Autobiography and the Shape of the Self: Zach Simpson

Hiker, podcaster, and professor of philosophy and religious studies Zach Simpson tells us about autobiography, the way we're shaped by reading, and the skilled misdirections of detective fiction. Intro and outro music: "Your Love Hip Hop" courtesy Music_Unlimited on Pixabay. Episode artwork: Saint Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne (cropped). Public domain image courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Wikimedia Commons. Want to learn more about the books—and shows!—we talked about on this episode? Check out the list below. You can also find us on LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Mastodon—and show your support at Liberapay! 4 Non Blondes                                      Al-Ghazali                                         Deliverance from Error                           Dante Alighieri                                 The Divine Comedy             Augustine of Hippo                          The Confessions                                                                               Marcus Aurelius                                                                                                                             Averroes                                                  Walter Benjamin  The Book of Judges     Jorge Luis Borges Bill Bryson                                        A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail                     Roberto Calasso                               Literature and the Gods Italo Calvino                                     If On a Winter's Night a Traveler      Car and Driver                                Lee Child                                          Jack Reacher series  Cicero  Michael Connelly                             Harry Bosch series Michael ConnellyThe Lincoln Lawyer series                       Gilles Deleuze      Mark Fisher                                                 Gustave Flaubert                                            Sigmund Freud                                                              Gabriel García Márquez                                                Alasdair Gray                                   Lanark: A Life in Four Books                                                                                    The Greens and Blues 14er Podcast Frederic Gros                                   A Philosophy of Walking  Barbara Guest                                  Herself Defined: H. D. and Her World  Rob Harvilla                                     Sixty Songs that Explain the Nineties                                                 Václav Havel                                                                                                          Martin Heidegger                                 Hermann Hesse                             Dave Hickey                             Homer Aldous Huxley                                  Island                                                      Isocrates                                                                                         Samuel Johnson / James Boswell    A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland / The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides John Kaag                                         Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are           Margery Kempe             Lamentations                                                             John Locke                                       Essay Concerning Human Understanding                                     Martin Luther Table Talk Robert Macfarlane                          The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot Daniel Mendelsohn                                                                                        Metallica                                          "Enter Sandman"                                         Georg Misch                                    A History of Autobiography in Antiquity   Thomas More                                  Utopia        Maggie Nelson                       Friedrich Nietzsche                          Ecce Homo Oprah's Book Club  Eric Ellis OvermeyerBosch Reese's Book Club                                                                                             Rick Riordan                                     Percy Jackson and the Olympians                                                                          Gerry Roach  Jean-Jacques Rousseau                  Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau                   Origins of Inequality Jean-Jacques Rousseau                   The Social Contract                          Saturday Night Live "Thank You, Scott" William Shakespeare                       The Tempest   William Shakespeare                       Henry IV       Zachary Simpson                                   The Paradoxes of Modernity                                                                                Sophocles       Sports Illustrated  Taylor Swift  Ibn Tufayl                                         Hayy ibn Yaqzan                              Article on the tale by Marwa Elshakry             Mark Twain                                      Roughing It                      Emily Wilson