Twenty Books Every Man Should Read Before Forty

Twenty books in ten years works out to one every six months. That's not a reading challenge. That's a bookmark and one television habit you were ready to lose anyway.

Most men who say they don't read mean they don't sit down. So sit down. Twenty pages before bed gets you through almost anything on this list inside a month. Keep a paperback in the truck for the school pickup line, because fifteen minutes twice a day is a book a month all by itself. And drop anything that bores you at page fifty. Life's short and the list is long.

I've flagged the rough ones. Some of these books have violence, cruelty and adult subject matter in them, because some of them are about war and prison camps and men at their worst. None of them are crude for the fun of it.

Hard men, hard places

Endurance, by Alfred Lansing. Shackleton's ship gets crushed by Antarctic ice and twenty-eight men spend two years trying to stay alive. Every one of them comes home. Lansing wrote it from the crew's own diaries, and it reads like a thriller. If you read one book on this list, read this one. It'll take you a week.

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand. Louie Zamperini, Olympic runner, crashes into the Pacific, survives 47 days on a raft, and then things get worse. The last third is a conversion story and Hillenbrand doesn't flinch from it. Mature: sustained accounts of POW brutality and torture.

All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque. The best argument ever written that young men should not be spent cheaply by old men in comfortable rooms. Short. Devastating. Mature: graphic battlefield injury and death.

The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara. Three days at Gettysburg from inside the heads of the men making the calls. Chamberlain on Little Round Top, out of ammunition, ordering a bayonet charge downhill. Read it before you take your kids to the battlefield and the whole place changes.

What's going on inside your own head

Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius. A Roman emperor's private notebook, never meant for you. Get the Gregory Hays translation; the older ones sound like a man clearing his throat. You don't read it straight through. You keep it by the coffee maker and read a page.

Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. A psychiatrist survives Auschwitz and comes out convinced that a man can endure nearly any how if he has a why. Under two hundred pages and it will reorganize your week. Mature: concentration camp conditions.

The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis. A senior devil coaches his nephew on how to ruin an ordinary Englishman. The genius is that the tactics are all small. Distraction, vanity, a grudge kept warm. You'll recognize yourself by letter four, which is the point.

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Yes, it's long. A father is murdered, three sons are suspects, and the real argument is whether God exists and what follows if He doesn't. The Grand Inquisitor chapter is worth the whole book. Pevear and Volokhonsky is the translation to buy. Mature: murder, drunkenness, a brutal look at child cruelty in one famous chapter.

The country you live in

The Federalist Papers. Eighty-five newspaper essays written to sell New York on the Constitution. Read 10, 51 and 78 first and see if you don't want the rest. Nobody explains American government better than the men who built it, and they were writing for farmers and shopkeepers, not professors.

Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville. A young Frenchman shows up in 1831 to study our prisons and ends up writing the sharpest book about Americans ever produced. His warnings about soft despotism, the kind that manages you for your own good, land harder now than they did then. Read an abridged edition first. There's no shame in it.

Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Written while he was dying of throat cancer and broke, finished days before the end, published by Mark Twain to save his family from poverty. The prose is plain and absolutely clear. A masterclass in how a man writes about his own life without decorating it.

The Gulag Archipelago, authorized abridgment, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. What ideology does when it gets the keys. "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." He wrote that about his guards and about himself. Get the one-volume abridgment. The full three volumes are for the second pass. Mature: torture, starvation, executions.

Four novels worth the hours

Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry. Roughly nine hundred pages and you'll wish it were longer. Two aging Rangers drive cattle from Texas to Montana. It's about friendship between men who never once say so out loud, and about the cost of not saying it. Gus McCrae is the finest character in American fiction. Mature: frontier violence, prostitution, adult situations handled without explicitness.

East of Eden, by John Steinbeck. Cain and Abel replayed in the Salinas Valley, and the hinge of the whole thing is one Hebrew word: timshel, thou mayest. Not thou must. You have a choice about the man you become. If you're a father, this one will sit on your chest. Mature: adultery, a brothel, one genuinely evil character.

The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas. Betrayal, prison, buried treasure, and the slow discovery that revenge costs the man taking it. Buy the unabridged Robin Buss translation. The cheap abridged versions cut the soul out.

True Grit, by Charles Portis. Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross hires a one-eyed drunk marshal to hunt down her father's killer. The funniest book on this list by a mile, and clean enough to hand to a twelve-year-old. Portis wrote sentences you'll read twice for the pleasure of it.

Work, faith, and the rest of your life

Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matthew B. Crawford. A motorcycle mechanic with a doctorate in political philosophy argues that fixing things makes you a better man than managing things. He's right. This is the book that gets guys to buy a torque wrench.

The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough. Two bicycle mechanics from Dayton with no college degrees and no funding solve flight while better-credentialed men with government money keep crashing into the Potomac. Read it for the work ethic. They tested in Kitty Hawk because of the wind and the sand, and they went back season after season.

Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis. Radio talks given to a nation being bombed, which is why there's not an ounce of fat in it. Whatever you currently believe, Lewis will make you hold it more honestly.

A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean. He wrote it in his seventies. It opens, "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing." It's about a brother you can't save and a father you understand too late. Under a hundred pages, and grown men keep a copy for life.

How to actually get through them

Alternate. One hard book, one fast one. Solzhenitsyn then Portis. Tocqueville then Lansing. The pairing is what keeps you from stalling out in March and never starting again.

Buy used. A worn paperback you'll write in beats a pristine hardcover you're afraid to open. Pencil in the margin, dog-ear the corner, argue with the author on the page. That's what the margins are for.

Audiobooks count for narrative history and novels. They don't count for the Federalist or Aurelius, where you need to stop and back up.

Start tonight with Endurance. Twenty-eight men, two years on the ice, all of them home. You'll finish it inside a week, and then you'll go looking for the next one, which is the whole trick.