The Second Annual Inkling Awards
Young Heretics
Spencer Klavan
4.9 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2026
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome back!! Happy 2026!! After a holiday hiatus, we're starting the year off strong with the Second Annual Inkling Awards for Literary Excellence. As an exciting new term of teaching kicks off for me at the University of Austin, TX, It's a good time to be thinking about some of the best questions: why should we read? How should we read? And how much? Without further ado, here are Dr. Klavan's rules of thumb for reading, the best books I read last year, and the books I'm looking forward to in 2026. Plus: C.S. Lewis on why you should read old books.
Check out my cover essay in First Things on Virgil's Aeneid: https://firstthings.com/in-the-footsteps-of-aeneas/
Order Light of the Mind, Light of the World (and rate it five stars): https://a.co/d/2QccOfM
Subscribe to be in the mailbag: https://rejoiceevermore.substack.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming to you live from Austin, Texas, it's the second annual Inklings |
| 0:07.0 | for Literary Excellence. |
| 0:10.0 | Yeah, the crowd goes wild. |
| 0:18.0 | We're back, Happy 2026. I'm sorry I'm late. I know I said at the end of last year that I was going to do this episode before 2025 was up. Well, my friends, the holidays got the better of me. What can I say? I was in the words of |
| 0:40.1 | Bob Cratchett, Charles Dickens' indelible character. I was making rather merry with my family |
| 0:47.3 | over the holidays and did not get around to putting together my second annual list of best books, personal best books |
| 0:57.2 | from my own reading life. And actually, I think that might be a good thing. I don't know about |
| 1:04.4 | you, but I like to log off as much as possible. In those kind of two weeks at the end of the year, |
| 1:10.6 | I think it's Lindy, as they say. |
| 1:12.5 | It's traditional to do that. And it might be that this kind of episode on reading, episode about |
| 1:18.8 | having a reading life, what it means to have a reading life, the worth of having a reading life, |
| 1:23.1 | will be particularly inspiring to you at this moment when people are doing their New Year's resolutions, a fresh year. |
| 1:31.2 | There's a line of thought. There's a group of people that kind of don't like the month of January. They think it's the worst month because Christmas is over and you get a little depressed and the holidays were so fun, but you led up to them the whole time. And now it's just |
| 1:45.1 | blah for the rest of the winter. And I understand that feeling, I will say. It's a very good |
| 1:51.7 | reason to celebrate Christmas the way our ancestors did, according to the traditional liturgical |
| 1:57.3 | calendar, because if you were doing that, it would kind of even maybe still be Christmas. |
| 2:02.3 | There's 12 days after December 25th, and then there's a whole season up to February 2nd. |
| 2:08.1 | So that was part of the point was to keep the winter bright. |
| 2:11.4 | And now that we have the Christmas season in the lead-up rather than Advent, it's kind of like |
| 2:16.8 | all the good stuff |
| 2:17.5 | gets front-loaded at the beginning of Christmas, and we don't get anything really to look |
| 2:22.3 | forward to after that. |
... |
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