This book is seared into my memory. I first read it in August of 2002 and just re-read it for the second time in my life. My memory of the work from my first reading was near exact, something that almost never happens to me. It struck such a cord in my 20s that I thought about it often over the subsequent 20+ years. It is one of the most important novels I have ever read.

Dorian Gray makes a Faustian bargain to retain his youth in exchange for his soul. A painted portrait then takes on his “passions and his sins” while his body does not change. We witness him go from age 22 to 38 with no visible change in his physical appearance. This makes it difficult for people to believe the horrible rumors they year. Surely someone so good looking and youthful could not do such things.

Despite being written 130 years ago, this novel feels modern. Youth is still highly prized and now we use social media filters and botox to keep the facade alive. We are still really good at covering the degradation of our lives like Dorain covers and hides his portrait. It’s Adam & Eve all over again. An immediate desire to cover and hide when exposed by the Coldplay Cam.

This novel is a tragedy but does fate guide Dorian’s actions? Is he irreparably influenced by Lord Henry to where there’s no turning back? Or does Dorian have a choice in the matter? What if he did change course? Would the portrait change back to what it was? Or would it remain the same?

This is an endlessly fascinating novel. One with vivid pictures that have stuck with me for 23 years. It’s a novel I think about often. In this podcast episode, I talk about themes, questions, and my One Thing.

Ashurbanipal was king of Assyria from 669 to 631BC. He was a warrior poet, a scholar who carried a pen in his belt while decimating foes with cruel and unusual punishments. In a miraculous twist of history, the fire that destroyed his famous library is the very thing that ensured its survival. The fire solidified his 30,000+ clay tablets.

Those clay tablets, lost to history for 2,400+ years, now mostly reside in the British Museum, where Cuneiform scholars work their way through works of astrology, exorcism, medicine, entrail divination, lamentation, and literature. The most and best preserved copies of The Epic of Gilgamesh come from Ashurbanipal’s library.

This book looks at three main things: Cuneiform, Ashurbanipal, and the contents of Ashurbanipal’s Library. The author, Dr. Selena Wisnom, connects ideas from the surviving works to our own. We see how ideas that seem completely foreign to us are not that far removed from our experience. She shows how the Mesopotamians discovered many things long before others. In turn, these discoveries made our modern world. We’re continually learning more and more from what was discovered in Ashurbanipal’s Library.

In this podcast episode, I talk about the book, Cuneiform, Ashurbanipal, and the contents of his library.

I find it helpful to take a step back from day to day reading to consider overall themes that show up over spans of reading time. That’s what I do in this episode. I look at the first half of reading for 2025 and talk about the 19 books I’ve read so far. I then talk about my favorite books, things I enjoy about Greek Literature, and share the one idea so far this year that has had the biggest impact.