Getting Booked

This essay has two parts. The first part painted a collective portrait of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) staff through the books they recommended for others. Here, I offer personal thoughts on what should constitute common reading for those who, like me, believe our society would thrive if more of us engaged with a shared set of books.

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Reading books is far from the only way to get knowledge. Most of the most important things any of us know do not come from books. We are shaped in all-important ways by our parents, our siblings, our playmates, and our teachers before we learn to read. Large portions of humanity now, and for hundreds of thousands of years, have thrived without reading. As we go through life, experience matters vastly more than books. What we love, hate, and fear may be touched by what we read, but those emotions are directly the result of our meeting others who inspire longing or loathing,

This is to say that listing books people “ought to read” is an exercise of limited utility. Most people today who know how to read exercise that skill minimally.[1] There is little in day-to-day life that requires a first-hand acquaintance with Democracy in America or The Princess and the Goblin. On the other hand, if you are reading this, you are among the self-selected minority who care about such things.

Why care?

One answer is that you may regard the written word as filled with sacred significance. You can, of course, know Yahweh, Christ, or Mohammad from the serenity of booklessness. But the official keepers of these “religions of the book” teach us that the deepest knowledge requires entry into the script. Daily Bible readings may account for a large percentage of the actual reading of many American adults.

But there are other reasons why you may read and why you may regard reading as a crucial part of your life. I don’t think I need to write an inventory of those reasons but there is one reason I want to push forward: reading—reading books in particular—is the cornerstone of our civilization.

There is not much we have by way of material abundance, medicine, the rule of law, spiritual richness, knowledge of the past, and understanding of the present that isn’t dependent on those who do the hard work of reading, and there are in addition to the many practical benefits, profound advances in our personal journeys that come from meeting some authors on the pages where they have transcribed their best thoughts in their best words.

But let me climb down from that trampoline.

Writing recipes, ransom notes, and goodbye-cruel-world missives also requires literacy. I’m primarily interested in the relative handful of books that are the lifeline of Western civilization. No disrespect to Aztec, Lao, Tamil, Assyrian, Aboriginal, and other civilizations, but our civilization matters more to me and to us.

I was disappointed with what the NAS staff recommended. Some very good books appear on the list, and all the entries reflect serious purpose. My disappointment arises at the absence of some books of great importance. At the end of the discussion, I added The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so that America’s greatest humorist and one of its greatest moralists wasn’t forgotten entirely. Why no mention of Dostoyevsky, especially The Brothers Karamazov? Where was The Iliad? The Odyssey? The Aeneid? Has Ovid been metamorphosed into a Marvel comic? Are the shows of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides closed for the season? Just mentioning their names now feels like pedantry.

But it isn’t entirely that. In the last eight years, we have had three fresh and highly acclaimed new translations of The Odyssey into English: Emily Wilson’s in 2017, Peter Green’s in 2019, and Daniel Mendelsohn’s just-published version. Someone must think that ancient text is still worth reading.

I don’t read Latin or Greek, but I count several works of classical antiquity as among the works that have helped to form my view of the world and that I have re-read several times. Herodotus’ History is foremost on that list. That may be because I am an anthropologist and Herodotus stands not just as the “father of history,” but also plausibly as “father of ethnography.” To explain the war between the Persians and the Athenians—and several other Greek states—he feels the need to examine what we would call the cultures of Lydia, Egypt, the Medes, Babylon, the Lydians, the Spartans, Scythians, and dozens of other circum-Mediterranean peoples. This is not just history but world history with a fine eye for how “custom” shapes policy.

Can we understand the Middle East today without reading Herodotus? Can we understand ourselves?

Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War stands higher than Herodotus in the eyes of many American academics and intellectuals. That is because Herodotus acknowledges the role of the gods and oracles and indulges in what Americans consider mere mythology, while Thucydides is the relentless realist who presents Athens’s misbegotten war with Sparta with steely fidelity to the facts, which he either witnessed first-hand or learned from witnesses. Thucydides is a precursor of Machiavelli in discerning the ruthlessness of politicians behind their feigned concern for principle and their sometimes-dazzling charisma. He teaches us how to read history as well, and it is wise for the student to study both Herodotus and Thucydides.

My bent towards anthropology is in some sense a bent away from philosophy, though I wouldn’t count anybody as educated who hasn’t made a serious assault on the alps of Plato and Aristotle. I wouldn’t leave the classical world without saying everyone should read Plutarch’s Lives—at least some of them. We wouldn’t have Shakespeare’s Roman plays without Plutarch, and Plutarch is immensely readable. Tacitus gives us a window into the first century Roman Empire, including its decadence. He is supreme among the many Roman historians.

I could continue in this vein, but that would make for too long an essay. I’ll just leave it at this: classical antiquity is now a hole in the American mind, which we have filled with fantasies such as the Gladiator movies. But the world we have inherited is largely an invention of the Athenians and the Romans between the sixth century BC and the third century AD.

Those who want to know what happened to that world should start with Gibbon’s magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Those who simply want a model of what real scholarship based on primary sources looks like when written in English at the highest pitch of rhetorical force should also start here.

The classical world is one pillar of Western civilization that is poorly represented on the staff list. But Western Civilization has more pillars than the Parthenon.[2] I won’t try to name them all, but among the few that stand out is Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’s invention of the modern novel and, in it, two of the characters that define the scope of human aspiration. Don Quixote himself is the madman who wants to fix the world, and Sancho Panza, his servant, wants to survive in that world. They are the idealist and the realist locked together in quests that always reveal far more than the deluded knight can ever understand, but we the readers can reckon with. His famous bout with the windmills takes on a new meaning in light of today’s reality that windmills are indeed evil giants.

Where are all the monuments of nineteenth-century British literature, from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens? Possibly, works by Dickens and George Eliot are too long to expect the average undergraduate who is not an English major to have read one or two within the span of a four-year program, but Austen is within anyone’s range, and Eliot’s Middlemarch should at least be on everyone’s bucket list.

Since the staff admitted books that are normally read at a pre-college age, why not Grimm’s Fairy Tales? The brothers Grimm stand behind a huge portion of modern fantasy and science fiction, not to mention postmodern literature and the dream life of modern Americans. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are likewise keys to unlocking important aspects of our civilization’s psyche. And in that vein, why have we not mentioned a work by Sigmund Freud? Totem and Taboo, perhaps?

You can see where I am going. My list of books would be those that any educated person of, say, fifty years ago would take for granted as the basic cultural capital of an educated person. I don’t want to stop there, and I don’t want merely to compile a list of once-familiar-but-now-expired authors. Other authors who populated the list I would as soon see retired: Hemingway and Steinbeck, for example, who are tiresomely overrated. But they arguably have historical importance and can stay if I can add Willa Cather and Dashielle Hammett. The wide-open spaces and the claustrophobic dark ones are also part of our story.

When I contemplate the books proposed by NAS staff, I am struck by the absence of poetry. T. S. Eliot’s mélange of fragmented conversations and shards of memory in The Waste Land is a sorry excuse for that vital tradition, and I expect Eliot himself would be first to agree. No one was ever worse off for not reading it. I would rather a staff member have ventured The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere or Poe’s The Raven as poems that embedded themselves in the American mind and that actually mean something beyond “the war made me sad.”

In fact, there is a lot of American poetry worth reading and memorizing if you are up to that discipline. If reading poetry is not in your usual scope, start with the works of Robert Frost, whose poems look simple but grow deeper and deeper as you absorb them. And Frost testifies to both the lonely realities of American life better than most of those today who spread their pain across the page.

The staff list includes many novels, and I am fully on board with the idea that the novel is a key form of expression and an aid to moral and intellectual development—up to a point. Of course, it can also be the opposite. Don Quixote’s madness is, not incidentally, a result of his obsession with chivalric romances. It is easy to be pulled aside by genres of “literature” that are entertaining but empty—or entertaining but seductive. Nabokov’s Lolita is a masterpiece, but I’d censor it from the school library.

In 1979, the National Endowment for the Humanities established The Library of America (LOA), with the goal of bringing into print a permanent collection of the best works of the nation’s most important authors. Early on, it was the best place to get the collected works of Melville, Jefferson, Hawthorne, Henry James, William Faulkner, and many others. This essay doesn’t need my endorsement of our literary canon. Eventually, LOA ran off its rails, mainly toward identitarianism at the expense of literary merit. It has now published books as Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories and The Future is Female: Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women (in two volumes).

We have an abundance of good writers whose works would provide a study foundation for life after college, and I don’t want to make too much of my own choices—some of which I came to long after college. The key is discovering your own Melville and Hawthorne young enough to grow with them. The Scarlet Letter at age fifteen is not the same book at age 25 or 40.

Some books age extraordinarily well. Most of what I learned about war came from Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, written by a man born after that war was six years over and who died never knowing the horror that would come in 1914. Imagination can be more potent than witness. Take that, Thucydides.

I can’t end this without putting in a word for my own field, anthropology.

As an academic field, anthropology is thriving; as an intellectual discipline, it is moribund. It came into existence in the nineteenth century as an attempt to grapple with the realities of human diversity. An explanation was needed for that diversity, especially after Darwin had pulled back the curtain on the antiquity of the human past. (And Darwin also belongs on this list).

In the matter of a few decades, observers realized that we had never truly scratched the surface of how very different Westerners are from the multitude of other peoples. The result of this was the emergence of scientific ethnography. In the space of about 75 years, anthropologists provided hundreds of revelatory portraits of people around the world whose view of matters was pretty much beyond the comprehension of most Westerners. Then, in a few short decades, anthropology erased itself and discarded that library of ethnographies as tainted by “settler colonialism” or some such.

If, from the ashes of that Alexandria, I could rescue one volume for the common reading of a new generation, it would be Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Marooned by the British government during World War I in the Trobriand Islands, east of New Guinea, Malinowski mastered the language and embedded himself in the Trobriand way of life. The book doesn’t need my endorsement. It is well known and admired. But it is also the two-way mirror that allows the young reader to discern his own civilization’s astonishing likeness as well as similarities with these stone-age seafarers.

Grasping a civilization requires the ability to step in and out of it: into it by recognizing the principles you share and out of it to recognize the practices that make you shudder. Reading books may be the best way to gain experience without the risk of typhoid or poison arrows, but there are other ways, too. Offering young people some sense of what the literary path might look like is philanthropy. Young people themselves will reject most such advice. They always do. I did.

Read part one of this essay here and follow the National Association of Scholars on X.

[1] The Pew Research Center reports that 64 percent of Americans read at least one book per year. The National Endowment for the Humanities reports that fewer than half read that much. The Economist reports that 54 percent of Americans read at least one book per year, but 73 percent of college graduates do. Then again, 15 percent of Americans read fifteen or more books per year.

[2] 46 outer columns and 23 inner columns.

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