I just couldn’t read another or my brain would melt.

“We’re switching to chapter books,” I told her, and that night we dove into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She loved it. I had a blast too.

She still adores the sprawling, illustrated fare with (hopefully) clever themes and ideas, and we read them together from time to time. She now mostly reads those to herself, sometimes sharing her favorites with me. When we read together, however, we now work our way through more substantial stories.

The bedtime ritual usually involves the two of us, snuggled up and reading something I hope will delight me as much as it does her. It’s not hard to do; the best children’s books enthrall adults as much as our kids. We just finished The Indian in the Cupboard a few nights ago—so good!—and we’ve been working our way through The Chronicles of Narnia. We’re reading The Silver Chair now. I can’t wait until she’s ready for Madeleine L’Engle and Harry Potter.

As we turn our way through a book, Naomi always reads me the opening page of every chapter, and then I take over until the next chapter starts. It’s been fun to see her reading skill improve as she navigates awkward vocabulary and learns the rhythm of sentences.

What’s appropriate for kids at whatever ages? That’s a little tricky to navigate. I was gung-ho on starting A Wrinkle in Time once we finished The Chronicles of Narnia. There are eight books in L’Engle’s Murry-O’Keefe Family Chronicles, but Megan suggested they might be a little dark for Naomi. “Maybe wait till she’s nine or ten,” she said. I figured that would hold for Harry Potter as well. I read those twenty years ago (all but the last book for whatever reason; I still want to find how it turns out) and recall them getting heavier as the series progresses. Maybe eleven or twelve?

But, then, children’s books are fraught for all sorts of reasons. I’m sensitive to all the woke stuff. I get it. But I don’t have much patience for people shaming me about literature. And by “don’t have much,” I mean “have less than none.” Is Little House on the Prairie problematic? Sure. Is it worth reading? Obviously. Same with countless other children’s classics. Where’s the line? I guess I’ll find it when I’m reading to my child and have to explain things. I think that’s what they used to call parenting.

Several books I’ve already mentioned are people’s hit lists today. “The Indian In The Cupboard,” says Angel Shaw at Screen Rant, “perpetuates harmful stereotypes.” Harry Potter? “Modern society has deemed several elements of Harry Potter problematic,” says Shaw, apparently speaking on behalf of us all. “House elves, who are enslaved by wizarding kind (but like it), are a problem for obvious reasons, while goblins, who greedily hoard gold and run the wizarding bank, are said to carry antisemitic themes.”

Writing a piece in Medium, Eliza Bachard disapproves of Harry Potter as well. While she gives the supposed antisemitism a pass, she highlights “the slavery. . . . It’s messed up,” and adds “fatphobia” to its roster of sins.

It doesn’t end there. Harry Potter receives double censure from both Shaw and Bachard because of its author’s politics. “Rowling’s comments against transgender-inclusive legislature [sic] have only added to the controversy,” says Shaw. And Rowling’s transphobia is enough for Bachard “to want to stay away from her and her books and her IP for the rest of my life.”

The inability to separate art from the artist is a perennial problem. Last year Naomi and I read through a pile of Roald Dahl novels and loved every minute. Oops. Shaw singles out the “minstrel influence on the Oompa Loompa’s singing and dancing, and the frequent descriptions of the ‘fat’ Augustus Gloop have begun to make some readers uncomfortable today as well.” Dahl himself smoothed out some wrinkles in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the early 1970s. Thank God, sensitivity readers and editors have recently helped clean up the rest of the atrocities.

But Dahl’s real sins go beyond his creations; some refuse to read Fantastic Mr. Fox because Dahl was antisemitic. That’s a choice. But even his illustrator, the great Quentin Blake, could separate the man from his work. “I probably disagreed with everything he thought,” said Blake. Somehow we’re not allowed the same freedom? It’s not like George’s Marvelous Medicine is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in disguise. The idea is almost as comical as Dahl’s stories.

Personally, I see no reason to bring authors’ politics or morals or whatever else into consideration of their art. Maybe it’s meaningful to some, but it’s largely irrelevant to whether my daughter and I will enjoy a good story.

That leaves the content of the story itself, and here I think the scolds also overstep. Shaw flags Bridge to Terabithia for dated gender messaging and Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club because the girls are too young to be babysitting. Groan. It’s a story. It’s make believe. Who’s to say imaginary twelve-year-olds can’t babysit imaginary babies? This sort of tsk-tsking dissolves into self-parody.

Pharisaism, puritanism—whatever you want to call it—ranks among our species’ more annoying qualities. And it entirely misses the point of reading with children. The Guardian recently reviewed Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s new book, A British Childhood: How Our Children Live Now. Writes Joe Moran,

Cottrell-Boyce does not think of reading as a moral education. Some of the best-loved tales in the Arabian Nights, he points out, revel in lying, cheating and selfish ambition. One of the most famous, the tale of Abu Hasan, is about a fart. Lots of lullabies depict babies being killed or stolen. Frank L Baum [sic], the author of The Wizard of Oz, was an apologist for the genocide of Native Americans; Roald Dahl was a committed antisemite.

But such critiques misunderstand what’s going on when a parent shares a book with a child. Reading is about relating. “It has little to do with the content of a book,” says Moran, “and everything to do with creating a moment of shared attention and mutual noticing.” He then floats the line, “pedagogy of the sofa,” a pet phrase of June O’Sullivan and the London Early Years Foundation.

I find that bit as beautiful as I do endearing because now we’re back to parenting—guiding, leading, loving a child by sharing something of value and showing them how to evaluate.

If you find something objectionable in a book, welcome to books. Call it out if it makes sense to do so. I inserted myself into a few passages of The Indian in the Cupboard—for instance, when the boys are watching a western with Little Bear and Boone—to let Naomi know what was going on and why the scene played out the way it did. She’s learning how to judge; the book offered me a good moment to help her along.

Then, as she reads more on her own, when she graduates to reading chapter books all by her lonesome, she’ll be ready to bring her own moral sense to the page, more astute for all the times she’s done it with me. And now I’m wondering if I might push up that date for A Wrinkle in Time.

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Three runaway slaves have arrived at the fort, seeking protection. What do you do? It’s May of 1861, and the war is barely a month old. There aren’t any plans for this sort of thing and, thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act, the precedent would actually suggest returning them.

It’s safe enough to start with the basics: You feed them and give them some work. Yet how to respond when an officer arrives from the Confederate Army demanding their return? You refuse. But on what grounds?

The Confederate officer cites the Fugitive Slave Act, which would have compelled you to hand the men over, as a decade’s worth of precedent dictated. “Ah,” you say, “but the Fugitive Slave Act doesn’t apply to foreign nations, which Virginia now claims to be, and it’s just your luck I’m taking you at your word.”

Sorry, sucker; no dice.

The real Gen. Butler found himself in exactly this position and reported saying almost those very same words, as Damon Root recounts in his riveting new history Emancipation War: The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment.

But then what? The runaways kept coming. By the end of July, 900 more such folks were clustered around Fortress Monroe, bestowing it their own name, the Freedom Fort. As Root argues, the presence of these people and how they were treated helped define the nature of the war.

Two Civil Wars

In the beginning, there were two Civil Wars running simultaneously and bumping into each other in awkward, problematic ways:

1. the official war, in which one side sought to preserve the Union and the other to defend states’ rights

2. the unofficial war in which one side fought to abolish slavery and the other to protect their “peculiar” institution

The South was unified on both the official and unofficial war because the two were linked. Without the conflict over slavery, there would have been no secession. Meanwhile, the North was a mess. You can chart the situation like so:

The South maintained a unified position, but the North was divided. Root shows how that confusion played out on the ground, especially early in the conflict. Twice, for instance, Union generals in the field freed the slaves in their territory. President Lincoln overruled them both times.

Lincoln personally disapproved of slavery, but his foremost concern involved preserving the Union, and he maintained a precarious political coalition to do it. Going all-in on abolition risked rupture within his camp.

Root documents this drama in his book, starting with the proposed thirteenth amendment to the Constitution. We’re all more or less familiar with the text:

(1) Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. (2) Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

But when Lincoln was first elected, the proposed thirteenth amendment, which had already passed Congress, read a little differently; in fact, quite the opposite:

“No amendment shall be made to the Constitution,” the proposed amendment said, “which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.” In other words, slavery forever. And, as a sop to the South, Lincoln backed this language.

War came anyway, and the pressures of the conflict not only galvanized Lincoln against slavery, but enslaved Americans like those showing up at Fortress Monroe—the Freedom Fort—forced the issue and paved the way for their own emancipation.

The Problem with Property

Barbaric as all wars might be, modern conflicts are governed by laws, waged among politicians as much as soldiers on battlefields. This was all the more so during the Civil War, in which the part of the contested ground included the Constitution and the legal tradition of the nation itself.

In war, the property of opponents can be seized as contraband and put to use waging the conflict. If you take a fort, you keep the fort. If you take a prisoner, you keep the prisoner. Gen. Butler was free to do this when the former slaves showed up at his doorstep; he fed those initial three and gave them a job. But what about when the rest began mobbing the fort? “The children, certainly, cannot be treated” as contraband, said Butler when describing the situation.

And then there were those enslaved persons who were abandoned as enslavers took flight. Abandoned property becomes the possession of those who salvage it. “If property, do they not become the property of salvors?” asked Butler. “But we, their salvors, do not need and will not hold such property and will not assume such ownership: has not, therefore, all propriety relation ceased?”

Once they came into Union hands, Butler reasoned, the slaves had functionally freed themselves. “My own mind is compelled by this reasoning to look upon them as men and women. If not free born, yet free, manumitted, sent forth from the hand that held them, never to be reclaimed.”

That sort of logic seems obvious today. Not so in the nineteenth century, especially once you toss in the various legal—and thus political—ramifications of taking action on it.

The Dueling Wars

As an example, Maj. Gen. George McClellan, a key figure in the Union Army, almost quit when Lincoln—moving toward abolition but not fully there yet—issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. The president’s actions, McClellan told his wife, “render it almost impossible for me to retain my commission and my self respect at the same time.”

Root mentions a more astounding example in the case of Benjamin R. Curtis, a former Supreme Court justice who previously dissented in the infamous Dred Scott case. Curtis was pro-Union and disdained slavery but opposed Lincoln’s move toward emancipation. State law regarding slavery was the states’ business, not the federal government’s, and Lincoln was overplaying his hand.

“The war in which we are engaged is a just and necessary war,” said Curtis. “It must be prosecuted by the whole force of this government till the military power of the South is broken.” But if we violate the Constitution doing it, what’s the point? “With what sense of right can we subdue them by arms to obey the Constitution as the supreme law of their part of the land,” Curtis asked, “if we have ceased to obey it, or failed to preserve it, as the supreme law of our part of the land?”

Jefferson Davis would have loved that. Contrary voices in the North did not and argued their side of the case. Eventually, they prevailed, but it was, as the tension in Root’s narrative makes clear, not a foregone conclusion. And it would take significant legal action as well as military force to settle the issue.

Black Americans Free Themselves

Into this mix of white politicians and military leaders wrestling over the terms of the conflict, black Americans joined the fight. In one of Root’s most effective chapters, he documents the role black Union soldiers played in not only changing the war, but the nation as well.

The first efforts to marshal black soldiers failed. In April 1862, Gen. David Hunter requested “50,000 muskets,” along with “50,000 pairs of scarlet pantaloons,” to arm and dress former slaves. He got nowhere with the request.

Arming former slaves to fight the war proved controversial, even in the North. Still raw from the threat of slave rebellions, especially that of Nat Turner, the New York Times warned on May 22, 1862, that arming blacks would lead to the “exterminat[ion of] the white population in those States.”

But pressures persisted the other direction. First off, black Americans wanted to join the fight. Frederick Douglass championed the move, and the military value of black troops became apparent. But how would they serve? Technically speaking, the property of an enemy could be seized and put to use in opposing the enemy. But the North had no interest in owning troops; nor would such troops have any incentive to serve.

No, the reward for service would be freedom. The Militia Act passed July 17, 1862, granted emancipation to all black soldiers and their families—several months before the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. They would be, as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton said regarding the new law, “forever free.”

Lincoln was initially ambivalent but got on board. A year after the passage of the Militia Act, he urged the recruitment of black soldiers, and when he caught wind of Confederate soldiers violating the rules of war regarding those troops, he came down hard. “For every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a Rebel soldier shall be executed,” Lincoln ordered, “and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a Rebel solider shall be placed at hard labor on the public works. . . .”

“This was not,” as Root says, “the Lincoln of 1861.” The two Civil Wars were converging, and abolition and preserving the Union were finally moving toward a single goal. But, as far as the ultimate fate of slavery was concerned, uncertainty persisted.

Resolving the Conflict

Grade school narratives of the Civil War and whatever the popular imagination might recall tends to forget that slavery existed in the Union—in the border states such as Kentucky and Delaware. Lincoln’s final Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves within the Confederacy. He had no legal grounds to free slaves in Union states, and was on shaky constitutional ground even in the South; the Emancipation Proclamation could have been overturned in court.

Slavery thus persisted after the war and might have been later reestablished in the South if something were not done to address the issue.

The only solution? A constitutional amendment, but like everything in the conflict the road to the passage and ratification of the thirteenth amendment was fraught. First, there was that that original version already passed that had to be discarded. Then there was the new language to be considered. Competing versions proliferated, and political egos and machinations got predictably involved.

The safest and surest course was to ground the amendment in the text of the Northwest Ordinance, already enshrined in U.S. law, in fact predating the U.S. Constitution: “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

Even here the North was divided. And the risk of the amendment’s defeat was potential all the way until it crossed the line. Former slave states participated in the ratification process, meaning that the requisite number of votes was imperiled from the beginning of the process. But on December 6, St. Nicholas’s Day, 1865 Georgia lodged its vote and ratified forever freedom for all Americans, regardless of color or previous condition, including the servility enforced by the state on its own inhabitants.

A Personal Note

None of this is abstract or impersonal to me. I read Damon Root’s book with rapt attention. I grew up in California, seemingly half a world away from this conflict. In my twenties I bought the states’ right argument. In my thirties I would have agreed with those who found Lincoln’s actions toward emancipation unconstitutional, even technically tyrannical. I enjoyed being contrary, and I could make all the arguments.

But I also contradicted myself in all sorts of ways. As a libertarian, I loathed—then and now—police violation of civil rights, especially those directed at black Americans by racist motives. What changed my mind on the war? For one thing, I moved to Tennessee; these are not theoretical conversations here, and you’ll meet plenty of folks who maintain Lincoln was in the wrong, even if they’d never countenance slavery. Humans are complicated; so are our hearts.

I now live adjacent to a Civil War battlefield. Three of my kids are black. They now possess property on land where they once would have been possessions, where they once would have been property.

I can’t imagine that America, and I’m glad—profoundly, endlessly, existentially grateful—for the sacrifice required to change it, including the impossible negotiations of existing law and political and military exigencies necessary to secure freedom for my children. Root’s Emancipation War tells the dramatic story of how it happened.

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The massive novel, printed in six volumes, sold 10,000 copies in its first year, exhausting four printings—not counting pirated editions produced in Ireland. And its fame soon spread abroad as Dutch, French, and German readers clamored for translations.

A generation later, when the British abolitionist Hannah More quoted “some witty passages” from the novel, the famed lexicographer Samuel Johnson recoiled. “I am shocked to hear you quote from so vicious a book. I am sorry to hear you have read it . . . I scarcely know a more corrupt work!” Johnson had plenty of company. Many deemed Fielding inferior to Samuel Richardson, whose novels Clarissa and Pamela captivated contemporary readers.

Meanwhile, Johnson’s friend and biographer James Boswell loved the book. He found Johnson’s “unaccountable depreciation” of Fielding baffling, saying, “‘Tom Jones’ has stood the test of publick opinion with such success, as to have established its great merit, both for the story, the sentiments, and the manners, and also the varieties of diction. . . .”

Give Samuel Taylor Coleridge a choice between Fielding and Richardson, and the poet picks Tom Jones without reservation. Coleridge not only praised the story for possessing one of “the three most perfect plots ever planned”—along with Oedipus Rex and Ben Jonson’s play The Alchemist—but he delighted in the effect of the writing. “How charming, how wholesome Fielding always is! To take him up after Richardson is like emerging from a sick room heated by stoves into an open lawn on a breezy day in May.”

The Bastard Tom

If you venture a read, you’ll find erected upon that vast expanse of lawn a sprawling, zany, Rube Goldberg device of a plot, engineered with such narrative precision and comedic genius it’s nearly impossible to imagine how Fielding pulled it off. Calculating the number of contingencies and relationships between people and events would give a statistician heart palpitations.1

Fielding constructs the story around a dozen or so primary characters, all played to maximum satirical effect, and several dozen lesser characters who populate the various houses, inns, and roadways from Somerset to London.

It all starts when Squire Thomas Allworthy retires to bed after a long trip from his country estate and finds a baby under the sheets. Inquiries point to one Jenny Jones as the unwed mother, who Allworthy helps relocate to another area away from the scorn of her neighbors. Allworthy keeps the child, gives him his own name, and raises the boy as his own—hence, Tom Jones. But, as a bastard, Jones won’t inherit the estate, which leaves an opening.

Allworthy’s sister Bridget lives with him and is soon courted and married by the calculating opportunist Captain Blifil who imagines he’ll inherit the estate, the value of which he’s constantly totting up as he meanders around the grounds, consulting actuarial tables to determine when Allworthy might conk and leave it all to him. Alas, he conks first, leaving Bridget with a son, young Master Blifil, who is raised alongside Tom like a younger brother and who will inherit the estate.

The two boys couldn’t be more unalike. While Tom is gregarious, impetuous, impulsive, he’s also gentle-hearted and kind. Blifil is, on the other hand, so priggish, hypocritical, and sycophantic readers risk occasional gagging. A pair of overbearing tutors, the brutal Rev. Thwackum and the sterile philosopher Square, oversee the boys’ education and formation. Blifil shines like an angel in their clouded eyes, whereas Tom’s immaturity ensures their contempt, the deck already stacked against him because of his parentage.

Fielding’s narrator telegraphs all this and more as he artfully guides the reader through the maze, sharing information as needed, withholding whatever he hopes to spring upon us later, and often divulging what he’s doing in the process. Fielding treats his readers like active participants in the performance of his characters, which amplifies the humor and pathos—and he’s winkingly ruthless.

Bumpy Ride

Fielding was an unlikely novelist. “He was by birth, education and literary sympathies much more closely allied with the earlier eighteenth-century grouping”—people like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope—”that despised novels than with the classes for which they were the chief reading-matter,” says Doreen Roberts of Rutherford College. Fielding was forced into it.

Despite a supposed family connection to the Habsburgs of Austria, Fielding grew up strapped for cash and constantly in debt. He turned to writing to pad his income, becoming a successful playwright. In the nine years between 1728 and 1737, he churned out more than twenty comedies, farces, ballad operas, and burlesques for the stage and, says University of Warwick professor Claude Rawson, “established himself as England’s leading playwright.” But nothing lasts forever.

Fielding’s later plays criticized Prime Minister Walpole’s government, and Fielding found himself censored out of a job by the Stage Licensing Act of 1737. “The Act effectively ended Fielding’s dramatic career,” says Rawson. So Fielding rustled up other work.

He studied law and became a barrister, practicing through the 1740s, followed by taking the job of magistrate for Westminster in 1748, where he organized London’s first professional police force, the Bow Street Runners. While sorting out London’s ruffians and ne’er-do-wells, Fielding also applied his talents to political journalism, editing and writing for a string of periodicals and stirring up trouble as he went.

He also started writing novels, first a parody of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela, published anonymously in 1741 as Shamela, commencing an on-and-off feud with Richardson that lasted until Fielding’s death in 1754. All the while, Fielding perfected his craft, taking the tools of the stage to his work, most effectively in Tom Jones.

“Fielding’s novels use a wide repertoire of stage routines: well-timed coincidences, contrived meetings, comic misunderstandings, conversations overheard at cross purposes,” says Rawson. “They also show a keen sense of the well-shaped, tightly ordered plot, especially remarkable in a work of such length and panoramic coverage as Tom Jones, and many local signs of theatrical organization: chapters and episodes framed as set-pieces, analogous in shape and length to a scene in a play; comic reversals and resolutions; a sharp ear for dialogue . . . designed to bring out the cant of social groups or the character-revealing accents of wicked or foolish types.”

It all makes for a bumpy ride for our hero, Tom.

Bad Luck on the Road

Few characters in English literature have worse luck than Tom. It’s not just his wormy little brother Blifil, the ogre Thwackum, and the smarmy Square. His lousy judgment—not to mention his raging libido—lead him into mess after mess, starting with Molly Seagrim. A romp with her lands him in fisticuffs with Blifil and his tutors.

With every indiscretion Allworthy’s good opinion of Tom erodes, but Fielding drags Tom’s trials across page, chapter, and book by constantly giving our hero just enough grace to maneuver into his next predicament, most of which leave residual effects that play into the later plot—none more importantly than Tom’s attempted courtship of his neighbor Sophia Western, daughter of Squire Western.

Tom is smitten by Sophia, and she returns his affection. But Tom’s lack of fortune and unfortunate background make their union impossible. Her father’s lands adjoin Allworthy’s, and Dad conceives of an advantageous match between his daughter and young Blifil—whom he mistakenly believes Sophia loves. But Sophia loathes Blifil and refuses the match.

She implores her father to not press the marriage on her, but the irascible and bombastic squire insists. She runs away from home, seeking shelter with a relative in London, a move she assumes will help her father come to his senses. Meanwhile, Tom has finally pushed Allworthy’s patience as far as it can go and finds himself turned out. Allworthy gives him enough money to sort himself out and sends him away.

Tom determines to go to war—the Jacobite rebellion being underway—but never quite makes it. Instead, hearing about Sophia, he pursues her. Along the way, he picks up a Sancho Panza companion in the form of Partridge, a man who was assumed to be Tom’s true father, despite his protestations to the contrary. Knowing nothing about Tom’s rejection by Allworthy, he thinks he can get back into Allworthy’s good graces himself if he leads Tom home. Instead, he follows Tom in his fruitless search for Sophia.

At every step, Fielding ups the ante and complicates the pursuit. While Tom edges closer to Sophia, he finds himself thwarted by impossible chasms, some he digs himself, others created by those taking advantage of him—including the conniving Lady Bellaston, Sophia’s cousin to whom she’s run for protection, who ensnares Tom in her own schemes.

All this plays out while Fielding tightens the noose around Tom’s neck, almost literally. Tom finds himself in jail facing murder charges; Sophia, learning of Tom’s inconstancy, rejects him; and a darker revelation comes to light that would seem to doom our hero. But there’s a long-hidden secret that can unwind the entire tangle, known to just a few—one, Blifil, desperately hoping to keep it quiet and another, Jenny Jones, who can finally reveal whose bastard Tom really is and what that might mean for his future.

Sackcloth to Silk

Readers can take this whole circus any number of ways—and did. Richardson not only hated it, he wrote his novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753) as a rebuttal. This, said Richardson, is how a real gentleman behaves. As we’ve seen, readers were divided. Tom Jones is at once bawdy and rambunctious in ways that have long scandalized those sensitive to the language and characterizations Fielding so gleefully spreads across the page. Squire Western has, as my old boss David Dunham used to say, no holes in his tongue.

But no simple denunciation holds up to what the book really presents. Fielding’s moral vision operates between the following polarities, says Doreen Roberts: “appearance and reality, action and motive, reasoned principle and instinct, prudence and impulsiveness, self-interest and disinterestedness, suspicion and trust, and justice and mercy.” There’s nothing binary about the way these play out in life, nor in the novel. The tensions between them, stretched between Fielding’s elaborately constructed set pieces, drive the plot.

Circumstances force Tom to choose, sometimes well, sometimes (well, often) badly. And yet, however predetermined his actions might be by his superintending author—always talking to us readers about what fresh trouble is brewing—Jones possesses what feels like real agency. He blunders freely, and the blunders cost him. However preposterous the action gets, we can correlate it all to real life, which is why Henry Morley could say, “A page of [Fielding’s] is to a page of Richardson’s as silk to sackcloth.”

That’s where Samuel Johnson’s rejoinder to Hannah More strikes me as tone deaf to the novel. Tom Jones looks vicious only if you either demand moral perfection or mistake propriety for virtue—only if Blifil, who appears flawless, is therefore good, and Tom, who constantly errs, slips, and fumbles, is therefore bad. Nothing in life would suggest that’s how morality actually works.

Maybe Johnson can be excused. It takes Allworthy the entire novel to figure out what he missed. When he does, Allworthy relents, repents, and finally brings the poor bastard home.

I’m reading twelve big-ass classic novels this year. Here’s the full schedule for 2026. Fielding’s Tom Jones was my May novel. Apologies for the delay in posting the review. Time to catch up with Tristram Shandy.

• January: John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• February: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

• March: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• April: Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

• May: Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

• June: Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

• July: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

• August: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

• September: Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

• October: Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

• November: Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

• December: George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Bonus big-ass classics:

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

• Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

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The guide “recommended not only fake books such as Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende and The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, but also imaginary titles from authors Brit Bennett, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Min Jin Lee and Rebecca Makkai,” reported the Washington Post. The culprit? A freelance writer using AI who didn’t check the work.

I’m pro-AI in all sorts of ways and for all sorts of uses—probably to the annoyance of some of you. But we all know the best reading lists are personal, not algorithmic. I want to know what actual books actual humans are actually reading. And with that in mind, here’s a look at what my eyes are planning to hoover up this summer. I want to hear what’s on your list, too; tell me below.

Leave a comment

Just the Facts, Ma’am

For me, let’s start with the nonfiction. I’m looking forward to several titles right now:

• ’s Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction

• ’s What’s So Great About the Great Books: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though They Might Destroy You)

• ’s The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art

• Christian Miller’s The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World

The last two have quite a bit to say about where we find ourselves with AI.

Stranger than Fact?

But man cannot live on facts alone, at least not this one. I crave fiction, especially the classic stuff. I’ve got three in particular already queued up from my big-ass classic novel goal:

June

• Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy

July

• Cervantes’s Don Quixote

August

• Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick

I just finished Tom Jones last night and I’m jonesing to jump into Tristram Shandy. The trick with these huge novels is they take a lot of bandwidth. Shandy is thankfully somewhat shorter than others I’ve read for this project. But if I have time, here are a few others I’m looking forward to:

• S.L. Huang’s The Language of Liars—not about AI as far as I can tell :)

• Seishi Yokomizo’s She Walks at Night

• Philip K. Dick’s Eye in the Sky and The Penultimate Truth—the second of which does feature a plot element that foreshadows modern LLM concerns.

Now’s the time to share your own summer reading plans. I want lists: real or speculative, earnest or fanciful. I’d prefer the real you, as would we all. What do you want to read this summer?

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All four were innovators in their respective fields, and their life stories contain remarkably similar chapters, evident in several recent biographies:

• Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee (2022);

• King: A Life by Jonathan Eig (2023), winner of the Pulitzer;

• Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative by Jennifer Burns (2023);

• Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins by Aidan Levy (2022), winner of the American Book Award.

Each story stands on its own, but what intrigues me are the overlaps and convergences. There are many, but I want to zero in on just three. They’re not so surprising the moment you frame their lives as innovators, but the patterns are pronounced and warrant deeper attention.

Beyond their common humanity, American citizenship, and (mostly) twentieth-century lifespans, what else do an architect and philosopher, preacher and activist, economist and policy wonk, and musician and composer share in common? If you’re looking to make new stuff happen, here’s how these four did it.

1. Develop an Irrepressible Vision

If you’ve been to Disney’s EPCOT or seen pictures of its gargantuan sphere, you know the influence of architect and philosopher Buckminster Fuller. Born in 1895, he thrived so far ahead of the curve he was always three steps ahead of the culture, the counterculture, and everyone else. He didn’t always make sense to those who tried to follow his trains of thought in lectures, demonstrations, and books, but he seemed to anticipate and advocate for a future that left even sci-fi novelists in the dust and the envious and anxious Soviet Union guessing what magic the Americans were up to.

Fuller—“Bucky” to intimates and enemies alike, not always fixed or mutually exclusive categories—imagined a comprehensive design language, a full-blown science, based in geometry that could unlock the secrets of the natural world and complex systems, allowing humans to optimize our resources and solve perplexing social and ecological problems. “My objective,” he said,

is to discover nature’s principles governing universe and to employ those principles in designing tools, instruments and systems capable of anticipatorily solving the problems now threatening man and extinguishing all life aboard our Spaceship Earth.

Oh, is that all, Bucky?

The perplexing problem that seized hold of Martin Luther King Jr. was racism and the plight of his fellow black Americans. Born in 1929, the Christian minister and civil-rights leader saw racism as a cancer in American society and wished to eradicate it. King advocated tirelessly for what he called the Beloved Community—a vision marked by societal justice, equality, and harmony for all people. “Now,” he said,

is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

King enrolled untold millions of Americans in this dream, though not without substantial conflict. Through it all, he stayed committed to nonviolence, recognizing that aggressive means would undermine his peaceful ends.

Economist Milton Friedman was possessed by a commitment to individual freedom and the concomitant need for free markets and limited government. Born in 1912, Friedman lived through the Great Depression and witnessed how New Deal government growth and intervention not only worsened the Depression’s societal impact but undermined individual freedom as well.

As an advocate for public policy grounded in this vision, he looked for ways to reduce the presence of government in individual lives and expand personal choice. On the one hand, he opposed tariffs, wage-and-price controls, and other forms of economic regulation and, on the other, promoted:

• School choice, specifically vouchers;

• an all-volunteer army, ending conscription;

• direct cash payments to low-income individuals—as a simplification of complex welfare programs;

• drug legalization, ending police interference in citizens’ lives;

• controlling inflation through simple monetary rules, rather than legislative programs; and

• floating exchange rates, which allow national currencies to compete on the open market.

These and other initiatives reflected Friedman’s preference for the outcomes of individual choice and free markets over those of government intervention.

While these first three men—Fuller, King, and Friedman—were occupying a growing share of the popular discourse, saxophone virtuoso Sonny Rollins was staging a revolution of his own. Born a year after King, he’s the youngest of the group. Though he lived through decades of dehumanizing discrimination, his jazz compositions and improvisations embodied the same sort of self-determination, freedom, and dynamism championed by Fuller, King, and Friedman.

Like all true originals, Rollins began by copying everyone who had come before. He mastered his instrument, the language and style of bebop jazz, the vast American songbook, and more far-flung forms such as calypso. He distilled it all into a new vision of American music. “When I heard Sonny,” said fellow saxophonist Jimmy Heath, “that was startling, because his rhythmic concept was so strong. . . . His rhythmic concept, the way he put his lines together rhythmically, was attractive to everybody that heard it.” As Levy says in his biography, “Sonny was speaking the language his own way, not like Bird, Hawkins, Byas, or Pres, but a synthesis that was sui generis—like Sonny.”

Several threads composed Rollins’s unique vision for his art: perfectionism and a relentless push for personal growth and technical mastery, experimentation, unconventional arrangements, surprising melodies and winking musical quotation, spiritual sensitivity, self-determination, and (paradoxically) a willingness to embrace near total self-abnegation.

That meant Rollins—same as Fuller, King, and Friedman—encountered opposition from people at the center of their respective worlds, and they had to battle for influence and legitimacy from the periphery.

2. Embrace the Margins, Work Toward the Center

Despite a privileged upbringing, Fuller represents the perpetual outsider. Conventual design, architecture, technology, societal structures, even math: He consistently questioned it all, and plank after plank of his vision undermined them in one way or another. As a result, he was regarded as a crank by stakeholders in the disciplines he challenged. He found it hard to raise money, to keep an office, to retain his supporters—all of which was made harder by personal quirks and character defects (such as repeatedly taking credit for other people’s work).

Even some of his grandest ideas, including his advocacy of geodesic domes and housing inspired by grain silos, were based in part on his theories and his lack of financial resources. He emphasized “ephemeralization,” using fewer resources to build bigger, better structures based in his principle of tensegrity (his coinage for the idea that structural tensions can amplify structural integrity).

The idea worked in practice, which proved a gift because it was all he could afford. “Although he emphasized its structural efficiencies,” says biographer Nevala-Lee, “its first real benefit was that it could be prototyped for almost nothing, and its triangulated framework evoked the technology of tomorrow, as much for its aesthetic qualities as for its actual strengths.”

Coupled with his reputation for pushing boundaries and championing revolutionary ideas, Fuller pushed inward from the margin and won converts near the center. So did King.

King’s power stemmed from the fact that he represented a historically marginalized group denied their legitimate claim to human dignity, civil rights, political power, economic freedom, and social mobility. He was forced to work from the outside because that was the only position allotted to him by the entrenched white establishment. “The point of the movement,” said King, “was to take a crowbar and stick it into the cracks of the system.”

Nonviolence proved central to the strategy. When those in power began using force and coercion against people standing up for little more than the right to be heard, it engendered both sympathy for, and outrage on behalf of, the violated. Sit-ins and marches challenged the conscience of the country, especially when met by force; firehose and truncheon-wielding law enforcement might have possessed legal authority, but King and his movement possessed all the moral authority.

By working from the margins and maintaining the moral high ground, King built a coalition across racial lines that carried his demands to the center. Says biographer Eig,

King and the other leaders of the twentieth-century civil rights movement, along with millions of ordinary protesters, demanded that America live up to its stated ideals. They fought without muskets, without money, and without political power. They built their revolution on Christian love, on nonviolence, and on faith in humankind.

When Milton Friedman began his intellectual insurgency, he was completely on the outs. He possessed neither political power nor much academic support. Though he used the accepted tools of his trade, especially data and empirical research, he turned them against the prevailing view of his discipline, which advocated government management of the economy, tinkering with taxes and federal spending to smooth out bumps in the market, reduce inflation, increase employment, and avoid recessions (and worse).

Friedman thought all of that was rubbish. Instead of using tax-and-spend fiscal policy to fix the economy, he advocated for the outsider view of monetary policy. “Inflation is always and everywhere,” he said unceasingly, “a monetary phenomenon,” by which he meant a function of the total amount of money in the system. This, he thought, should be governed by a few simple rules, free of manipulation. In practice this dramatically reduced the power of the federal government, part of Friedman’s overall vision of a small state with limited interference in the lives of its citizens.

To advance his views, he found allies outside the traditional centers of influence, including the Mont Pelerin Society and later the Hoover Institution, and cultivated a public voice to communicate his views directly to the American people (more on that in a moment.)

Where Friedman leaned into public attention, Rollins leaned out—in more ways than one. First, his approach was unorthodox. He learned all the bebop basics but wanted to transcend its limits and structures. He experimented tonally, melodically, harmonically, rhythmically. Constantly looking for the right sound, he was rarely satisfied with his performances, especially those on his records. Critics didn’t quite know what to do with him, and his albums were sometimes savagely reviewed.

It never interfered with his innovating. A drummer, bassist, and pianist filled the usual seats in a standard jazz rhythm section. But what might happen if you dropped the piano? Rollins tried it and gave the world his first major hit, Way out West (1957). What if you left out the piano again but added a guitarist? The result was The Bridge (1962), which can still both enthrall and blast the hair off your head.

But while Rollins worked from the outside in, he always took solace and sustenance from the outside. Not only did he occasionally abandon public performance altogether, sneaking off for long periods of time to practice and develop something new, something fresh, he also launched his own record label and assumed near total creative control over his business. He might play to the center, but he would never let it swallow him.

For all four men, these outlandish bets paid off. While it cost them all, and in King’s case the ultimate price, they kept pushing for the realization of their respective visions and saw them come to fruition. But not without a final shared ingredient.

3. Sell the Vision Until It’s Sold

Fuller’s vision was so grandiose he would never see it fully embodied, but he dedicated himself to pushing it as far as he humanly could. He really never stopped inventing, patenting, writing, lecturing, modeling, and enrolling acolytes and students. On the lecture circuit, he was an awkward but spellbinding speaker, and in intimate settings he could sway nearly anyone.

Books formed a core of his public outreach, communicating his complex vision and sometimes baffling point of view on the state of the world: Synergetics, Nine Chains to the Moon, Grunch of the Giants, Utopia or Oblivion, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, I Seem to Be a Verb, and others allowed both critical and mass engagement with his ideas. Some of these titles were even released as mass market paperbacks meant for a general audience.

King was no different in his relentless advocacy for his vision. Like Fuller, he published, but King’s special gifts were oratory and public protest. The March on Washington capped by his “I Have a Dream” speech galvanized the nation. No less important were the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, which elevated local voting rights to a national concern and helped set the stage for legislative reform.

Friedman was every bit as dedicated to selling his vision, using popular books like Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose, cowritten with his wife Rose, and other vehicles for mass influence. He secured a regular column in Newsweek, appeared frequently on television to debate and present—most famously in his hugely popular 1980 TV series Free to Choose. He also stayed engaged on the academic side of his work, lecturing and writing, developing and defending theories that still influence economists today.

And then there’s Sonny Rollins. He earned the nickname Saxophone Colossus early in his career and its significance only grew in the following decades. His recorded music, both studio albums and live in-the-moment performances, leave a crumb trail of his creative search, always hunting for the next expression. He was rarely satisfied because he never quite found it, but the critics eventually turned his way and audiences flocked to hear him.

In one way or another, we’re living in the world these four men shaped. Working from the margins, they refashioned the center.

The World They Built

People took from Fuller what they could—rarely the full package—but it was enough to create a lasting impact on the wider culture. His relentless push for innovation and alternative models for inventing, building, and thinking found eager adherents in the human potential movement and eventually Silicon Valley, where he was seen as a model for startup founders and a font of radical new ideas. Stewart Brand credited Fuller for his techno-optimistic influence on the Whole Earth Catalog, and Steve Jobs intentionally brought his limitless thinking into Apple. Fuller passed in 1983 at the age of 87.

Despite virulent opposition by state and local authorities, constant harassment from the FBI, and danger at every turn, King and the movement he led ultimately prevailed, not only in the form of legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but most especially in the moral and cultural victory that has edged racism to the margins. King might have accomplished much more, but his life was cut short by an assassin on April 4, 1968. He was only 39.

Friedman’s views shaped economic and political discourse for decades, such that his vision was taken as normative in conservative circles and held significant sway on the center-left as well, only recently being challenged by the rejections of the MAGA movement on the right. He remains a revered figure among classical liberals, libertarians, and many conservatives. He died in 2006 at the age of 94.

Rollins represents a towering figure in the history of jazz, improvisational music more broadly, and the saxophone in particular. Many of his compositions are now jazz standards and his name invokes both awe in his legions of fans and permission to experiment among musicians. Beyond that, his decision to handle his own tour-and-concert booking and record production foreshadowed the contemporary trend of artists controlling more and more aspects of their creative careers. He passed away May 25, 2026; he was 95.

Incidentally, three of the four received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, King (posthumously) from Jimmy Carter in 1977, Fuller in 1983 from Ronald Reagan, and Friedman in 1988 from Reagan. And Barack Obama publicly praised Sonny Rollins during his reception of Kennedy Center honors.

But whatever their formal recognition, we live in the reality they helped to form. Their visions, their strategic action from the margins, and their persuasive communication have defined the world we all inhabit.

Now a question for you: Who is one innovator you think shaped our world?

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please hit the ❤️ below, restack, and share it with your friends (especially if they’re fans of Fuller, King, Friedman, or Rollins—or innovation more broadly).

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