What's So Great About the Great Books

I like reading books, and I like writing about reading books, and I like writing about reading books that write about reading books!

I just finished "What's So Great About the Great Books?", the latest book and first non-fiction book from Naomi Kanakia. It's a great, thoughtful, gently persuasive case for the seemingly-daunting task of reading through "the classics", the received-wisdom (but surprisingly amorphous) list of the greatest books ever written. She roams around a bit, looking at the contents of the books themselves but also directly addressing the many reasons why people may be reluctant to embark on such a time-consuming project.

 

 

For the last few years I've followed along with this project through her blog Woman Of Letters, which launched as a Substack in part to promote this book's project, and since then has also become a place to read intriguing short fiction (as well as some really fun and occasionally catty inside-baseball glimpses of the literary fiction world). Some topics from this book have been previously discussed on there, such as the importance of taste and the value in reading authors from diverse eras as well as diverse cultures. I liked how everything came together in this volume, each chapter is nicely focused but the book as a whole coheres and can easily refer back to previous points.

While this isn't exactly a memoir, it does draw on a lot of autobiographical material, both the overall course of her life and specific meaningful moments within it. This doesn't feel at all gratuitous: the book aims to show how reading the Great Books can change your life, and shows that in a concrete way. She also shows how her own understanding of the Great Books has changed: when she started reading them, she was an aspiring science-fiction author, and assumed that all writers and publishers were immersed in the Great Books. Only many years later did she realize that most writers have not seriously studied these books, either in school or outside of it, and that today that classics have only marginal influence inside academia.

I like how Naomi keeps restating the premise of the book - she uses different language at different points, but the overall thrust is that reading the Great Books is a good use of your time, because it will help develop your sense of taste. It does this by exposing you to very well-written literature, and literature from cultures unlike our own, so being exposed to this greatness helps you recognize greatness. Having this taste won't directly transform your life: it won't make you more employable or popular, but it can improve the quality of your life and make you more thoughtful. In her own experience, she can't say "Reading X helped me do Y", but the overall experience of reading Proust was profound, and reading about the struggles of characters in eighteenth-century novels gives language for us to describe our own situations.

The book spends a lot of time considering the intersection of politics and the Great Books. Historically, the Great Books as a concept started as a middle-class American invention in the post-WW2 era. This was a time when the elite institutions like Harvard stopped requiring Latin and Greek, so there was a desire to still share those ancient stories to a larger audience. Academics thought that people reading these great books would help make the populace more educated, thoughtful, better citizens. Encyclopedia Britannica sent its salesmen door-to-door selling subscriptions to the Great Books; their direct goal was profit, and the vision they sold was that people would be able to raise their social and cultural capital by learning to speak about these great books. Interestingly, this was especially effective in many African-American homes, and you can still see a lot of Great Books on the bookshelves of older black peoples' homes.  In a survey Encyclopedia Britannica commissioned to study who was buying the books, they found that they tended to be weird, loner nerds, who loved books but felt awkward in high society, and saw the books as a potential gateway to entering that world.

Today, interest in the Great Books in America tends to be aligned with Christian, traditional, conservative groups. The classics tend to be either ignored or viewed with suspicion by progressive or liberal readers, which includes most of secular academia and the publishing world. Naomi seems to be primarily writing to this latter group, and many chapters consider the objections people might have. Are these books racist? Do they harm society? Can reading them trigger you and cause psychological damage? She takes these concerns seriously, looking at the reasons they are raised and what valid arguments could be made, but continually concludes that the benefits outweigh the risks. In some cases, these books are great because they swim in murky and uncomfortable waters. Or we can learn to see the beauty of their art and not be distracted by the author's prejudices.

I have to say that I think I personally lean more towards the perspective of Naomi's wife, who questions the company that these books keep. I mentally sort art as inferior to politics: beauty is wonderful, but survival is more important than beauty. That said, What's Go Great About the Great Books? comes at politics-and-art from a slightly different angle. I'm used to arguments about, say, whether we should praise and study works like "Triumph of the Will" or "Birth of a Nation" that are impressive artistic achievements with horrendous messages. Naomi, though, sees art as inherently individualistic. Experiencing a work of art doesn't mechanically move you in a given direction. If it moves you at all, the effect will depend on your own private history, culture, community, prior beliefs, concerns in life, and so on. As one example, Anna Karenina is beloved by many people who identify as leftist, even though the novel is explicitly about traditional morality. Reading Anna Karenina won't mechanically transform you into a traditional moralist.

Or to directly quote from the book: 

To reduce the Great Books to politics is to make a fundamental mistake about the nature of reading. A book does not make us do or think anything. In reading the book, we might alter our own beliefs, but we changed ourselves - the book does not change us. So, to say certain books are bad is to, as its core, make an assumption about free will: to assume that books can act mechanically on human beings, such that human beings are helpless to judge or resist them. But if human beings can determine their own beliefs, then books cannot be pernicious; they can only be better or worse tools for achieving whatever purpose the reader intends for them.

Then a footnote adds:

An exception to this statement is books that lie. These are books that make arguments that are easily disproven, using either surface-level logic or empirically attained evidence.

Reading that, my mind immediately goes to books that have had a pernicious effect on civilization: the Turner Diaries, the Malleus Malleficarum, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The latter two books definitely lie, the former is a novel. What does it mean for a novel to "lie"? And does it matter that most people believed the lies? To be fair, I don't think any of these books or books like them are part of the Great Books canon, but still, I think there's a gap between our ideal vision of a noble reader thoughtfully and sensitively communing with a work of literature, and the actual measured impacts that some books have caused in generating murders.

Naomi says that books with "perfect politics" can't be Great Books, because they're too flat, missing the complexity and contradiction that reflect real life and are present in great literature. Emile Zola has complicated politics, Upton Sinclair has perfect politics, but The Jungle isn't a good book, because its protagonists are too perfect. I agree that complexity is essential for greatness, but I also think that you can have good complexity or bad complexity. George Saunders might be my Platonic ideal of good complexity - his characters are messy and flawed, but there's a keen moral voice at work in his work. You can still wrestle with a hard problem and its rough edges while always being within a bounded moral area. Would Saunders' stories be better if they earnestly espoused racism or homophobia? They'd be more "complex" but worse.

I'm reminded of recent discourse on and about Bluesky - there's a recurring charge that it's an "echo chamber". Which is kind of funny, because there's nonstop heated argument and debate on there. But on Bluesky it's mostly leftists arguing with liberals. Would the discourse be elevated if the Bronze Age Pervert and Matt Walsh and Curtis Yarvin were a key part of the discourse? I think not - it would be more "complex", but wouldn't elevate worthy ideas above their current exercise. As in the Brain-Dead Megaphone and Nexus, adding more information does not always and mechanically bring us closer to goodness or truth. It has to be good, true information to begin with.

But again, I think all this is somewhat orthogonal to Naomi's thesis. We aren't talking about the Turner Diaries, we're talking about Huckleberry Finn and Aristotle and Nietzsche. These are specifically great books, written by people who died a long time ago and were writing to and about a world that no longer exists. There are good things we can get out of those books, and we shouldn't let our present concerns prevent us from their goodness.

Shifting topics a bit: Kant comes up several times during this book. I haven't read him, but I really like the idea presented here that we can know an object or truth through intuition, not through reason. Logic and reason let us communicate ideas, but those ideas only exist within our minds; actual objects do exist, but we cannot discover them through reason. But art can be a way for us to directly experience and understand those things which cannot be explained. This reminds me a little bit of Kierkegaard, who I have read and enjoyed, and similarly draws a strong boundary between logic and faith: faith isn't necessarily less valuable or important than logic, but exists independently of it.

The appendix to the book includes the list of Great Books that Naomi has been following. As she explains, while plenty of people are eager to extol the virtues of The Great Books, they tend to be very cagey about exactly what books are on or off the list. A handful are indisputable (no list would omit The Odyssey or Shakespeare), but when you start deciding who is in or out you'll inevitably get drawn into arguments. So it's mostly coincidental that this is the specific list she's followed.

Anyways, I like lists too! Just for fun, I noted below which of these Great Books I've read. Ones I mark with a * are cases where I've read only part of a book (typically a collection of poems or essays). Like Naomi, I count books that I know I've read even when I don't remember them well. I think I read The Mayor of Casterbridge for English class in either my junior or senior year of high school, but I couldn't tell you anything about it today.

I read a lot of these books in high school or in college: I was an English Literature major, so many were very relevant! I more clearly remember the ones I've read since then as an adult. I am not counting plays that I've seen but not read, and obviously not adaptations like movies. 

Anyways, I have read: 

The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous

The Iliad by Homer

The Odyssey by Homer

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

Antigone by Sophocles

The Histories by Herodotus

Lysistrata by Aristophanes

The Birds by Aristophanes

Protagorus by Plato

Phaedo by Plato

The Aeneid by Virgil

* The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Prince by Machiavelli

The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part 1 by Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part 2 by Shakespeare

Hamlet by Shakespeare

King Lear by Shakespeare

Macbeth by Shakespeare

Othello by Shakespeare

The Tempest by Shakespeare

* Selected Sonnets by Shakespeare

* Selected Works by John Donne

Discourse on Method by Descartes

Paradise Lost by Milton

* Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

* Second Treatise of Government by John Locke

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

* Basic Documents in American History by Thomas Jefferson and others

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

Kubla Khan by Coleridge

Pride and Prejudice by Austen

* Nature by Emerson

* Selected Essays by Emerson

The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne

* Selected Tales by Hawthorne

* On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

* Short Stories and Other Works by Edgar Allen Poe

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Walden by Thoreau

Civil Disobedience by Thoreau

The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels

Moby-Dick by Melville

Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville

* Selected Poems by Whitman

Madame Bovary by Flaubert

Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky

* Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson

Huckleberry Finn by Twain

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

Ulysses by James Joyce

The Trial by Kafka

The Castle by Kafka

Brave New World by Huxley

The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner

* Short Stories by Hemingway

Labyrinths by Borges

Dreamtigers by Borges

Pale Fire by Nabokov

Animal Farm by Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell

* Collected Poems by Auden

The Plague by Camus

The Stranger by Camus

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez

 

Looking through this list, the biggest surprise for me is my lack of Dickens - he has a lot of books on this list, I've read some of his work but nothing on the list. The list and Naomi's recommendation also reminds me that I want to read more of the great Russian novelists - Crime and Punishment was an incredible book, and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain exposed me to a lot of great short stories from Russians. I'm pretty sparse on poetry and drama, and feel fine about that; most poetry leaves me cold, and I'd usually prefer to see a staged performance of a play than read the text.

What's So Great About the Great Books? was a treat. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect when I picked it up, and I'm still not sure how best to describe it (a manifesto? an essay? a memoir?), but I know I enjoyed it. I've been a lifelong reader, but definitely an aimless one, veering between authors and subjects based largely on whims. I admire the dedication and earnestness in pursuing such a daunting life-long project to read through all these Great Books. As Naomi says, not everyone will, can or should follow this path: some people are too busy curing HIV to read Proust. But for those of us with the leisure time and attention spans to read, we can get a lot from these old, great books.