Ben Sasse’s book The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-Of-Age Crisis—And How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance recently came out and I just finished reading it yesterday. Because my reading list isn’t huge (50+ books a year), I try to pick good, impactful books to read. This isn’t always easy so I’m constantly looking for sources to help me populate my reading list.

That’s one reason I wanted to read this book but it unexpectedly delivered more than a source for great literature. He went into the mechanics and techniques of making great readers. Whereas I did have some moments of pause and reflection (I’ll need to read other books to weigh his points), reading this book didn’t cause me to outright disagree at any point; that’s very rare for me.

Something I found very reassuring was that I’d read so many of the books he refers to or suggests. The shear number of books he referred to impressed me so much that I collected them in a rough bibliography. Here it is:

Bibliography for The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse

• Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz (retired Yale professor)
• Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood by Christian Smith (a Notre Dame sociologist)
• The Great Disruption by Francis Fukuyama
• The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman
• The Affluent Society by C. Wright Mills
• Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman
• The Waste Makers by Vance Packard
• Outside Lies Magic by John R. Stilgoe
• Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch
• The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (philosopher and classicist)
• Agamemnon by Aeschylus
• Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
• On Old Age by Marcus Tullius Cicero
• Shop Class for Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford
• Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• John Dewey (Sasse disagrees with atheist Dewey and mentions these books, in particular, as to why he disagrees with him):
  • Democracy in Education
  • Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal
  • The Primary Education Fetich [sic]
  • The School and Society
  • My Pedagogic Creed
  • The Humanist Manifesto
• Dumbing us Down by John Taylor Gatto
• Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes
• The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
• Escape from Camp Fourteen by Blaine Harden
• Children of Dictators by Jay Nordlinger
• White Collar by C. Wright Mills
• Common Sense by Thomas Paine
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
• Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman
• Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt
• Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck
• Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart
• Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
• The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
• Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte
• Moneyball by Michael Lewis
• Religion
  • Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
  • Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
  • Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen (Sasse disagrees with this book but it’s a great book to read)
  • Book of Genesis in The Bible
  • Book of Matthew in The Bible (especially Sermon on the Mount)
  • Commentary on Galatians by Martin Luther
  • The Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin
• Greek Roots
  • Ethics by Aristotle (starter book)
  • Crito by Plato (starter book)
  • Odyssey by Homer
  • History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
  • Three Theban Plays by Sophocles
• Homesick Souls (or, Fundamental Anthropology)
  • Confessions by Augustine
  • Why God Became Man by Anselm of Canterbury
  • Bondage of Will by Martin Luther
  • Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas
  • Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
  • Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Sasse has a long struggle with this book; he ultimately sees Rousseau as wrong)
• Shakespeare
  • Romeo and Juliet
  • Hamlet
  • King Lear
  • Julius Caesar
  • Macbeth
  • Sonnets
• The American Idea
  • Declaration of Independence
  • U. S. Constitution
  • The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
  • Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an America Slave by Frederick Douglass
• Markets
  • Politics by Aristotle
  • Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
  • The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 by Charles Sellers
  • Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
• Tyrants
  • Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (laid the intellectual foundation for communism and, hence, the murder of more than 100 million people)
  • Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (the best analysis of the rise of scientific racism and anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century Europe, which led directly to the Holocaust)
  • The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek (explains the close relationship between fascism and communism)
  • Animal Farm by George Orwell
  • 1984 by George Orwell
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• The Nature of Things (or, a Humanistic Perspective on Science)
  • On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
  • Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
  • Elements of Geometry by Euclid
• American Fiction
  • Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  • Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
  • O, Pioneers by Willa Cather (a Cornhusker substitute for Death Comes for the Archbishop)
  • Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  • Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (about his alienation as a black and gay man growing up in Harlem with an abusive Baptist minister as his stepfather. This is a disturbing book in many aspects. It illustrates the ways in which religious life can turn hypocritical and repressive.)
  • Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

This a great list to dig through and start reading which, in itself, is an exciting prospect.