Before we get into today’s piece…our Read to Lead course over at Daily Stoic has been updated for 2026! If you want to become a better reader and get more out of your reading, check it out here. Sign up by September 22nd and you’ll also get to join me for a live Q&A—I’d love to see you there!
It’s been said that books are “uniquely portable magic.”
But, believe it or not, I think that understates it.
If you love to read, you know what I mean.
A few weeks ago, I was in Minneapolis and walked by an Indigenous restaurant called Indígena at the Guthrie Theater right next to my hotel. It sounded interesting, so I walked in, ordered, sat down, and pulled out the book I had started on the plane: Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather.
I’ve found that when you read old famous novels you find one of two things: they are either totally unreadable, or they are so readable you can’t stand it. This book is the latter. It is incredible and sitting there reading it while I ate bison bone marrow was a nearly transcendent experience.
It was like traveling through time and around the world. It starts in Rome with a bunch of cardinals deciding who they are going to assign to the American Southwest to oversee an enormous diocese of tens of thousands of square miles after the Mexican-American War. What follows is a strange book unlike any I’ve read before. It has no huge action scenes, but every page is somehow riveting and beautiful.
It’s got buffalo and corrupt priests. It’s got cathedrals and canyons. It’s got primordial underground rivers and Kit Carson. And the huge sweep of history and territory is breathtaking. Sitting there in Minneapolis in 2026, I was somehow also there inside Cather’s nineteenth-century New Mexico too.
And when I eventually looked up from the page, the bison bone marrow in front of me, the red neon “YOU ARE ON NATIVE LAND” sign above Indígena’s kitchen, the Mississippi River flowing there across the street, the three-hour flight I had just taken—it all felt a little richer, stranger, more interesting, more meaningful.
It was just one of those fleeting feelings that reminded me of all the reasons I love to read and how reading enriches life in almost unimaginable and inexpressible ways.
In Greece last year, I wandered into a little bookstore in Ithaca that felt more like a small office supply store. There was a book called The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller. I had never heard of it and was momentarily deterred by the horrendously inaccessible title, but I grabbed it anyway. It’s an account of his travels in Greece in 1939. At one point, sailing toward Corfu, he watches the islands come into view.
“Out of the sea,” Miller writes, “as if Homer himself had arranged it for me, the islands bobbed up, lonely, deserted, mysterious in the fading light. I couldn’t ask for more, nor did I want anything more. I had everything a man could desire, and I knew it. I knew too that I might never have it again.”
I got goosebumps. This book I had picked up on a whim, written more than eighty years earlier, perfectly put into words something I was experiencing, there, with my family, walking in the footsteps of all the influences that had shaped my life. I could never have articulated it that way myself but I thought about that passage many times during our trip.
That’s magic. That’s art. That’s humanity. That’s the meaning of life right there.
That’s what I love about Stefan Zweig’s little biography of Montaigne. I first read it in 2016, then returned to it during the pandemic. Montaigne had lived through plague and religious wars. Zweig was writing about him centuries later, in exile from the Nazis. I was reading them both as my own world was being turned upside down. It’s a very surreal experience to read a book about a man turning inward amidst the cruelty and close-mindedness of his time, written by a man fleeing the brutality and persecutions of his time, and find that both are helping you make sense of yours.
Three very different lives, separated by centuries, yet here were two men helping me think through questions I was facing myself. How do you think clearly when everyone seems to be losing their minds? How do you remain human in an inhuman time?
And of course, books also let you enter experiences you’ve never had. I heard someone say that a book should be a window and not a mirror—that it should help you look in on someone else, or out into another world rather than back at yourself. That’s why I love memoirs. They help you get inside someone else’s life.
What’s it like to be the most powerful man in the world? Meditations gives us a glimpse. What’s it like to die of terminal cancer? When Breath Becomes Air documents it. What’s it like to be a queer teenage girl with a twin? Tegan and Sara Quin’s book High School is a fascinating picture of it. What’s it like to be an alcoholic in an insane asylum in the 1930s? William Seabrook’s Asylum captures it through the lens of a travel writer who committed himself to one. What was it like to undergo a gender transition in the 1970s? Jan Morris’s Conundrum is an incredible and eye-opening account of it.
Sometimes you’re not ready for the power of a book, even though it’s there. I thought Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was good when I first read it. It was devastating when I read it after having kids. On the night I finished, all I could do was walk quietly into my son’s room and sob while he slept. The book is one of the most beautiful and profound depictions of struggle and sacrifice and love ever put down on the page. McCarthy had taken me inside another father’s experience, and when I put the book down, I carried it into my own. My son was asleep in his bed. Nothing about that had changed. But standing there looking at him, I felt it differently.
The same book can do that to you more than once. The words stay the same, but your life keeps giving you new ways to understand them.
As part of our Quarterly Classics Book Club, I just reread History of the Peloponnesian War. It was a form of time travel for me. Not just because Thucydides is a great writer who transports you to the three-decade-long war between Athens and Sparta but because I first read this book roughly 20 years ago and I still have my copy. It is crazy to look at notes I wrote at that age…We never step in the same river twice (although I am amazed at how consistently the same passages still strike me).
But of course, the craziest thing about Thucydides is this sentence from the introduction: “My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.” And here we are, talking about his book 2500 years later.
You did it dude!
Of course, these are the big and famous books, the ones I remember where I was when I read them. But just as we quickly forget