This essay has two parts. First, it offers a collective portrait of the people who work for the National Association of Scholars (NAS) through the lens of the books they think other people should read.
Whether that portrait will interest a broader audience, I don’t know, but it interests me not just because the seventeen voices it represents are those of my friends and colleagues, but also because it is a snapshot of well-educated mostly young people—aged about 25-40, with a few outliers—conservative or traditionalist disposition—with a few more libertarian-oriented folks. It is a cohort you would seldom encounter outside a Hillsdale reunion, though none are Hillsdale graduates. But if you are interested in the currents that swirl the Millennial generation and reflect on its education, this account may be illuminating.
The second part of the essay is my personal reflection on questions about what should count as common reading for those who believe, as I do, that our society would benefit greatly if more of us read some of the same books.
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At NAS’s recent meeting, I asked the staff what books they thought American students should have read by the time they graduate from college. It was a spontaneous question, and the answers were similarly unpremeditated.
Some were more or less what I would have expected: Tocqueville’s Democracy in America; The Federalist Papers; Plato’s Republic; various plays by Shakespeare; Abraham Lincoln’s Speeches. Some answers I didn’t necessarily expect but I was glad to hear them: Whitaker Chamber’s Witness and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago fell into that category. Both are profoundly important books but well beyond what most college graduates today would have the patience to read or the moral foundation to comprehend.
Some staff members went in the opposite direction towards books of painless accessibility such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm; William Golding’s Lord of the Flies; John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony and Of Mice and Men; and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I agree these are worth reading, but to my eye, they fall in the category of books that anyone who graduated from high school and possessed at least a faint stirring of interest in literature would have absorbed along the way.
I take it that answers of that kind represented a normative rather than an aspirational answer to my question. The average student approaching college graduation is probably familiar with Orwell, Golding, Steinbeck, and Shelley. If they haven’t read them, they know the names. Or perhaps not.
In the last decade, I’ve heard from numerous college instructors and directors of college reading programs about the phenomenon of “book virgins.” These students arrive at college without ever having read an entire book. They have been raised on excerpts and summaries, and many of them are overwhelmed the first time they are asked to read even a simple work of fiction or nonfiction. One suspects that with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), they will be spared that trauma in the years ahead.[1]
There were still other categories of books among NAS suggestions.
A few saw this as an occasion to urge attention to sacred texts or works of Christian apologetics. The Bible as a whole was mentioned several times, and individual books of the Bible were cited: Genesis, Psalms, and Proverbs. Also in the category belong The Rule of Saint Benedict, Augustine’s Confessions and City of God, G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man. I wouldn’t for a moment say these are not worth the serious attention of young people and may deserve lifetime study. Without some knowledge of the Bible, the rest of Western civilization is a closed vault. Yet it would be hard in our secular age to advance a successful argument that these are among the books every college graduate should read. As one staff member said to me privately, “reading the Bible without the eyes of faith is to see nothing but a fairy tale.”
This doesn’t exhaust the list of recommendations.
Some recommended literary classics include Montaigne’s Essays, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Dante’s Paradisio. (But not the Inferno or the Purgatorio. Some NAS folks have a sunny disposition). A few sampled celebrated works of twentieth-century American fiction: Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. (Some NAS folks have a saturnine disposition.) Among the few modern non-American works cited were Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
Some ventured into political or economic theory: Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose; Thomas Sowell’s Conflict of Visions and his Black Rednecks and White Liberals; Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed; Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism, and Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. The sciences were represented by Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene; Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate; Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!; Kary Mullis’s Dancing Naked in the Minefield; James D. Watson’s The Double Helix; and David Kaiser’s How the Hippies Saved Physics.
History received scant attention. One staff member cited Wilfred McClay’s textbook, Land of Hope, and another, Edward J. Watts’s Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny. Perhaps Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel can be added as quasi-history.
The only post-seventeenth-century poem anyone cited was T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Popular psychology found a ledge with Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, though the staff member who offered those options later retracted his choice to add Carnegie’s book to the list. Again, I might stretch the category to add James C. Collins’s work on management principles, Good to Great; Spencer Johnson’s fable about the inevitability of change, Who Moved My Cheese?; and Thomas J. Stanley’s paean to frugality, The Millionaire Next Door.
Other books were mentioned, which I’ll group for convenience as “classics.” These include Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, unspecified works by Cicero, and that staple of high school English, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Hermann Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy also made the list.
Three books remain that I can’t place anywhere else: Viktor Frankl’s account of his time in a Nazi concentration camp and the observations he made about humanity, Man’s Search for Meaning; Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, in which the apostle of post-modernism evolved his theory that everything in society can be reduced to attempts to impose state power overs the human body; and George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, a children’s fantasy about a lonely princess who, with the help of a boy who labors in the kingdom’s mines, thwarts a rebellion by the evil goblins.
Read part two of this essay here and follow the National Association of Scholars on X.
[1] A debate continues among scholars over whether the scarcity of reading by college students reflects a lack of ability on the part of the students or a lack of incentives on the part of the colleges. Of course, both factors probably play a part. The critic Joseph Bottum has a recent essay in The Wall Street Journal in which he announced his intention of offering a course at the University of Colorado Boulder that will entail heft reading assignments. He hopes to find out whether students will rise to the challenge as students at the University of Oklahoma did several years ago when Kyle Harper, Wilfred McClay, and David Anderson presented such a course.
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