The Inaugural Tortuga Book Club
The Pillars of the Earth, Kingsbridge Series #1, by Ken Follett
Hello everyone, it’s been a while since I’ve published anything to Tortuga Media. I’ve been riding the coattails of my last substantial contribution, which was received well, and I’ve also been dealing with a host of circumstances in my own life that have kept me away from the keyboard.
The core offering of Tortuga Society is still a toolbox for its members to develop themselves into economic pirates within a well-curated digital fraternity. That said, the captain is leaning heavily into his literary arc. Similarly, both Theon and I are looking to expand what the society offers to our guys to help them develop deeper aesthetic and artistic sensibilities.
Today, I’m here to announce the inaugural Tortuga Society Book Club1. This limited-run gathering is designed to appeal to the aristocratic sensibilities of our Sensitive Young Men™ who yearn to engage themselves in pursuit of higher ends, beyond the pleasures of financial arbitrage against decrepit and disreputable institutions of 21st-century America.
We’ll be reading and discussing the first book, The Pillars of the Earth, of the esteemed Kingsbridge pentalogy by Ken Follett.2
Now, given the fact that everyone nowadays—including me—suffers from a level of distractibility exceeding that of a squirrel-brained chimpanzee with ADHD, I had to consider whether there would be enough people willing and able to read a book that is more than 10 pages long, let alone 1000 pages long.
However, my instinct is that the caliber of the median guy in our group is far beyond that of the average person, so that with the right nudge, they’ll not only accede to the task but also participate in a rich dissection of this contemporary medieval historical fiction.
While mainstream sinecurists are paid millions to puzzle over how to appeal to white men (who they continue to see as fundamentally evil, disgusting, and beyond hope), we shall endeavor to partake in an unapologetic celebration of Anglican heritage—in all of its glory, violence, chaos, and majesty.
Keep in mind that I’m only about a quarter of the way into the book, so I’m not able to make any final conclusions on quality. Still, so far, I’m quite pleased about both the general themes of the novel and the characters, both of which are presented in simple terms without reducing their innate complexity.
A couple of things that have struck me positively so far, in particular:
The novel portrays male heterosexuality accurately and without admonition. Frankly, in 2025, I consider this to be a miracle given that publishing houses have a minimum mandatory misandry requirement, if they aren’t run by anonymous (or doxxed) Twitter accounts.
It also portrays the real messiness of spiritual life in dark times, in a way that doesn’t flatter the facile religious sensibilities of, for example, Millennial TradCath Twitter e-celebrities who work a remote data analysis job, and livestream political debates with centrists on YouTube in their spare time.
It provides a surprising amount of anagogic ambiguity for a setting bound by an explicit and narrow historical and moral context. The worst sin that a piece of literature can commit is to be overly intellectually prescriptive, and this book does not descend into such base demeanor.
Moving on to the logistics:
We’ll be providing a free e-book version to anyone who signs up. You’re free to get a physical version, too, if desired.
We’ll be running a series of six 90-minute group calls this summer, either every week or every other week.
The first of these will include a planning session where I lead the participants in developing a co-curriculum that will set our collective path for the remainder of the book club.
One of my goals is to select discussion leaders who create and bring activities and presentations to the table on different days.
Depending on how things play out, our activities may cover fewer chapters so that we can focus on fewer sections more deeply.
Existing members of Tortuga Society will have access to all of these sessions and their related materials without any further cost on their part.
Non-members of the society are eligible to join if they sign up for an annual Substack membership ($50) with Tortuga Media.
Upon verified attendance and participation in all sessions, non-members will be eligible for a 30% discount on a full Tortuga Society membership
I’m optimistic that this will be a great time and produce a lot of valuable engagement and inspiration in several ways. If this sounds like the kind of challenge you’ve been looking for, we’d love to have you join us. It’s a one-time (at least at this stage) opportunity to read something ambitious, think seriously with others, and strengthen parts of yourself that often get neglected. Sign up, show up, and see where it takes you.
As a quick aside, I asked several different LLMs for ideas for a name that was better than Tortuga Book Club, and precisely none of the suggestions were any good.
I’m in, looks fun.
I’ll play. And I’m ahead of most of you, because 20 years ago I was an overnight security guard, and I read this book while I was making sure nobody broke into an office building.