In Defense of Difficult Reading

What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia; Princeton University Press, 272 pp., $25.95

It would be tempting to put Naomi Kanakia’s new book on the crowded shelf of recent works that have sought to defend the importance of a liberal arts education, particularly the humanities. Roosevelt Montás’s Rescuing Socrates (2021) is the most logical precursor to set it beside. But in championing Great Books, Kanakia is not staking out ground in campus curriculum debates. Instead, she addresses the lay reader, Virginia Woolf’s “common reader,” the nonacademic reader who, like Kanakia, may have spent formative years reading science fiction or fantasy more than literary fiction or philosophy. A convert to the Great Books in her 20s, Kanakia wants the Gone Girl reader (her example) to at least consider moving on to Proust and Middlemarch.

In What’s So Great About the Great Books?, she is trying to win converts, not slay opponents. Kanakia acknowledges upfront that the category is not timeless and unobjectionable. The Great Books began as a series of 20th-century initiatives that shaped core curricula at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. It led to the production of the influential Harvard Classics series (which launched Montás’s own Great Books journey) and went on to inspire The New Lifetime Reading Plan (1960) by Clifton Fadiman, whose revised version became Kanakia’s own reading roadmap. We should add Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994) to this genealogy.

Kanakia anticipates her critics by structuring her book around questions a Great Books skeptic might pose. “I wanted to do credit to the Great Books,” she writes, “by taking seriously the arguments against them.” Most of those arguments involve suspicion of the blind spots and biases associated with the book lists themselves. Some sample chapter titles show that spirit: Where did your list of Great Books come from? Why not read other books that are equally beautiful but have better politics? When we say, “The Great Books are worth reading,” do other people hear, “White men are inherently superior”? The uniqueness of Kanakia’s book may just be its patience with these questions. She honors their seriousness and, in places, even concedes the value of the critique. She makes steel-man progressive arguments against the Great Books and then thinks through the challenges with patient sympathy.

The winning jolt of the book, in fact, is the way it positions a Great Books defense as natural and important for readers on the political and cultural left, where Kanakia locates herself. Culture wars have gerrymandered reading lists, and the Great Books usually, as we say now, code right. Kanakia redraws the redrawn map, defending the status of books that are more often valued in classical academies and conservative blogs. Daniel Walden’s recent article for The Point, “The Left Case for Great Books,” makes a related argument. Maybe classic texts will slip partisan sorting after all. Maybe that’s part of what makes them Great Books in the first place.

Kanakia herself is an unthreatening guide. Her tone is conversational not polemical. Immensely well read, she will slip into slang and idioms like “kinda,” or “Well, what can you do?,” or “I have no clue!” These choices feel like appeals to reluctant readers, attempts to show that loving the Great Books doesn’t require academic jargon and specialist expertise. In Kanakia’s view, reading classics is serious and life-giving, not technical and inaccessible—which doesn’t mean it’s not still enormously hard work. “Everyone who’s ever approached a difficult book has had the experience of not getting it at first and then suddenly getting it,” she writes. “That experience is exactly why you read these books.” Why move on from Gone Girl to War and Peace? It’s not because Tolstoy is a better airplane or beach read.

What is her argument, then, for committing to a project that will be long and arduous, for taking on a list of books even Kanakia, with her disciplined devotion, hasn’t come close to finishing? Why, when life is busy and fraught, devote your leisure hours to long shelves of books selected by experts who assert they are classics. Kanakia contends that Great Books have earned their status because of their integrity. They are, she writes, “unflinchingly honest.” They have self-searching “rigor,” “a certain seriousness,” and “sensitivity.” Reading them can cultivate the same in us. More refreshing and, for me, unexpected, is her insistence that our commitment to diversity should include the diversity of other times. This “conversation with the past” adds depth and dimension to our own perceptions of the world. Indeed, reading these classics helps us to better understand our embeddedness in a long and complex context:

The moment we come into contact with other people, we realize that the world precedes us. We come into a rich world that’s already full of preexisting ideas, which we discover through conversation, through the media, and through books. We determine our morality not in isolation but in relation to this world and to the choices it offers us.

This sustained appreciation for what Kanakia elsewhere calls the “collective wisdom” of the Great Books offers a kind of progressive reclaiming of tradition, a seizing of what Emerson called “the forms already existing.”

Kanakia, who writes the “Woman of Letters” blog, and who was featured last year in a New Yorker article titled, “Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?” has, in this new book, steered the culture-war and curriculum debate in a more urgent direction. The most important literary battle at the moment is not whether Milton or Melville or Morrison belongs on a high school or college syllabus but whether we can preserve the practice of patient reading at all. Professors have lately bemoaned their students’ lost capacity for sustained attention. In high school, reading is too often treated as a skill to master rather than a lifelong habit to instill and inspire. What’s So Great About the Great Books? is a spirited, welcome argument about the value of reading—reading on your own time, with your own appetites and needs, with your desire to make something meaningful of your life after your formal education is behind you. It is an appeal for reading whole books, challenging books, old books, books that have survived scrutiny and even contempt, books that affirm without simplifying, books Kanakia is willing to call “great.” Here is a defense of ideas of goodness that aren’t pure preference, ideas of greatness that aren’t punching bags for critique. To paraphrase an orphan character in one of Kanakia’s Great Books: More, please.