A Calendar of Wisdom
Leo Tolstoy considered A Calendar of Wisdom the most important book he ever compiled, and he worked on it in various forms across the last two decades of his life. The finished text organizes 365 daily readings around themes such as faith, work, humility, service, temptation, and death, with each entry stitching together short quotations from figures as varied as Christ, Buddha, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, Emerson, Kant, and Tolstoy himself. The book is meant to be read a page a day rather than in sittings, and returns to the same handful of ethical and spiritual questions from different angles as the year progresses. Tolstoy's own reflections thread through the entries and give the book a distinct voice, more austere than his novels and preoccupied with how to live rightly. Suppressed for decades in the Soviet Union, it appeared in English only in the late 1990s.
What you might want to know about A Calendar of Wisdom
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Tolstoy's daily reader, assembled over seventeen years, offering short passages from world philosophy and scripture for every day of the year.
Holiday has said Tolstoy's daily reader was one of the direct models for The Daily Stoic and calls it the single best daily book he has ever read, and he recommends it constantly to his own readers.
The book is dated to the calendar year, but there is no obligation to start in January, and many readers simply open to today's date and go from there.
A Calendar of Wisdom was written by Leo Tolstoy, published in 1997 by Scribner.
A Calendar of Wisdom is 400 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, A Calendar of Wisdom takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
A Calendar of Wisdom is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
