READING YEAR THEME: GREEK PHILOSOPHY

I’ll be spending most of 2026 ploughing the depths of Plato and Aristotle. I divide eating reading year into semesters:

* Spring Semester - March - June

* Summer Break - July

* Fall Semester - August - November

* Winter Break - December

I start each year reading straight through the Bible during January & February. The versions I’m using this year are The Intertextual Tanakh (tah knock), Bibliotheca (The Latter Prophets, The Writings, The Apocrypha, and The New Testament)

Spring Semester Book List (Subject to Change)

I started Plato during Fall Semester last year. I’ll be continuing on, but am first taking a look at philosophers before Plato since he keeps referencing them. I’ll then return to the 20 or so dialogues of Plato that I have remaining within the Complete Works set.

* The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists

* Early Greek Philosophy

* Heraclitus Fragments

* The Greek Sophists

* Plato: Complete Works

* The Republic / Bloom

* A Commentary on Plato’s Meno / Jacob Klein

* From Plato to Christ / Louis Markos

* The Cave and the Light / Arthur Herman

Summer Break

I’m going to dedicate the month of July to Gilgamesh. I love that epic so much and am going to read some of the books pictured above. I’ve been collecting anything I find about Gilgamesh and it’s time to read those books. If you know of other books related to Gilgamesh that I must read, please let me know in the comments below.

Fall Semester (Subject to Change)

If I finish reading Plato during the Spring Semester, I’ll begin reading Aristotle in the Fall Semester. Like Plato, I’m planing on reading the complete works of Aristotle. I realize that’s excessive and may change my tune, but why not. He’s one of the greatest philosophers of all time.

* The Complete Works of Aristotle Volume 1 / Hackett

* The Complete Works of Aristotle Volume 2 / Hackett

* From Aristotle to Christ / Louis Markos

Winter Break

I’m going to explore another area of interest during December - Trees! I know nothing about these strange things surrounding us outside and simply want to know more. I don’t have a list yet, so suggestions are welcome. There’s only one book so far that I keep seeing over and over again:

* The Hidden Life of Trees

Short Great Books Reading Group

I lead a reading group in Franklin, TN and this year we’ll be covering the following books, so I’ll be interspersing these books with the list above. More details here.

* A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor - Jan 12

* The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol - Feb 2

* Our Name is Dare by Kev Coleman - March 2

* One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn April 6

* Medea by Euripides - May 4

* Apology (Defense of Socrates) by Plato - June 1

* Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis - July 6

* Billy Budd by Herman Melville - August 3

* My Antonia by Willa Cather - September 7 (Labor Day)

* Candide by Voltaire - October 5

* Jason and the Golden Fleece by Apollonius - November 2

* The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffmann - December 7

Each year, I stack all of the books from the previous year’s reading list next to me and reminisce over the reading year. It’s one of my favorite yearly podcast episodes and it’s a great way for you to hear about some books to add to your reading list.

2025 was an incredible year of reading. I continued on in the third year of my Immortal Books project. The main focus was on Greek Tragedies, Comedies, History, and Philosophy.

In this episode, I cover the year as a whole, some of my favorite works, and some best of lists.

Here are some of my favorite podcast episodes from 2025:

The Braveheart film has had an outsized impact on my life. It first sparked a deep interest in the country of Scotland, that try as I might, I cannot shake. It inspired me to purchase a set of bagpipes and then learn how to play them. But it also had deeper implications in the areas of faith and living.

In this book, the author of both the novel Braveheart as well as the screenplay that became the famous film, Randall Wallace, provides an autobiography that shows a close connection between his life and the Braveheart story. It’s an exploration of fatherhood, faith, and truth. And I loved it.

The two pillars of this reading project are to read more books and to remember what I read. To that end, I’ve experimented with a variety of practices to attempt to assist with memory. I’m always on the hunt for new ideas.

That’s how I came across Rhetorica Ad Herennium by [Cicero]. Cicero is in brackets because it’s not certain that he is the author. So, author unknown, but content exceptional. This is the oldest surviving work we have about ways to remember what you hear and learn.

This was written around 90BC and the techniques are still used today. The main idea is to place an intermediary background between your memory and the thing you are trying to remember. I always just go right to the thing. If I want to memorize a poem, I brute force my way into my memory bank by reading it over and over again. I never thought to place that poem against a background to enhance the likelihood of remembrance.

In this episode, I cover a very short 10-page section of this larger work that deals with memory. I share how Cicero or not-Cicero suggests creating a background or room in which to place images that relate to words or subject matter. The more striking and odd the image, the more likely it will be remembered.

This practice is not natural to me and it actually seems counterintuitive. But, if it’s worked for 2,000+ years, there’s something to it. I’m going to give it a try.

Book Version - Loeb Classical Library book 403 - Rhetorica Ad Herennium

I started reading through the complete dialogues of Plato this year. I came to a point where I realized that Plato was referencing philosophers who came before him and I didn’t know anything about them or their ideas. I took a break from Plato to consider these philosophers who gave the seeds to Plato’s philosophy.

These philosophers are called the Presocratics and the Sophists. They are Pre-Socrates in that their ideas precede Socrates, not necessarily that they preceded him historically. The Presocratic philosophers discussed in this podcast episode lived between 600 - 400BC. Socrates lived between 469 - 399BC.

I read The First Philosophers with a translation and introduction by Robin Waterfield. In the introduction, Waterfield says “Presocratic thought was holistic : it was an attempt to give a systematic account of the whole known universe and all its major features.” They cover ideas such as the soul, happiness, and the makeup of things. You can see not only their intellectual method but also their ideas in the dialogues of Plato.

In this episode, I cover four of my favorite Presocratic philosophers (Heraclitus, Parmenides, Pythagoras, and Empedocles) and some of their ideas. I also share the one thing that stuck out to me the most about these fathers of philosophy.

An introduction to this reading project for anyone new to Books of Titans. I started this in 2017 as an attempt to read more books and experiment with ways to help me remember what I read. It’s morphed into a lifelong reading project that I now expect to last until I die as I slowly make my way through The Immortal Books. Give this episode a listen to learn more and then give my wife Stephanie’s music a listen as well!

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

~ Alfred North Whitehead

I’ve been enjoying my Plato Project where I’ve decided to read through the Complete Works of Plato. I’ve read 9 dialogues so far and realized I needed to take a step back and learn more about the philosopher himself. This was the perfect book for that endeavor.

Robin Waterfield covers the basic known facts about the life of Plato, his friendships, his practical application of philosophy, especially with the king of Syracuse, and the Academy he started in Athens. It is a fascinating look at how Plato’s life fed into his philosophy.

In this episode, I cover the main things I learned about Plato and share the One Thing that stuck out the most.

Enjoy!

I’m making the wild assumption that you like books. Perhaps that’s because you like what’s inside of books - the stories, ideas, information, history. But do you ever just stop and think about the book itself? The physical book that you hold in your hand?

Joel J Miller has a book coming out this Tuesday, November 18th, 2025 called The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future. It’s a book about the book. It’s a richly researched account of the history of the book through the ages, how Christians played a large role in its eventual format, and how the organization and categorization of ancient and moderns libraries led to the A.I. tools of today.

I read an advance copy of the book a few months back and absolutely loved it. It gave me a new appreciation for book, the perfect idea transfer technology. In this podcast episode, I share some of my favorite ideas from the book and tie in some things Joel spoke about during a book event I attended on Thursday evening, November 13th.

If you live in the Nashville area, Joel will be at Landmark Booksellers on the book’s release date of Tuesday, November 18th at 6pm. Jeff Goins will conduct the interview.

You can also order a signed copy of the book from Landmark Booksellers. I think you’ll enjoy it.