13 books The Argument thinks you should read

Besides Abundance

The George Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins University (Photo by JHU Sheridan Libraries/Gado/Getty Images)

What do reading and liberalism have to do with each other? Well, some of these books engage directly or indirectly with liberal ideas, but others are just books we loved that we think you might love too. It’s this last sort that I think is the most important.

Reading gives me an unshakable faith in a common human nature. When I step back for a moment, it’s pretty amazing that books written by people hundreds of years ago, by people in cultures I will never inhabit or fully understand, translated from languages I do not speak, could be meaningful at all to me.

That I could sit in my comfortable living room in Washington, D.C., and feel any kinship at all to Ivan Ilyich, Bilbo Baggins, Elizabeth Bennett, or Lisbeth Salander, while other, very different people feel the exact same a world away, is proof positive that the accidents of birth and the choices that distinguish us as individuals are much smaller than we often pretend.

There are many good arguments against the anti-liberal perspective that people are products of the communities they are born in and that your obligations are forged only in blood and soil. But one of the best is realizing that your joys, pains, petty irritations, and passing interests are mirrored back to you in characters written by Adichie, Ishiguro, and Faulkner (to name a few).

Happily, I am not the first to draw the line between egalitarianism, universalism, and reading. Here’s Richard Rorty writing in 1989:

Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, or Richard Wright gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended. Fiction like that of Choderlos de Laclos, Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves. That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress.

There’s nothing better than stumbling randomly on a book you would never have read if it were described to you. But that puts me in a tricky bind when recommending books, because in some sense I am robbing you of that experience. As a compromise, we’ve tried to thread the needle by keeping our thoughts to three sentences. In some cases, those are long, complex sentences. In my case, I’ve tried to be a little cryptic but still give you a sense of what you’ll be coming across.

Comment some of your favorites below! We would love to hear what you all have been reading.

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The Subjection of Women by J.S. Mill

Every generation is wrong in ways that will shock their descendents. Some people resign themselves to this fate, leaning on the pathetic excuse that we are mere products of our times. Mill is better than this and inspires us to be better too. -Jerusalem Demsas, The Argument Editor-in-Chief

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

Ted Chiang once said that the difference between science fiction and fantasy is the distinction between magic and science: Magic is distributed unequally, whereas science or technological progress could theoretically be provided to everyone. Bennett’s The Tainted Cup feels like fantasy, but under Chiang’s definition, it is definitely science fiction. It’s also an incredible homage to state capacity and civil servants. -Jerusalem Demsas, The Argument Editor-in-Chief

Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics by Timothy Shenk

Nothing reshaped my mind this year like Timothy Shenk’s Left Adrift, a short, historical account of two American pollsters working in and around the Clinton administration. It reveals that the populism vs. popularism debate is not so much a debate as an eternal golden braid of discourse that stretches back at least to the 1970s. It made me feel both more and less hopeful in equal measure — and mostly made me frustrated that 100% of our bickering class hasn’t already read it. -Robinson Meyer, The Argument columnist

Felix Holt, The Radical by George Eliot

The most explicitly political of Eliot’s novels, Felix Holt both makes Jerusalem’s point about the radical origins of liberalism and asks some of the questions about politics that are uncomfortable for a political junkie like me: What, actually, is the point of electoral engagement? What actually drives long-term change in values and ideas? Eliot herself started out in the takes game and came to believe that fiction was a higher calling — a bitter pill for me to swallow as a columnist whose father and grandparents were novelists, but one that has some merit. -Matthew Yglesias, The Argument columnist

The Looking Glass War by John le Carre

I spent this year on a spy novels kick, which involved reading through almost the entire oeuvre of John le Carre. The Looking Glass War is one of le Carre’s least popular works, because it is a bleak, bitter account of an utterly pointless operation driven by interservice rivalries and the refusal of crumbling institutions to acknowledge their limitations or think clearly about whether their operations are actually going to work. Usually that’s not what people are looking for when they pick up a spy novel — they want an exciting thriller where the good guys outsmart the Soviets! — but it really just makes more overt the critique lurking in every other LeCarre novel, and it’s a critique that many other institutions could stand to take to heart. -Kelsey Piper, The Argument staff writer