• Corin Wagen
• About
• Papers
• Blog (Archive)

Books from 2025

(Previously: 2022, 2023, 2024.)

Strangely, Roberts’ Napoleon reminded me a lot of Elon Musk—incredible drive and energy, mind-melting attention to detail, and a culture of micromanagement and direct control which perhaps more than anything else drove him to ruin. (I hope Elon’s story has a happier ending.)

I distrust most historical fiction, but this book was actually good. Hosokawa Gracia is one of history’s great Christian heroes.

Many ex-academic startup founders should read this book.

As recommended by Tyler Cowen; hauntingly beautiful.

As recommended by Santi Ruiz; a great read about how the British state adapted and transformed during the Napoleonic wars. Roberts credits the British privatization of the military supply apparatus to much of Britain’s success in the war, which I found interesting. This book also helped me understand why government procurement is so crucial and so regulated today.

This book is ubiquitous in grey-tribe discourse these days, which pushed me to avoid reading it because it seemed overrated. It turns out I was wrong and it’s properly rated—Scott’s way of thinking gave me a whole new set of mental models for legibility, system fragility, and how we structure knowledge. Definitely worth a read.

While the two previous Napoleon books I read were very good, this book is one of the best books I’ve read on any topic. Many biographies (including Roberts’ above) try to avoid getting side-tracked by military history, preferring instead to focus on describing the man behind the campaign. Chandler does the opposite—he focuses only on the military aspect of Napoleon’s life and isn’t afraid to examine his historical models, his moments of genius, and his myriad mistakes.

Paradoxically, this focus ends up giving the reader a clearer picture of Napoleon as a person, because military campaigns were where he devoted the bulk of his energy and intellect. The book also has incredibly beautiful maps; I learned a lot of European geography trying to follow the various campaigns.

John Carmack liked this book, but I didn’t.

Eriksen is a weird guy; at once a hardcore RETVRN poaster and an avowed practicing bigamist. I guess polygamy is the most Lindy thing of all if you go back far enough?

Venerable but still the best piece I’ve read on the dynamic between open- and closed-source software. Raymond argues that the open-source-software community operates as a gift economy, and that there are powerful incentives for infrastructure/protocols to become open (but not applications). This book has been useful in informing how we think about open-source strategy at Rowan.

I really disliked this book. Weir’s science fiction is grimly impersonal in a way that makes me sad—the fiction centers on science, not people, and even though I like science I prefer my novels to be about people.

As recommended by Tyler Cowen. A good overview of Central European history, although it left me wanting more details on almost everything.

This book was recommended to me, but I’m not a huge fan. Other people have written good critical reviews of this book—see inter alia Kevin DeYoung and Wyatt Graham—so I’ll leave it at that.

O’Brien argues that the popular narrative around World War II is wrong, and that brute economic output as expressed through air and sea power was the primary factor leading to Allied victory. It pairs nicely with Britain Against Napoleon (book #9) and has influenced my thinking about present and future wars.

The central idea of this book is that the mayhem of family life can create spiritual formation in much the same way that monastic discipline does—through constant reminder that our life and time is not ours, but should be spent in love and service. This idea is powerful.

I tried and failed to write a full blog post about this book for months. Briefly—the story of the Bible, dramatically abbreviated, goes something like this (not theology advice):

1. God makes people, who live in right relationship with him.
2. But the people sin, breaking this relationship, and death enters the world.
3. God gives his people laws, like the Ten Commandments, to be reconciled to him.
4. But people are sinful and don’t obey the laws.
5. God sends his Son to live a perfect life, die to pay the price for our sin, and be raised to eternal life.
6. People can now be reconciled to God, even though they’re still sinful.
7. We await the day when God will make the world anew without sin.

This basic outline is pretty accepted by all Christian denominations, although people might quibble with the details—Catholics and Protestants disagree on the mechanics of #6, for instance. A critical reader might, however, have some questions. What’s the point of #3 and #4 above? If God’s people never followed the law, why was it there at all? And was that just a weird tangent in the history of salvation, or do these laws still matter at all today?

While these questions may seem rudimentary, they’re actually quite controversial—John Wesley wrote that “there are few subjects within the whole compass of religion so little understood as this.” Martin Luther and John Calvin, two giants of the Reformation, wrote at length about these questions, and they continue to be debated by Christian scholars to this day. But unlike other open theological questions, like Calvinism vs. Arminianism, many Christians don’t even realize that there are a range of opinions here or that people disagree at all on these issues.

This theological issue also has important real-world consequences. If the law of Moses has enduring moral validity, then the Old Testament’s teachings on the Sabbath, fasting, tithing, and usury might still be binding to modern Christians; if not, then the teachings probably aren’t. More dramatically, movements like Christian Reconstructionism seek to rebuild all of modern society around the Mosaic Law—which has pretty big implications. These movements have gained a lot of traction on the right in recent years. A recent Politico article on the influential “New Right” pastor Doug Wilson cited R. J. Rushdoony, the “father of Christian Reconstructionism,” as a key intellectual influence (emphasis added):

In response, [Wilson] started reading books by a group of conservative Reformed theologians — writers like Francis Shaeffer, who posited that all knowledge was grounded in the truth of Biblical revelation, and R.J. Rushdoony, who argued that all Biblical law, including the Old Testament law, still applied to the contemporary world.

(Grouping Schaeffer with Rushdoony here is wild.)

Five Views on Law and Gospel directly addresses the question of how law and gospel intersect. In the book, five Protestant theologians (Willem VanGemeren, Greg Bahnsen, Wayne Strickland, Walter Kaiser, and Douglas Moo) each write an initial opinion piece, and then every other author responds with their own essay. This makes for a fascinating but somewhat schizophrenic read—the argumentation is scattered across 25 different essay-length pieces, so writing a proper review proved to be substantially more intellectual effort than I could commit. (My draft blog post is 11 pages of increasingly inchoate theological ramblings.)

If you’re interested in the topic, this is a great book.

I did not like this book at all, and I wrote a blog post about why.

A helpful overview to the parables of Jesus, with useful literature review broken down by parable. (I read this to prepare for hosting a study of the parables, and found it useful.)

Just fantastic.

As recommended by Tyler Cowen. A great introduction to the history of the “Byzantine” empire (a term which Kaldellis rejects); unfortunately, his takes on church history seem pretty suspect overall, which makes me uncertain how much to trust his opinions on other topics.

I recommended this book to someone else, who agreed that “his church stuff is rough” and wrote back:

[Kaldellis] has me reflecting on the modern failing for people to believe that humans do act out of ideological belief, i.e. it’s not just a mask for some other desire.

I think this is right. It’s impossible to understand Athanasius of Alexandria without first accepting that he’s primarily a theological thinker, and that everything else flows out of his faith (and not vice versa). Dialectical materialism this is not…

I reviewed this book here. It is very good.

I reviewed this book here.

I’m a bit skeptical of Braben’s view of scientific incentives; I tend to favor Eric Gilliam’s view that some pressure from real-world applications can give scientists a push towards useful discoveries, while Braben seems to think that just letting scientists follow their curiosity without constraints or incentives is key. Maybe I’m too cynical, but this feels like Emile for science.

As featured on CWT. I liked this book!

As recommended by Tyler Cowen; I would have preferred a standard biography of Leibniz, I think.

As recommended by Challie’s, sorta. I used this to help co-lead a Romans study with friends.

An account of the 1988 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. I didn’t realize that “corporate finance thriller” was a genre I would love, but I couldn’t put this book down—I’m upset I didn’t read it sooner.

Days of Rage, a later book by Burrough, is also excellent.

The first book I’ve ever pre-ordered. I generally thought this book was good and interesting throughout; it leaves me with a lot of questions, but that’s to be expected. Wang’s chapter on the one-child policy was horrifying; from a consequentialist point of view, Paul Ehrlich must be one of the world’s greatest villains.

Read in preparation for my trip to Copenhagen.

Mary Harrington has recommended Illich’s writings before on her Substack (e.g.), which pushed me to read these books. Both were thought-provoking and worth reading; I’m still digesting the ideas and expect to be for some time.

To give a flavor of the argument: in Deschooling Society Illich argues that school and other modern institutions confuse process and substance, making our values like health and learning "little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve those ends" and creating “psychological impotence and modernized misery.” I’m not fully convinced by his proposed solutions, but I think a lot of his criticisms of formalized education ring true and dovetail nicely with Seeing Like a State (book #11).

As recommended by Misha Saul. This one shocked me a bit—I had no idea how bizarre and horrible the early history of Australia was. Well worth a read.

Sadly, another book I only read because of an obituary.

MacIntyre opens After Virtue by comparing ethical discourse in our society to a post-apocalyptic world in which people use relics of a distant age without understanding how they work or where they come from (a la Canticle for Leibowitz). As someone without many natural philosophical inclinations, I found parts of this book a bit tedious—but I’ve found myself bringing it up constantly in conversation and argumentation since I finished, which is high praise.

McNall argues that most Protestants’ understanding of penal substitutionary atonement is wrong, and that we should be thinking more about Christus Victor. I didn’t love the writing, but the argument is solid.

As recommended by Santi Ruiz.

Our new Nobel Laureate in Economics! A few observations from this book:

• Mokyr highlights Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton as the top figures in the Scientific Revolution. Newton obviously remains highly rated, but I know very little about Francis Bacon, perhaps because his ideas are so dominant today that nobody bothers to read him?
• Mokyr points out that many scientific societies were originally founded around the love of practical knowledge for the betterment of society—what happened, folks? Scientists’ narrow-minded conception of what science is or should be is holding them back (previously on the blog).
• Mokyr argues that Europe experienced the industrial/scientific revolution because it maintained a unified intellectual culture despite political fragmentation, leading to economies of scale in ideas without the capacity for any single actor to repress or censor ideas (as happened in Ming China). I’ve heard variants of this argument before, but Mokyr makes it particularly well.
• Mokyr also points out that the “republic of letters” (and academia today) operates as a status-focused gift economy—just what Raymond argues about open-source software (book #16, vide supra). I’d never made this connection before.

I also watched the movie, which was actually quite good.

Yeah, okay, I admit I’m a few months (or years) late to the party here. Middlemarch is a good book, but I don’t think it’s “the best novel ever” like some have said; I prefer either The Brothers Karamazov or Infinite Jest, to say nothing of dark-horse candidates like Kristen Lavransdatter. But I don’t regret reading it. Eliot captures the emotion of unsatisfied ambition and personal disappointment perhaps better than anyone else I’ve read?

I also didn’t finish a few books:

• I hated John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy so much that I stopped reading after a few hundred pages. I truly don’t know what people see in this book.
• I read most of Tim Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage, which was the suggested reading for a class I helped out with at church, but missed a few chapters in the middle.
• I started Calvin’s Institutes but—shocker—didn’t finish it. I’m reading the Battles translation, which came highly recommended, and I’m liking it so far.
• I’ve started D. A. Carson’s commentary on Matthew but haven’t made much progress yet. Next year!
• And I’m partway through Roger Chickering’s history of the German Empire (1871–1918), which is good so far.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks! I find myself in a contemplative mood, and I want to share (1) a brief reflection on the year’s events, (2) a few thoughts around ambition, and (3) some of the cocktails that Chloe and I enjoyed in 2025

The past year was a big one for our family. In no particular order: our company grew a lot (and in too many ways to recount here); I spoke at three universities and five conferences; my wife quit her job; we helped lead two marriage classes and a Romans bible study; we planned and took our first “solo” international trips, to Croatia and Denmark; I made Macau tamarind pork constantly; I broke my foot and got rhabdo; my son learned how to read; my daughter learned how to speak; and we had a third child (now almost a month old). Looking back over all of this, I think the undeniable conclusion is that I’m becoming middle-aged.

If you’ve been a part of this journey at all—thanks! I’m incredibly grateful to lead a busy and interesting life and for all the persons who populate it, both professionally and personally.

I’ve become more bothered by the cultural discourse around ambition. To both east- and west-coast crowds, ambition is something that’s good. We celebrate the founder tackling an ambitious problem, the politician with bold new ideas, or the writer aiming to reshape how society thinks about a given topic and achieve “thought leadership.” And if we define ambition simply as the desire to make the world better than it is, then it seems obvious that we should all be as ambitious as possible.

But this doesn’t seem to comport with other sources. The Bible verse I’ve found myself reflecting on is 1 Thess 4:10–12 (emphasis added):

But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.

Paul is saying something surprising: that we ought not to try and disrupt the world as much as possible, but instead we should be content to live inwardly focused “quiet lives” where we tend our own gardens and keep to ourselves. Living quietly should be our aspiration. It may not be something we can always achieve, but it’s the best-case scenario.

So, is ambition bad? Paul himself is clearly not a person devoid of ambition; 1 Corinthians 9 is fully aligned with the “founder mode” / agency memes. I don’t think this passage means that all outward-focused ambition is necessarily bad. But Paul does remind us that our first and primary ambition should be inward, aimed at the renovation of ourselves (“Always be killing sin, or it will be killing you”). Life may push other ambitions upon us—but if we had no other ambitions, this alone would be enough.

(A full literature survey would take too long, but it’s worth noting that ambition isn’t typically a fantastic character trait in pre-modern literature: contrast Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition” to the likes of Cincinnatus.)

Unfortunately, everyone today seems in love with ambition. Without naming names, I can think of plenty of startup founders and VCs who espouse a Christian pro-family worldview while expecting themselves, their employees, and their portfolio companies to live and work in such a way that makes it impossible to uphold family obligations. This is bad.

I wish that these people and many others would be willing to be less ambitious externally—revenue, impact, followers, cachet—and would instead be ambitious about virtue or something similar. “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” Similar things could be written about the modern church’s love of growth metrics and other legibility-focused outcomes.

Eliot says it better than I can. To quote from the end of Middlemarch, which looks back on the life of Dorothea Brooke:

Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

May we all aspire to such an epitaph.

And, finally, a few cocktail recipes to close out the year:

Cynar Plane

Shake and serve with a big ice cube.

This is a variant on Sam Ross’s Paper Plane that substitutes Cynar for Amaro Nonino; Nonino is expensive and Cynar is delicious.

Little Giuseppe

Mix the Cynar and Punt e Mes together in an Old Fashioned glass, then add the bitters and lemon juice. Stir, add the big ice cube, and sprinkle the salt on top of the ice.

My wife doesn’t really like this drink, but I love it.

Mosquito

Shake and serve with a big ice cube.

Another Sam Ross drink, not so dissimilar to the Cynar Plane above—this one is pretty low ABV, which is nice. I make ginger syrup by blending and filtering a 1:1:1 mixture of chopped ginger root, water, and sugar. It keeps for a few days but not indefinitely, so drink up!

Daiquiri

Shake and serve with a big ice cube.

Following advice from my old Merck collaborator Spencer McMinn, I’ve been making daiquiris with a modification of the original Embury recipe: 2.0 oz rum, 0.5 lime juice, and 0.5 oz simple syrup. You can basically use any rum you want here—this is a very rum-forward drink, so nicer rums aren’t lost like they would be in a Jungle Bird. I like the 8-year Rhum Barbancourt or Smith & Cross, and a blend isn’t bad here either.

Jungle Bird

Blend until smooth and serve: the frozen pineapple means you don’t really need ice, although you can add some if you want. On small scale, I typically just use an immersion blender and a jar.

The above measurements are admittedly a bit of a mess—this is adapted from a much larger recipe, which uses 0.6 L of rum and a full pound of pineapple. Still, this is approximately correct, and the drink is flexible enough that you can easily flex anything up or down without messing it up.

Most Jungle Bird recipes you find floating around on the internet are pretty different from this: the pineapple is juice, there’s more of it, and there’s less Campari. I think this is much better. The chunks taste better and give the drink a lovely creamy texture, while the extra Campari balances the sweetness of the other ingredients.

Happy Christmas, and to all a good night!