Michael Novak

Michael Novak directs political and social studies at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He has authored 25 books on the philosophy and theology of culture.

Cypresses Believe in God by Jose Gironella (out of print). An epic novel, this book wholly gripped me for three straight days when I was 20. In a marvelously sympathetic way it tells of a young love riven by being on opposite sides in the Spanish Civil War. It also flooded in bright light the ideological battles of the next 50 years.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Bantam Classics, $8). This novel is rivaled by none. I used to dedicate Holy Week every year to rereading one of Dostoyevsky’s masterpieces, since in their own way they evoke the story of the passion and death of Jesus Christ on an exceedingly profound level. I am still haunted by the contrast between Ivan Karamazov and the younger Alyosha.

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Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry by Jacques Maritain (out of print). A book so lyrical in its philosophy that I often had to set it down and go out for a walk, it moved me so. It illuminates better than anything my joint loves for the intuitions of the artist and those of the philosopher.

The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle (Oxford University Press, $10). One of my all-time “foundational” choices, especially for its subtly adumbrated central insight into the habit of phronesis, or “practical wisdom.” Phronesis is like the knowing exemplified by an archer facing a stiff crosswind and letting fly his arrow straight to the bull’s-eye.

On the Democratic Idea in America by Irving Kristol (out of print). This book opened my eyes at a critical juncture of my intellectual life, when I was just turning away sadly from the illusions of socialist economics. Kristol in effect invited me to look again at the vision of political economy implicit in the American experiment—a better alternative.

Insight: A Study of Human Understanding