The Great Books for You and for Me

At the end of August this summer, I’m going to be back in the college classroom for the first time in three years—or, technically, almost six years, since the last on-campus class I taught was in Spring 2020 and the subsequent three years were all online. I’m especially excited, because I will be teaching Greek history—which means that we will begin the semester by reading Homer’s Odyssey in its entirety. We’ll go from there to read Herodotus, Thucydides, a smattering of Athenian comedies and tragedies, before concluding the semester by reading Plato’s Apology and putting Socrates back on trial in our own classroom. We’ll see if this group of students awards him his request of free dinners for life.  

As it happens, my new home department’s mission of Great Books emphasis in teaching history and political theory fits well with an exciting new trend. This past May in The Atlantic, David Brooks took a break from mourning the destructive effects of the Ivy League on America and proclaimed instead: "Something Big Is Happening on Campus." The subject of his newfound optimism? Great Books curricula. He opened his essay with a brief profile of Roosevelt Montás, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who fell in love with Plato as a high-schooler, became a college professor of Great Books, and wrote a book about it along the way, aptly titled Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. Not bad for an immigrant kid who literally found a book of Plato's dialogues in the trash.

Reading can be life-changing, many agree, including those who might not be died-in-the-wool Great Books advocates. Indeed, the importance of reading has been the reason behind the push for literacy campaigns in American public schools for generations now, and now for some college programs too. While the humanities continue with gritted teeth to field the questions about the utility of those degrees and program cuts about, many universities simply move to offer the Great Books—and find that if you build such programs, the students will come. Brooks’s experience on the ground confirms the growth of this trend: 

I get to visit about two dozen campuses every year, and I meet at least a few teachers like Montás at each of them. I can generally spot the ones with the pure disease, the ones with that raw teacher-fire. Usually, they had some experience early in life when they fell in love with learning. This love then became a ruling passion, and now they fervently seek to share it with their students in the classroom. You can find them at Ivies and at community colleges, at big state schools and small liberal-arts colleges. They are a part of what’s going right in American higher education, the part that critics (like me) don’t write about enough.

I grew up in a bookish immigrant family. Our home shelves were filled with the works of Dumas, Balzac, Beecher Stowe, James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, Stevenson, Homer, Plutarch, Gogol, Pushkin, and many, many more, whom I read first in Russian, because that was the language of my family’s home library. I double-majored in the Classics and French Literature in college and went on to get a PhD in Classics. In other words, an appreciation of the importance of what is generally referred to as Great Books was, in my family and throughout all my life, axiomatic.

But for many others the question remains: Sure, reading is good (and the decline of reading is apocalyptic, the July Atlantic cover story reminds), but why does it matter what we read? Why is reading the Great Books, specifically, life-changing, as opposed to merely a literary diet of adult equivalents of Dog Man or Captain Underpants, literal (but not literary) bestsellers that they are? And, on a related note, what books should be counted among the Great Books, anyway? These questions are more difficult to answer, because they require making a judgment—that some books are better or more valuable than others. Casting such judgments, though, has become a political affair. The spirit of pluralism, in particular, is categorically antithetical to making a judgment that certain books are, in fact, much better than others. My own academic home field of Classics has experienced an implosion as a result, with some on the inside accusing the field of being for too long nothing but the study of dead white men—by other dead white men. 

This is an argument that proponents of the Great Books have to contend with as well. And so, on the surface at least, it seems that the case for the Great Books (just as for the Classics, which generally are included within Great Books curricula) is going to be different for those who approach the field from the right rather than from the left. Except, as I started digging deeper, it turned out that most defenses of the Great Books, whether on the left or the right, have effectively been repeating the same arguments time and again. 

Perhaps Brooks is right, and the love of the Great Books is a uniting force in the American higher education landscape. Indeed, it seems that all who teach the Great Books face a common enemy—the “utilitarian” approach that dominates higher education at the moment, valuing all subject matter entirely based on utility. From this perspective, AI in particular seems to have destroyed any need for reading and writing. But the unified response from both the right and the left remains the same: to read is human. And reading the Great Books now has a new purpose of buttressing our humanity in the face of the machine onslaught.

The Right Case for Great Books

Over the past decade if not longer, the Great Books, along with their close relative, Classical education, have acquired a strong association with the political right and especially with Christian readers. Consider Catholic convert and philosopher Zena Hitz’s bestseller Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Hitz received her PhD in ancient philosophy from Princeton University, and after a few years in a traditional academic position, she walked away in search of something she couldn’t name but that she felt was missing. She found God and a deeper love of the intellectual life in the process. In her book, she presents the intellectual life rooted in reading Great Books as a transcendent delight. She now teaches at her own undergraduate alma mater, St. John’s College, an institution whose curriculum is structured entirely around the reading of Great Books. 

For other conservative Great Books advocates, like evangelical scholar Karen Swallow Prior, reading these books teaches the virtues essential for living a good and well-ordered life in community with God and fellow humans. That is the main argument in her book On Reading Well: Finding a Good Life Through Great Books. Walking the reader through virtues and vices of classic literary characters, Prior shows that the very act of reading is formational for us as persons. Great Books change us—they make us better. 

Pepperdine University Great Books professor Jessica Hooten Wilson agrees. In her book The Scandal of Holiness, she shows how reading enriches our imagination and introduces “literary saints” who will guide us throughout our lives, allowing us to find goodness, truth, and beauty. Catholic literary scholar Christopher Scalia makes a version of this argument in his own book 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read), as he argues that conservatives are facing a crisis of the imagination, and reading the Great Books is one way to address it. 

Ultimately, conservative arguments in favor of the Great Books revolve around the formational aspects of reading. Great Books are the kinds of books that make their readers better—they form readers in the virtues, they productively shape their imagination and faith, and they make them better citizens of liberal democracy. 

In defining the Great Books, furthermore, conservatives emphasize the value of humility and tradition: if millennia of readers have considered Vergil essential reading, who are we to arrogantly declare that we suddenly know better? What do such proclamations say about our character? “The good life begins and ends with humility,” Swallow Prior says in concluding her book. On a related note, conservative defenses of the Great Books continue to emphasize the timeless nature of these books. To read a Greek tragedy in the twenty-first century will elicit some of the same emotions that the original audiences felt in the fifth century BC. Our shared humanity is on display through reading these books and discussing them together. That is what the pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty has been about for over two and a half millennia now.

When it comes to facing questions of utility, then, conservatives can point to matters of the soul—reading is transcendent, which means that in addition to improving the brain and the heart, it also elevates the soul. This is useful for the education and elevation of persons, albeit not in terms that ever make it into any course learning outcomes. Yet this role of the Great Books is particularly important right now—because our cultural crisis right now is metaphysical, as conservative journalist Mary Harrington argues. By neglecting matters of the spirit, we lose our very humanity. In other words, in this age of AI, we need the Great Books more than ever. 

The Left Case for Great Books

So can a case for the Great Books be made from the political left? Must one be a conservative and a Christian of some sort to appreciate these books? The answer, it seems, is no. But the arguments that come from the left are remarkably familiar. It seems, really, that the left case for the Great Books is identical to that made from the right. It’s just that it is made by people who self-identify as left-leaning.

For instance, while Montás himself is not affiliated with the right and is a lapsed Catholic, his own Rescuing Socrates, is still imbued with the same language and values that conservatives have generally presented in their arguments in favor of a Great Books education—especially, the belief that Great Books make us better persons and citizens. To say that reading Plato saves lives may sound dramatic but is true for all Great Books advocates, left or right. 

Likewise, this was my impression in reading Daniel Walden’s essay earlier this year, "The Left Case for the Great Books." Walden is a liberal Catholic, and he is a self-described leftist. He is a Homerist by academic training, and he has spent his academic career teaching in Great Books programs, most recently at the Honors College of the University of Tulsa. In other words, few have his credentials for making a left-of-center defense of the Great Books in earnest.

But what is striking in reading Walden’s argument for the value of the Great Books is just how much it holds in common with the right-leaning arguments. He argues that the Great Books are the sort of books that teach us to be better people individually, and this matters for us personally. They are timeless—as he notes with examples from Homer and Aeschylus. The Great Books equip us to be good citizens in a liberal democracy, and this makes liberal education a public good, no less than a personal good. Finally, deep conversations about the Great Books teach students intellectual honesty and how to function well in community: 

The secret ingredient behind the most successful Great Books programs is not only the syllabus but the intellectual community that is formed. A community is necessary because it lets people who have begun to recognize their common humanity develop new ways of relating to one another that have nothing to do with the scripts handed to them by their social context, and this new community must be insulated in some way from society at large so that the compulsion to follow these omnipresent, ready-made social scripts loses some of its force.

Really, the only thing that is absent from Walden’s defense of the Great Books, in comparison with conservative scholars, is the interest in the formational aspect of these books spiritually. Still, much of the language that Walden presents about treasuring our “common humanity” can be found also in conservative defenses of the Great Books—because to speak of our shared humanity often involves speaking of the spiritual realm, going back to the doctrine of the Imago Dei, creation of humanity in God’s image. Many on the left stop short of this last point, even if they are religious. 

But so far, all of the books and essays I have discussed have been by academically trained scholars of the Great Books. Maybe it is academic training that has led to the similarities of their arguments, a skeptic might note. What about a normal reader—perhaps someone who didn't get a Great Books education in any school setting but came to love reading as an adult? How might such a person defend the Great Books?

Such is the story of Naomi Kanakia, the author of the newest contribution to the genre of defenses of the Great Books, What's So Great About the Great Books? Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You). The uniqueness of her book, she argues, lies in her own late arrival to reading the Great Books. She holds an MFA and is a YA novelist. She does not hold a PhD in any field and is not employed in academia. And so, her questions do not have to do with teaching the Great Books in a college setting but rather with the education of “normal” people. How might someone who had missed the chance to read much earlier approach getting a Great Books education later on in life? And why might such reading be good for that person?

Key to Kanakia’s argument is her own story. Educated in a private Catholic high school that was immersed in the Great Books and included the study of Latin, she rebelled in college, spending the four years drinking heavily and often high as well. Getting rejected from all MFA programs to which she applied at first, though, taught her humility and made her realize that good writers are, first and foremost, good readers. And so, she found a list of Great Books and started reading through this list for personal improvement. This was nearly two decades ago, and in her own way, she found that (surprise!) reading the Great Books saved her life. 

Really, the main signs of Kanakia’s left-of-center views lie in the following three aspects of her argument. First, she is dismissive of the idea of universal truth, goodness, and beauty—indeed, there is a footnote early in the book that ridicules Jessica Hooten Wilson’s idea of the transcendent aspect of reading. Second, Kanakia argues that far from being timeless, the entire concept of the Great Books is a recent construct—just as many scholars on the left now argue that gender is a construct, as is class, religion, and so on. Finally, the conclusion delves heavily into her own identity struggles as a queer man who transitioned to being a woman in adulthood. 

And yet, even while trying to be dismissive of arguments about the unique value of the Great Books, Kanakia cannot help but return repeatedly to how key reading them has been for her life after college, and how transformative reading them can be for others. Without using such words as “transcendent” or “timeless” or “formational,” she effectively says the same thing as conservative scholars have been saying all along, and as Walden did in his own essay. She reflects in her conclusion: “To open the Great Books is to begin a conversation. And the nature of that conversation is different for every person. Everyone who’s had a sustained encounter with these books has felt something, has felt themselves changed by them. That’s the whole reason people like me tend to recommend these books—because they do destroy you, in some way, but the destruction is good.” As a conservative classicist, I agree. 

Reading Together

While the arguments in favor of the Great Books from both the left and the right are remarkably similar, Kanakia’s question is important: What should someone do, who did not receive a good education in these books in high school or college? After all, while Brooks has observed many such programs in American colleges and universities, they are still far from universal and are remarkably endangered. Walden himself, after teaching Great Books at the University of Tulsa for a few years, now finds himself out of a job at the conclusion of this academic year: the Great Books-based honors college that hired him has been phased out, following the very public firing of the college’s dean, Jennifer Frey. 

As it happens, Zena Hitz, the author of Lost in Thought, had started an educational initiative for adults just a few years ago to address this very concern. Called “Catherine Project,” the initiative offers synchronous online reading groups and language courses for adults on a variety of Great Books and ancient languages. Some in-person groups have lately been added too. Taught by volunteers, classes are entirely free. The home page outlines the mission as follows: “If you seek real learning and real conversation, we invite you to join us in reading and discussing great books. We welcome people from all educational backgrounds and walks of life. We charge no tuition or fees.”

The popularity of Catherine Project and similar smaller, local initiatives shows that there is a desire for book clubs and good conversations still. Furthermore, perhaps the most important aspect of Great Books that comes through in the process is the desire for community. Indeed, no one is stopping anyone from starting a local book club—as a friend of mine did this winter. Over the course of three months, a group of moms met monthly in the evening to discuss a novel over cheese and other snacks, taking turns hosting while each respective host’s feral children roamed the house, resisting bedtime to check out the excitement. 

These small and local trends help address a concern that some have raised about the Great Books and their advocates: What about the practical considerations of education? What is the point of reading Great Books? While Great Books advocates are willing to respond to questions on this when asked and pushed (as they repeatedly are), they generally prefer simply to encourage reading instead of worrying about making all things practical and continuing to prove their worth.

As a classicist, I will say that this concern with practical considerations is a very modern question. Rather than accusing Great Books advocates of being impractical, perhaps we should see together with them just how recent these concerns are. The whole point of Great Books is that we need timeless things to shape our modern brains. Too much modernity isn't great for forming our imagination—and this, by the way, has practical implications too. Would we want doctors and lawyers and businessmen in our society to be knowledgeable solely in their specific craft and have no knowledge of anything else? The emphasis on Great Books for educating both students and adults in past generations reminds us that there is value in forming whole persons—indeed, we forget this sometimes, but lawyers are people too. And our society will be better if all professionals who inhabit these practical careers are genuinely virtuous people and citizens. Perhaps, in other words, the Great Books are practical in ways that are not as immediately apparent, but whose absence we can see in our vice-filled society. 

There is a wonder in reading the Great Books. This wonder is meant to be shared and is not limited to academic settings alone. Indeed, while most of those who have written about the merits of these books teach in colleges and universities, it seems that there is a rising recognition that the Great Books are not merely a college subject. If we say that to read is human and is the solution to our metaphysical crisis, the conversation naturally moves beyond the walls of higher education and pushes us to consider habits of an educated citizen body. 

In the Classical Athenian democracy, one of the most significant things the citizens did together was gather for tragedy and comedy performances. Citizens of all ages and life stages and all political persuasions were able to watch the same works performed on stage, discuss them, and achieve together what Aristotle terms in his Poetics a “catharsis of pity and fear.” We can think of this as group therapy—by discussing stories that spoke to their present crises, citizens were better equipped to go on in their daily lives. Indeed, there is nothing like this right now in our own society—and we are certainly the worse for it. 

Reading the Great Books is not easy for a variety of reasons, as those who have written about them universally agree—they are dense, the language may be difficult, and some are quite long (Kanakia describes, for instance, the challenges of reading Proust—whom she ultimately loved). But in our brave new world of fast everything, reading timeless literature—and, especially, reading it together with others—can still delight, encourage, and uplift us, if we let it.