Reading Thread [09/21/2025]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a young dildo found a list of 100 great books that everyone should read to consider themselves at least minimally well-educated. It was heavy on the Greeks and Romans, and conspicuously light on modern work. Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Caesar, (Gibbon of course). The Bible, Homer, Virgil, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, come to mind. Then Augustine, Beowulf, Chaucer, Thomas More, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Cervantes, Dante, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke... I don't remember them all, but you get the idea.

That article stayed with me for years. I remember seeing it folded up in a suitcase when moving during college, but that might have been my last sighting. There are current lists available, but a quick check of the internet yields lots of lists that are heavy on modern works, and conspicuously light on what until recently were considered The Great Books. I looked at more than a few, and too many had the immediate disqualifier of anything by Tony Morrison or Kurt Vonnegut or Burroughs or, well, you get the picture. We can have a discussion of whether some of those books are "great," but they are certainly not top-100 great! And the explicit criticism of Western Culture in most of the books of that ilk should be immediately disqualifying anyway.

Here are a couple of lists with some promise. The Good Books is actually a review of a book discussing 13 works of fiction that conservatives might like but probably haven't read! Sounds like fun, even though it isn't quite what I had in mind. St. John's Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum is exactly what I had in mind, and is a famous Great Books curriculum. I love the breadth of the list... there's music and art, natural science and physics as well as the usual suspects. Good stuff, and I will forgive them for sneaking in a few from my proscribed list!

That short story introduced me to the author (I have a soft spot for good short fiction), and I have read several more of his works.

Helprin's descriptions, both of the physical world and the thoughts of his characters are dense with imagery, and yet curiously easy to read. That makes his books pleasant reads, without the feeling of density that so many modern writers insist upon. A Soldier of the Great War is typical of him, and while the descriptions are deeply personal, they provide a certain flavor of the place that makes one...or at least me...want to visit.

On the 9th of August, 1964, Rome lay asleep in afternoon light as the sun swirled in a blinding pinwheel above its roofs, its low hills, and its gilded domes. The city was quiet and all was still except the crowns of a few swaying pines, one lost and tentative cloud, and an old man who rushed across the Villa Borghese, alone. Limping along paths of crushed stone and tapping his cane as he took each step, he raced across intricacies of sunlight and shadow spread before him on the dark garden floor like golden lace.

Give him a shot!

posted by CBD at 09:00 AM

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