Why Read

Basically speaking, we can read the Great Books in one of three ways:

• For PLEASURE;

• For the purposes of ACADEMIC STUDY; or

• For the purposes of the EDUCATION OF THE SOUL.

At various times I have read the Great Books for pleasure. My university training and my own teaching have been directed to reading the Great Books for the purposes of academic study. However, my current focus in creating a list of the Great Books and a schedule for reading them is the education of the soul. It is in this spirit that I passionately approach the Great Books: with a view to the leading of the soul to Beauty, Truth and the Good. When reflecting on the work I am reading, I ask myself: "in what ways is this work teaching me to try to be the best person I can be -- a better father, husband, citizen?"

See "How to Read the Great Books"

See my list of the "101 Greatest Books"

See my list of the "1001 Great Books"

The global civilization we live in is a product of a critical tradition of thinking and writing concerning what is the best way for us to live as individuals and as a society, namely the Western tradition. That tradition is founded on two pillars: the Greek spirit of philosophical inquiry and the Hebrew attempt to live in accordance with a Divine Law. In other words, it is the product of the tension between Reason and Revelation. This dialogue and tension between the Hellenic and the Hebraic bore fruit in the form of modern liberal democracies and in the form of the modern scientific inquiry into nature. These developments are relatively recent phenomena (within the last 500 years), in relation to human history as such (over 300,000 years). Yet the modern age has witnessed in that short time exponential improvements in humanity's ability to face the daily challenges of survival -- from feeding ourselves to curing the sick -- as well as improvements in individual liberties enjoyed by a majority of the members of Western liberal democracies. However, this Western tradition is at a point of crisis wherein many have come to question the critical values that have made the West: are individual liberties a "natural right" or merely a Western construct? Is scientific inquiry into nature the sole arbiter of truth on these matters and is it as objective as it would like to say it is? In questioning these assumptions, many would like to accelerate the destruction and overcoming of this civilization and its tradition. However, in order to understand ourselves in the present and our future possibilities, we must continue to plant our roots firmly in the soil of this tradition. The spirit of CRITICAL INQUIRY that is needed to overcome the limits of the modern age are to be found in the Western tradition itself. There is an inner meaning and enduring strength that lie within the greatest spiritual, intellectual and artistic achievements of the West that can continue to nourish us.

The notion that there is a set of definitive texts that define the tradition has been "deconstructed" over the last few decades from a number of angles. However, the DECONSTRUCTION OF THE CANON is not a strictly recent phenomenon. It has been undertaken since the inception of the Western tradition with the Ancient Greeks and Hebrews. The first philosophers took as their point of departure a critique of the traditional wisdom that had been passed down to them in the form of the poets, thereby commencing the perennial "Quarrel of Philosophy and Poetry". So too, within the Jewish tradition, Priestly authors writing in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE consciously re-wrote and re-interpreted the stories of their ancestors in light of the experiences of the Babylonian captivity. Later, with the modern revolution in thinking, Francis Bacon and René Descartes felt the tradition of authoritative texts was precisely that which they needed to dispense with so that they could approach truth more directly. This dismantling of the canon of great works and authors took a different turn in the course of the latter half of the 20th century. At that time, following in the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche, many theorists attacked the traditional canon on the principle that the set of authors and texts one finds in these lists is an arbitrary effect of power structures (a function of their power as white, male, wealthy etc.), not a result of the inherent greatness or value of the works themselves. So the Western tradition has been marked throughout its history by a destruction and re-creation of its highest texts and ideals. A critical re-evaluation and re-interpretation of the texts of the past forms the very basis of the tradition. Recent efforts to deconstruct the canon, therefore, are not a justification to abandon that canon and its tradition of critical inquiry.

Today, the advent of new communications technologies also challenges our traditional relationship with the knowledge of the past. Indeed, one could ask along with James Poulos: can we have "Great Books in a Digital Age?" The effect of the DIGITAL AGE on the canon can be perceived in a few ways. First, we live in an age where the ability to slowly and closely read a 900 page text of subtly nuanced fiction or of densely argued philosophy is becoming more and more rare. Adam Garfinkle has called this phenomenon "The Erosion of Deep Literacy". Second, with the advent of "Digital Humanities", we see the possibility of relating to the texts of the tradition as texts to be mined and analyzed globally. In this vein, Franco Moretti has infamously called for a practice of "Distant Reading" to replace our traditional skills of "close reading". Finally, the notion that there is one corpus of texts that constitute the core of what one should read and know seems obviated by the seemingly infinite information and counter-claims that are available today.

Still, despite the fact that the Western tradition seems to lead to its own destruction in critical philosophy, and despite the fact that it is increasingly difficult to think of a coherent corpus of texts in our digital age, we cannot escape noticing that it is only out of the Western tradition itself that critical philosophy and digital technology arise. So once again we are led to the conclusion that in order to understand ourselves in the present and our future possibilities, we must continue to plant our roots firmly in the soil of the tradition. The way out of the current "crisis of the West" will necessarily involve a "stepping back" -- not out of an atavistic desire to return to an idealized past, but out of a need to critically think through the essence of what makes us modern, Western, and human.

Our lives are marked by a RADICAL FINITUDE: we will never do all of the things we hope to be able to do, say what we would want or mean to say, or get to know and love others in quite the way we would want to know and love them. It is the same with books. Despite efforts by the digital humanities to scan and analyze millions of texts, and despite the efforts of trans-humanists to overcome the limits of death via modern biotechnology, we will never be able to get to know and love all of the great works we would want. We will need to make choices. Lists can help us decide what is reasonable to do or read over the course of a summer holiday, or even the course of one's life. For this reason, I find some lists of Great Books less serious. For instance, the Mortimer and Van Doren List includes a vast listing of 137 authors and often no choices have been made about the key texts that would need to be read; it simply lists "Works" as what is to be read for many of the authors listed. Since these authors, in many cases, wrote dozens of works, the list would quickly get into the thousands. This is unrealistic. No one would be able to meaningfully engage with that number of works in one life time. No difficult choices have been made. Lists are about making difficult choices about what is worth pursuing in a limited amount of time.

The Master List

An exceptional Blog that has surveyed 24 lists of great books to come up with a list of over one thousand titles. As most lists are heavily biased to modern novels (many lists are basically "100 Best Novels" lists), this list is skewed in that direction as well. However, this is a great resource.

The Great Books of the Western World

Originally published in 1952 by Encyclopedia Britannica as a 54 volume set, it has since been re-issued in a 60 volume set. It contains 517 works by 130 authors. The volumes were edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler; Adler also produced a two-volume work, "The Great Ideas: A Synopticon" (Volume I; Volume II), based on the works in the set. Adler's selection of texts, unlike most lists, includes a healthy proportion of books in philosophy and science, rather than the standard list of novels; this is an approach I have taken as well.

The Harvard Classics

Like the Great Books of the Western World above, this is also a multi-volume collection of the selected works -- 51 volume set that includes 180 works (1909/17).

The Western Canon

Harold Bloom's list of approximately 1300 key texts included at the end of his work; strangely it is not limited to the Western Canon.

How to Read a Book

The list provided in Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren's book on this topic. The list contains 137 authors, often their entire corpus (or, "Works") are listed as to be read.

The 50 Greatest Books of All Time

Compiled by a secret panel of judges for the Globe and Mail. It is not limited to the West and in the name of inclusion must make some odd exclusions -- no Hamlet, Macbeth or Othello?

The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major follow an approach similar to my own -- what are the key texts one should read in the short remaining days of their life? Their book provides a very good list of 133 works as well as two page summaries of the texts listed. They do not limit themselves to the West; they do not include the Bible at all (major lacuna) and avoid the Shakespeare problem by simply listing "Complete Plays" as the work to be read.

The Book of Great Books

Another book with a list of great works along with short summaries of each, this one by W. John Campbell. The approach is the "World Classics" and, again, the Bible is inexplicably omitted. Otherwise, a good list.

The Columbia Reading List (1961-62)

The syllabus for the Freshman Literature/Humanities class at Columbia. I have referred to the 1961-62 syllabus as the more recent installments have become a little watered down.