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