Top 5 Conservative Books to Read During Quarantine

This whole quarantine thing is sucky. I hate being stuck at home and not being able to do much more than going outside for a walk and adapting my workouts to be suited for the great outdoors or my living room.

I know it’s for the best though.

My job as a flight attendant has me encountering a lot of people. Even as domestic travel is dwindling, people still have to go places. My wife working PR for a grocery store means she has to spend a lot of time around people as most grocery stores are all hands-on deck right now.

For that reason, when we’re not actively working, we’re sitting at home self-quarantining.

We’re both young and physically fit people, so we know that it’s highly likely that we can be carriers without showing any symptoms. We just don’t want to spread the virus is there’s a chance of us doing so.

I would be pissed if someone else got my parents sick by coming to their house with the virus. The same goes for my in-laws because my mother-in-law is high on the at-risk scale. It would be a REALLY bad situation if she were to end up with the Wuhan coronavirus.

This is presumptuous, but most likely you are tired of being stuck at home doing nothing too.

It would be a lot better if you had something to do, huh?

That’s where I come in!

I got my degree in English, so I read a ton of books. I did some reading and some research to come up with what I believe is the best list of books to help you spend your quarantine time.

But you shouldn’t just be reading these books. Instead, these books are meant to give you sound justification for your personal conservative and libertarian beliefs.

Reading these books is extremely important because I’m tired of seeing some seriously uneducated individuals with the huge platform of social media touting how “capitalism is failing us!” and other extremely dumb claims.

The books suggested here will show both, how government absolute rule isn’t the right answer and the eternal power of the individual.

So, stay tuned, invest in Amazon as the Kindle market explodes, and help raise your new Amazon stock by buying these books on Amazon.

1. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay

Back when America was first established, the country was run under the Articles of Confederation. This document proved to be interesting, but overall a poor way to run a country. This led to the United States Constitution that we still operate under today. The Constitution wasn’t very popular to start out with though. This led to the combined efforts of John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison to write 85 essays over the course of a year in various newspaper outlets. Instead of digging through newspaper archives, these essays have been rounded up and put into a single document that can be found for free online. There are a ton of sources to go through, including congress.gov, but it might be easiest to go through projectgutenberg.com and download it to your e-reader for free.

2. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl is an incredible human. He was in FOUR different Nazi camps between 1942 and 1945, including a stint in Auschwitz, and survived. In his time there, his parents, brother, and his pregnant wife all died, but he kept going. This led him to develop a new form of mental therapy for dealing with adversity which he called logotherapy. The gist of it is that people can’t control what suffering occurs to them, and it will happen no matter what, but they can control how they react to it. Frankl uses his terrible experience of Nazi concentration camps to assert this claim and prove it works because he did it himself. He believes life isn’t pleasant, but life is the discovery and pursuit of what you deem to be meaningful.

3. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is the author of one of, if not the most important books to come out of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn wrote the three-volume book series to be a textbook on how to not run a country. In the same way, the Nazi’s had concentration camps, the Soviet’s had Gulags. The first volume covers the irrational charges that the Soviets would use to arrest its own citizens and throw them in the Gulags for reformation. The second volume covers Solzhenitsyn’s own eight years in a Gulag and tells personal stories and stories of what happened to others in the Gulag. The third volume discusses people attempting to escape the horrors of the Gulags and what happened when they got caught. The book ultimately helped set up the Soviets to lose all sympathies and prove how horrid the totalitarian government is. It’s a great argument against a huge government gone wrong.

4. 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson is really hated by both sides of the political spectrum here in America because he sees how both levels of government can fail. Instead of giving in to either side to appease a fan base, he helps the individual. His second book, 12 Rules for Life, is just 12 of the most prominent rules he came up with from a Quora post he put online. Instead of being directly political, Peterson gives a philosophical and scientific argument to get people to understand that there are certain rules of life that can never be changed because it is simply in the laws of nature. Despite some things making people mad, the arguments really don’t have a good substance to be disproven. Following Dr. Peterson’s 12 rules are guaranteed to help anyone evolve their life, especially in this time of quarantine.

5. Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday

It was a toss-up between Stillness is the Key and Trust Me, I’m Lying both by Ryan Holiday for this final slot. Trust Me, I’m Lying is about how Ryan Holiday proves you can’t really trust the media. They get most, if not all, their sources from a website that doesn’t check credibility. Instead, to become a resource for media, you just sign up with whatever you want. Holiday does this by signing up as an expert in vinyl records then learning from a New York Times article, only to be used as a reference for a later New York Times article. Proving that anyone can be used as a credible source without actually being an expert. But I find his most recent book, Stillness is the Key, is more useful right now. Normally, I’m all for ripping apart the media. It’s hard to trust them these days. For either political side on top of that. Instead, in Holiday’s latest book, he argues that the true key to happiness and success can be found in stillness. Sitting in quiet and truly thinking and reflecting is the only way to find absolute solutions to any issue. Since we’re all quarantined, you might as well make yourself extra successful by figuring out how to be better at your current job.

BONUS: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

I’m sure a ton of people has read this book in school. I was one of those. It’s important to revisit those books though because the meaning you learned in school is not even kind of as important then as what it means as an adult. Fahrenheit 451 is the perfect example. I originally just thought it was a cool story about book burning and maintaining books secretly. I have since learned it is a book about the power of learning and the power of the individual. How the individual is a piece of God and the only way to share the divinity is to find your meaning and continue the spread of the knowledge you have learned. It is essential and it all comes down to the power of the individual. The willingness to stand up to totalitarianism. The willingness to fight back and not stop until the battle is won.