandemic that I was really struck by. It's a collection of his essays. It's called Yes to Life in Spite of Everything, which is a perfect encapsulation of the wisdom of Viktor Frankl's thinking that we say yes, we keep going despite everything. And reading this book, At 18, I hadn't really gone through anything. And so I could only understand what he was saying at one level. And as I've lived the last 20 plus years of my life, I've come to understand these ideas more and more and more. And I think you will too. Then the last one, I read Fahrenheit 451 in high school. And I remember thinking that it was about government censorship.
that the government sends their firemen to destroy books because they're, you know, in a big brother way trying to prevent people from access to information. But when you reread this book now in light of our current culture and political environment, you realize that's only a small part of it, that actually the censorship was coming primarily from the bottom up, that it was people not wanting to be offended, not wanting to deal with unpleasant or difficult ideas. That was the pain that they were trying to solve by burning the books. There's a passage in the book that I guess I missed as a high schooler trying to just write an essay about the book where Captain Beatty explains to Montauk why the books are banned.
He says, Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book about tobacco and cancer of the lungs. The cigarette people are weeping. Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, to the incinerator.
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