On the Question "What Should We Read?"
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[update: there was a typo in this paragraph, lol]
When people find out I have an English degree, they often want to ask me about canonicity. They don’t use that word; they’ll usually ask me something about the “great books” or “what we should read.”1 This is basically what a literary canon is. M.H. Abrams gives an excellent definition in his Glossary of Literary Terms:
[The canon includes] those authors who […] have come to be widely recognized as ‘major,’ and to have written works often hailed as literary classics. The literary works by canonical authors are the ones which, at a given time, are most kept in print, most frequently and fully discussed by literary critics and historians, and most likely to be included in anthologies and in the syllabi of college courses with titles such as “World Masterpieces,” “Major English Authors,” or “Great American Writers.”2
The word itself comes from the Greek word kanon, which was first applied, in a literary sense, to the list of books that make up the Bible. As Abrams explains, the biblical canon is completely fixed, and churches have the authority to determine what books are canonical and what books are not. The literary canon, however, is nowhere near as fixed, and no one holds a comparable level of authority over it. The most frequently cited example is that of John Donne, the 17th century metaphysical poet. For centuries, Donne was regarded as an eccentric: some critics did not even consider him a poet, and the term “metaphysical poet” originated as an insult. Yet after T.S. Eliot and a group of influential scholars praised him as a master of the poetic style that they valued, he became a regular fixture of English courses. Though he is no longer as prominent as he once was, scholars continue to write about his work.3
For a while I would hand-wave away the canonicity question entirely: even if someone had real authority over the literary canon, it definitely wouldn’t be a twenty-[redacted]-year-old loser like me. Instead, I’d give a perfect horoscope of a response. The great books, I would say, are “the ones you keep coming back to,” or “the books that everyone else is stealing from.” It was sort of like how I dealt with conservatives trying to tell me their prescriptions for Baltimore’s poor. Whenever they were about to say something racist, I’d say something about how I thought education was important and change the subject. I wouldn’t say what I meant by education, or specify any subject matter: I’d just say “education,” and leave it at that. It worked every time. No one could possibly oppose “education,” and my interlocutor could fill in “education” with whatever meaning he wanted to wring from it.
In the same way, you could fill in “everyone” with whoever you wanted to. (Everybody thinks everybody else is stealing from their favorites. Never tell a fan of Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy that you think the postmodernists invented metafiction or self-referentiality.) And you could fill in “the ones you keep coming back to” with anyone from Tom Clancy to Gloria Anzaldúa. It was perfect.
But I’ve come to think that the question “What should I read?” is unanswerable if posed in a vacuum. The Canon, capital C, is supposed to be the answer to that question. Yet it seems to me that the more important question is: What do you really want from reading? There’s no right or wrong answer, but you’ll need to come up with one. And, after you do that, you can come up with a personal, small-c, canon.
Here, I’ll try to look at a few possible answers and their implications for constructing a personal canon. At various points, I might list a few authors or books. They serve only as brief examples, not as a comprehensive list. I won’t concern myself with the capital-C Canon—if that’s what you’re interested in, find the latest edition of A Glossary of Literary Terms, look up “literary canon,” and read the books and articles the authors recommend at the end of the entry.
Answer #1: I need something to write papers about. Your canon will depend in part on what methodology you want to use, or what you want your topic to be. In other cases, your methodology doesn’t require a canon. In the case of symptomatic reading, you can write about whatever you want, since every text is riddled with contradictions and incompleteness. I happen to see this as a benefit.
Answer #2: I want to better understand book reviews. Richard Rorty once said that a participant in the literary culture of the mid-1980s “[was] expected to have read The Gulag Archipelago, Philosophical Investigations, and The Order of Things as well as Lolita and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.”4 When I first read that passage, I wondered what adjective might be used to describe our current literary culture, and what books would be considered required reading. I admit I still don’t know. An attempt at defining the contemporary U.S. literary culture is outside of my purview here. “Literary culture,” for Rorty, refers to something akin to the salons of the French Third Republic, or Alcove 1 at the City College of New York in the 1930s.5 I don’t know if such a thing can be said to exist today, and if it does, I’m certainly not getting invited to any salons. Accordingly, I can’t say what books would be considered required reading.
I do, however, read book reviews, and I can say that if you want to understand the references that book reviewers make, you are expected to have read Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Rachel Kushner, Rachel Cusk, Sally Rooney, and Jenny Offill, as well as Joan Didion’s early essays, at least some of David Foster Wallace’s nonfiction, and at least one major work of Clarice Lispector, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Roberto Bolaño. It helps to understand the main points of Marxism and to have read the two sentences of Discipline and Punish that everyone reads in undergrad. A more up-to-date list can be compiled by regularly reading Bookforum and New York, Los Angeles, and London’s respective Reviews of Books and seeing what authors are most often referenced.
Answer #3: I want to participate in a conversation. “Conversation” can have a wide range of possible meanings, although “cranking out hot takes on Twitter” isn’t one of them. One very good reason to read a book is so that you’ll be able to talk to other people about it. Start by asking yourself who seems to be having the most interesting conversations and your canon will determine itself. To give one example, I recently read an essay by Brandon Taylor that seemed like it was starting a conversation about contemporary fiction. I felt like I might want to participate in this conversation. But participation in that conversation requires some familiarity with Heti, Offill, Cusk, and Lerner as well as Kate Zambreno, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and a whole host of other authors.6
Answer #4: I want a cheap substitute for psychotherapy. I’m being a little bit provocative here because I don’t think that reading can ever be a substitute for therapy. Even scholars who are optimistic about literature’s ability to change the way you think will concede this point quite readily.7 The most it can do is provoke you to reassess how you understand certain things.
Answer #5: I want a catalogue of the Great Truths of Mankind. Okay, cool: what do you mean by “great truths”? Just asking this question tends to really piss off those readers who are particularly invested in the search for Great Truths. It implies that truth is made, not found.8 That group of readers really, really hates this idea.
I ask what “great truths” is supposed to mean because partisans of the Great-Truths approach are not a monolith. The Traditionalists have their own canon. So do the Straussians. So does every other group of readers and scholars that aims to seek the Great Truths. Every individual group says that its own canon, and that canon alone, is the one with the real Great Truths, and all the other ones contain lesser truths at best and a pack of contemptible lies at worst.
Answer #6: I want aesthetic delights. Oof. I’m completely out of my depth here. I have no background in aesthetic theory (and, good postmodernist that I am, I’m skeptical of universalizing claims about aesthetic goodness or badness). The standard advice I’ve seen is to find a critic who likes what you like, and see what else they like. I guess this is good? I don’t know.
Answer #7: I want to be seen as a serious literary person but I don’t want to do the reading. Look up the Sparknotes for every book on the St. John’s College syllabus. Pay special attention to the “Important Quotes Explained” section.
Answer #8: Escapism. In my experience, people who read for escapism have a very precise idea of what authors and genres to look for. Much more precise, I might add, than non-academics who make noises about wanting to look for the Great Truths.
APPENDIX: “I Still Can’t Think of Anything to Read and/or Want to Make a Reading Decision Without Accepting Responsibility For It”
I guess have to give a list of books, right? Print this one out, throw a dart at it, and see where it lands. It is, I admit, incurably basic; on the other hand, if you’ve read everything on this list, you know your own tastes well enough to be able to choose your own books.
FICTION, POETRY, AND THEATRE
Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace (start with Barbarians and then go on to Disgrace if you like his style)
Don DeLillo, Libra (White Noise is also good but I don’t think it’s the best one to start with—all of DeLillo’s books are set in Don DeLillo Bizarro World, but Libra is less obviously part of that world than White Noise is)
Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
William Faulkner, Light in August and As I Lay Dying
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
James Joyce, Dubliners (a short story collection; you can read it in order if you want, but if you want to wade in first, “Araby” and “The Dead” are everybody’s favorites) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 (read 10:04 first; if you liked it, try Atocha)
Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
John Milton, Paradise Lost (and Samson Agonistes if you liked Paradise Lost)
Tommy Orange, There There
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time)9
Philip Roth, American Pastoral
Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners
Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
Zadie Smith, White Teeth (read Kureishi next if you liked this) and NW (which, be warned, is written in a completely different style from White Teeth)
Anything by Wallace Stevens (start with “Sunday Morning” or “The Idea of Order at Key West”)
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse (flip a coin, honestly—most people recommend starting with Dalloway but I don’t regret starting with Lighthouse. A friend who preferred Dalloway once said that Lighthouse was “for old people”; make of that what you will.)
NONFICTION
Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language
Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Joel Garreau, Edge City
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier
Jane Mayer, Dark Money
Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger
Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm quadrilogy
Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier
Legal disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the bylined author. They do not represent the views or opinions of people, institutions, or organizations with which the author may or may not be associated in a personal, professional, or educational capacity.
Update: In retrospect, I probably should have used the word “ought”—people say “what should we read,” but they mean “what ought we to read,” or “what are we obliged to read.” The capital-C canon is supposed answer this question, specifically. This question, by the way, raises two other questions: (1) Who is “we”? (2) Why are “we” obliged to read certain books in the first place? Answering either of these questions is outside of the scope of a footnote.
M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. (Australia: Heinle & Heinle, 1999), 29.
Ibid., 29–30.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 82.
For an explication of what Alcove 1 used to be, see: Anemona Hartocollis, “At City College, Still Arguing the World,” The New York Times, October 24, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/nyregion/thecity/at-city-college-still-arguing-the-world.html.
See: Brandon Taylor, “Bobos in Ikea,” Sweater Weather, Substack Inc., August 17, 2021, blgtylr.substack.com/p/bobos-in-ikea. Taylor also cites Christine Smallwood, Bryan Washington, Ayşegül Savaş, Clare Sestanovich, Sigrid Nunez, Raven Leilani, and Jhumpa Lahiri.
See, for example, Marshall W. Alcorn and Mark Bracher, “Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the Re-Formation of the Self: A New Direction for Reader-Response Theory,” PMLA 100, no. 3 (1985), 346: “[T]he encounter with literature cannot be substituted for or assimilated by the experience of psychoanalysis.”
This is Rorty’s phrasing; see Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 3ff.
Also published as The Way By Swann’s and Remembrance of Things Past, respectively.