26A023 The Need to Read by Jim Davies, 6/9/2026

The present era enables us to take in stories and news and ideas much faster than could be done even 100 years ago; movies, TV and most of all the Internet. Never mind for now that all three are frequently frittered away, for example with trivial texting and vacuous entertainment; the tools are there, as never before. Any who wish to gain knowledge and understanding can do so more readily than any of our forefathers.

Even so, there's strong merit in a good, hard-copy, printed book. We can relax while reading, focus on the content exclusively, dwell on a page or chapter before moving on, and easily re-read it.

So I keep a small library, and by clicking on the "ZG Book Store" at top-right above, you'll see some particular volumes recommended.

New to that? - a good place to start is with an Econ primer, such as Hazlett's classic Economics in One Lesson, and a more recent rival, Per Bylund's How to Think About the Economy. Then move on to Murray Rothbard; Power and Market is a masterpiece, and his For a New Liberty is a must-read. Bill Schmidt's Liberty is mentioned in this ZGBlog, and he wrote a good part of the Tannehills' The Market for Liberty. There are so many magnificent books here! My Liberty Trilogy will be among them I hope (links to the right of this paragraph) but take your pick, wherever your interest leads.

Many of my shelves have works of fiction, for as my little gray cells slow down with age they don't need to be over-stressed. Hence, while I prefer to watch Jane Eyre as a DVD movie rather than plow through Victorian text, there's nothing quite like a long textual journey through War and Peace, even though Carlo Ponti managed to squeeze its "highlights" into a 3½ hour movie.

I have two favorite modern fiction authors, one on each side of the Atlantic. Neither is anarchist, but both are brilliant novelists with heaps of insight and when you know where to look, it's not hard to see gleams of libertarian light. By "brilliant" I mean that they can not only create a decent-sized, page-turning tale but can weave a complex plot and set of people whose characters remain consistent through the unraveling or dénouement. Not even P D James passes my test for that.

The first is Robert Goddard, a Cambridge historian who loves to write a plot spanning two different time periods, a generation or a century or two apart. Choose any from his bibliography, you'll like it. His first is Past Caring and is really elegant in its relating of the late 1800s through the late 1900s, with mysteries hidden from the key players for most of that span of time. His second is In Pale Batallions, evoking a tragedy from WW1, eventually explained only in the 1980s.

The second is Dennis Carstens, a Minneapolis defense lawyer whose main character in all the stories may be his alter ego, but fictional; he weaves his tales around his experiences from real life and likewise makes them complex, sometimes with surprise endings and always sprinkled with humor. Very readable indeed. Fair warning: his stories include some words that are naughty although not uncommon, so persons of tender age or delicate disposition should prepare occasionally to shut their eyes. If you haven't met Carstens, a good start is to get his first nine novels in e-book form.

For fiction with an expressly libertarian angle, don't omit a read of George F Smith's fine The Flight of the Barbarous Relic and The Iron Web by Larken Rose.

I'd like to write fiction, but alas that skill has eluded me, even though at age 11 a friend and I wrote an episode of a weekly radio thriller for the BBC; it wasn't chosen for broadcast, but we did get an on-air mention as runners-up who "must have had a lot of fun." Fiction, notice, is the form chosen by Ayn Rand to give conniptions to the whole, complacent, statist establishment of the last mid-Century with her monumental Atlas Shrugged.