Why am I passionate about this?

As an essayist, literary critic, and professor of literature, books are what John Milton calls my ‘pretious life-blood.’ As a writer, teacher, and editor, I spend my days trying to make meaning out of reading. This is the idea behind my most recent book, On Purpose: it’s easy to make vague claims about the edifying powers of ‘great writing,’ but what does this actually mean? How can literature help us live? My five recommendations all help us reflect on the power of books to help us think for ourselves, as I hope do my own books, including The Midlife Mind (2020) and Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2018).


I wrote

On Purpose: Ten Lessons on the Meaning of Life

By Ben Hutchinson,

Book cover of On Purpose: Ten Lessons on the Meaning of Life

What is my book about?

How do we live successfully? How do we live fully? Identifying the meaning of life and where we are heading…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Essays of Montaigne

Ben Hutchinson Why did I love this book?

Writing in the sixteenth century, Montaigne essentially created the modern ‘essai’ as we know it. What I love about his writing, erudite though it is, is that there is nothing dry about it: his subject was himself, which is to say, by extension, ourselves.

Mixing references both Christian and Classical, learned and personal, Montaigne explores subjects ranging from cowardice to thumbs, and solitude to smells. In inventing the essay as a way of understanding ourselves, Montaigne invented our age of narcissism: ‘I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself.’

Book cover of Areopagitica and Other Writings

Ben Hutchinson Why did I love this book?

Written at the height of the English Civil War, this is perhaps the single most important manifesto for free speech in the English language. But it’s also surprisingly good fun, composed in a vivid, memorable style that brings abstract concepts to life.

Advocating what he terms ‘promiscuous reading,’ Milton encourages us to think for ourselves and resist intellectual authoritarianism. I love his argument for the importance of reading in cultivating independent thought: "A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life." As a writer and literary critic, this life-blood is precious to me, too.

By John Milton,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Areopagitica and Other Writings as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

John Milton was celebrated and denounced in his own time both as a poet and as a polemicist. Today he is remembered first and foremost for his poetry, but his great epic Paradise Lost was published very late in his life, in 1667, and in his own time most readers more readily recognised Milton as a writer of prose. This superbly annotated new book is an authoritative edition of Milton's major prose works, including Of Education, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and the Divorce tracts, as well as the famous 1644 polemical tract on the opposing licensing and censorship,…


Book cover of Self-Reliance and Other Essays

Ben Hutchinson Why did I love this book?

I am drawn to Emerson’s essays, of which this is the most famous, because of the way that they encourage us to be self-sufficient. "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself," he encourages his reader; "insist on yourself; never imitate."

I love the irony of learning this by reading someone else since it offers an important life lesson: we can only become independent by learning from others. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Emerson was trying to encourage a whole nation, the USA, to become independent from the Old World. As such, his essays mark something like the start of the authentically American mind.

By Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Self-Reliance and Other Essays as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 14, 15, 16, and 17.

What is this book about?

Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays and poems on the transcendental movement in the United States became some of the most important literary pieces in American History. In this culmination of essays, Emerson takes the reader through different forms of philosophies that attempt to explain the world and man's purpose within it.

Heavily vested in the philosophy of transcendentalism, though not one to label himself a true follower of the movement, Emerson believed that spirituality and wholeness were central to the ways in which humans could place themselves within nature. Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson is a collection of integral works that…


Book cover of A Room Of One's Own

Ben Hutchinson Why did I love this book?

I love this book not just because of its enduring importance - Woolf remains a towering feminist figure - but because of its vivid, imaginative writing.

Based on lectures given to female students at Cambridge, Woolf’s essay argues powerfully for the intellectual independence of women. Such independence, she reasons, must first be materially possible, hence the female writer’s need for that famous "room of one’s own."

To exemplify this, Woolf imagines a certain Judith Shakespeare, the playwright’s equally talented sister: would she not be incapable of achieving the same success as her brother owing to the patriarchal structures of society? In our post-Me Too world a century later, the question remains vital.

By Virginia Woolf,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked A Room Of One's Own as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 14, 15, 16, and 17.

What is this book about?

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.


Book cover of Politics and the English Language

Ben Hutchinson Why did I love this book?

What I like about Orwell is that he is uncompromising. His fiction, such as Animal Farm and 1984, is very well known, but some of his essays have been just as influential.

This is probably the most important one, in which Orwell makes a case for clarity and concision as the guiding principles of communication. Language is both cause and effect of meaning: it "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts."

Good writing, Orwell suggests, helps us retain freshness of thought; bad writing, conversely, deadens our sensibilities. Linguistic precision, in other words, is "not the exclusive concern of professional writers." We should all be concerned by cliché.

By George Orwell,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Politics and the English Language as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Politics and the English Language' is widely considered Orwell's most important essay on style. Style, for Orwell, was never simply a question of aesthetics; it was always inextricably linked to politics and to truth.'All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.'Language is a political issue, and slovenly use of language and cliches make it easier for those in power to deliberately use misleading language to hide unpleasant political facts. Bad English, he believed, was a vehicle for oppressive ideology, and it is…


Explore my book 😀

On Purpose: Ten Lessons on the Meaning of Life

By Ben Hutchinson,

Book cover of On Purpose: Ten Lessons on the Meaning of Life

What is my book about?

How do we live successfully? How do we live fully? Identifying the meaning of life and where we are heading preoccupies all of us at some stage or another. Who better to help us articulate this sense of direction than the most articulate people among us? 

Interweaving my own (mis-)adventures with those of major authors such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Rainer Maria Rilke, I propose ten ways in which reading and writing encourage us to ask difficult questions, project our minds into the past and future, and see ourselves and others differently. Engaging and aphoristic, On Purpose is for anyone who finds themselves wondering how to live more mindfully, more forcefully, and more fully.

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The Stark Beauty of Last Things

By Céline Keating,

Book cover of The Stark Beauty of Last Things

Céline Keating Author Of The Stark Beauty of Last Things

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Novelist Environmentalist Beachcomber Classical guitar player

Céline's 3 favorite reads in 2023

What is my book about?

This book is set in Montauk, under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk’s last parcel of undeveloped land. Everyone in town has a stake in the outcome, among them Julienne, an environmentalist and painter fighting to save the landscape that inspires her art; Theresa, a bartender whose trailer park home is jeopardized by coastal erosion; and Molly and Billy, who are struggling to hold onto their property against pressure to sell. When Clancy…

The Stark Beauty of Last Things

By Céline Keating,

What is this book about?

The Stark Beauty of Last Things is set in Montauk, the far reaches of the famed Hamptons, an area under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk's last parcel of undeveloped land.

Everyone in town has a stake in the outcome, among them Julienne, an environmentalist and painter fighting to save the landscape that inspires her art; Theresa, a bartender whose trailer park home is jeopardized by coastal erosion; and Molly and Billy, who…


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