Reading List for June 2026
Finding ourselves in the rubble.
‘How can stories be used in times of war?’ asked journalist and war-correspondent Christina Lamb to Elif Shafak in a talk about the power of storytelling. The room fell silent before she answered. ‘The default,’ she said, ‘is to read numbers from the news. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand dead. They just look like numbers, like math.’ She continued, ‘but when we flip the script and we talk about the victims, the daughter, the mother, the student, we only need to talk about one to realise how human and worthy we all are.’
A back to back bleed in one of the most damaging events in my country’s history. On the clock. My first thought is checking the WhatsApp groups. Is my family safe? Are my friends safe? Is everyone I know safe? I am in Europe and I thought this was a dream, but now it’s a nightmare. Two major earthquakes happened back to back in Venezuela and I was the last one to find out five hours after UTC.
Time stopped. Ticking clock, digital clock, sand clock. None of those. Kitchen mess, lost keys, cold coffee, showers don’t matter. Who thought of time zones? The algorithm is my clock and that of every Venezuelan I speak with. It feeds us with posts of mournings, unknown victims and videos from family members trying to find them. I wake up and I scroll. I go to bed and I scroll.
I see videos of rubbled buildings with shattered walls and intact kitchens and closets left undone. Flying drones show broken spaces in standing buildings, portraits honoring those who passed, while the whole country already reminisces the present lost. In my head I play Christmas carols, Faltan 5 pa’ las 12 el año va a terminar, Me voy corriendo a mi casa a abrazar a mi mamá.
Why us? Why does Venezuela need to always be in the news? I keep scrolling and see crows above in the sky signalling the smell of dead and their floating patience for feast. I keep scrolling and see people pledging for heavy machines and support. I keep scrolling and hate those posting about it not to report but just to get noticed. Day one is not over, and I see video edits with the national flag and eleven thousand likes with a few thousand more sharing. I keep scrolling and I also hate those posting about anything other than the crisis. Support? Aid? Response? I keep scrolling and hate my government, once again, for not doing what’s right.
The socials make me a scientist, a hater, an earthquake specialist, a reporter, a saint and a rescatista. I read that double earthquakes are rare. Quantified is a 5% chance of having two large quakes in a sequence be within 0.2 units of magnitude. I repeat the numbers in my head.
I remember reading of Simon Bolivar, our liberator, shouting on the top of a mountain in 1812 after a similar earthquake in Caracas: ‘if Nature is against us, we shall fight Nature and make it obey.’ On the clock. I searched for Vargas in 1999, when a similar disaster happened, ‘La naturaleza sepultó a Vargas’ (‘nature buried Vargas’) read at El Nacional. What was different now? Simple, just three decades of abandonment. Obey.
There is a collective tragedy of a place and time. Those with a heart inside and outside of the country have no plans. No place. Just powerless. I keep scrolling.
I see someone in despair and another one walking to the rubble with a metal pipe and shouts for her relative. What was below the dust this time? A parent? His son? Is he/she alive? Did he hear him/her? When will he find out? He doesn’t know. Nobody knows. Twenty, forty, more than one hundred hours after and we still don’t know. There are over one hundred and fifty buildings reduced to rubble and supposedly over ten thousand people still missing.
Shafak also wrote once that ‘cities are erected on spiritual columns. Like giant mirrors, they reflect the hearts of their residents. If those hearts darken and lose faith, cities will lose their glamour.’ I don’t think we have lost faith, but I want to believe that, by helping each other through the rubble, we are learning again about our own identity.
The identity I mean is the same one that Marcus Aurelius referred to almost two millennia ago: ‘there is no role so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.’ For Venezuela, that’s the role of those who are, hopefully, just surviving and waiting beneath the rubble. The role of those who are making others aware. The role of those who are helping to supply first aid. The role of those unnamed who are using their bare hands to lift rock after rock pledging for help. I wanted to provide my average reading list for the month and the message behind. But all I’m left with now is an attempt to express what I am feeling with the world and those who I love.
Can we keep the thread going?
Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday - In the old world and from many places, they appeared before, during and centuries after the age of Christ. Babylon, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Spain, they were like you and me. One of the most famous ones was a slave and then freed (Epictetus), some others were teachers, ordinary workers, meanderers, or went all the way to the top as advisors to the Roman Emperor, or even more, an Emperor himself (Marcus Aurelius). Some of them were popularised in modern times, like Zeno, Seneca, Epictetus. Some others are known for their tragic moral conflict, like Cicero. And there are those ones, the least named, Cleanthes, Panaetius, Agrippinus, Musonius Rufus. This book is about those who planted seeds and continue carrying the work of philosophy, with no other reason than ‘to become a better person,’ as Ryan Holiday writes. Inspired by the works of Plutarch and his biographies, in this book, Holiday briefly distills the ordinary lives of those who influenced Greek thought, and later on—because of their dominion—that of the Roman empire at its peak. Connecting dots, what I find the most fascinating is that most of these influences were rediscovered with the evolution of Western thought and the fall of Constantinople towards the sixteenth century. Imagine the impression of their first translators from Greek and Latin into English and other European languages. Renaissance was forming. Here was a pagan philosophy with many consonances to Christian ethics, but should we force them to be different? The earliest Stoics had attempted to divide philosophy into three parts, using the analogy of a farm or an orchard, with a field (physics), fruit (ethics), and fence (logic), but later towards a century B.C. one of them, Posidonius, took the idea even further by pointing at the entire cosmos as a sentient, living being in which all things are interconnected. My book copy is signed. Holiday wrote the quote ‘Acta Non Verba’ in his signature, it means ‘deeds, not words.’ The thoughts of the writings and lives from this book on courage, temperance, justice, wisdom, overlapping with those of other ancient and sacred texts, make me believe how much of the same thread we are all from, and how we pull in from the past to influence each other with new ideas, new ways of thinking, new influences on each other’s lives. It is our duty to keep acting and to keep building, for the sake of everyone that came before and will come after.
A World Lit Only By Fire by William Manchester - This is one of those books that helps you fill a great gap that we all have in history: the medieval age. When learning about religion or Stoicism, I usually take most of our Western ancient references in reference to Christ’s age and the Roman empire, but have you realised how much of what we know then takes a dramatic jump towards the fifteenth or sixteenth century? What happened in the twelve hundred years between? What about the millions of Europeans without a sense of ego or ambition, whose last names were those of their jobs like Smith, Hans, Will, or Will’s wife. Those who built cathedrals over centuries of work and didn’t look for their names printed on rocks or having a legacy. A deep dive on the age of those that didn’t know about America yet, and barely communicated with Asia—let alone thought that the world was an immovable disk around which the sun revolved. As I researched this book, I found mixed reviews on its reliability, but I think it helped me understand large periods of history on a high level in 300 pages. It explains the conditions and actors of the most important cataclysms that challenged the Church and parted the world into renaissance. Machiavelli, observing patterns in human nature by studying Cesare Borgia. Copernicus, finding that Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. Magellan, proving it could be circumnavigated. Da Vinci, challenging most of what we knew about the human body and the world, making art with it. To Manchester, one of the greatest reasons why inventions started to accelerate once again was due to Gutenberg’s innovation in printing and the massive expansion of the Bible, later creating the first branches of new literature. It wasn’t the Church anymore who was able to interpret texts in Latin, but it was the push towards ‘identity’ and different languages that made the Germans, French, English and others who started to build their own conclusions. Luther, Erasmus, Calvin, redefining what holy meant. The chain of events isn’t coincidental, quite the opposite, it was all deeply interconnected. What I find most fascinating is the conditions of those who created something after one thousand years of stillness, those individuals and human catalysts. People obsessed with finding reason where there had only been obedience, in the words of Manchester, ‘finding the true drives of men who are often hidden from them,’ changing knowledge and the world with it.
As usual, I’d love to hear your thoughts on these ideas. The best books you can read come to you through word of mouth, so if you know good titles that relate, please share them! If any of these resonate with you, pass them along.