Since I spend more time reading than just about anything else (although lately blogging and grading papers seem to be giving books a run for the money) it’s hard to step back and think about which books really matter. Perhaps if I could answer that question more clearly I would spend less time with books; if I knew which books a person really needs to read I wouldn’t have to read as many as I do.
There are lots of reasons to read books: to learn about other lives, to save your soul, to stretch your imagination, to learn to write, to pass the time, to laugh out loud, to get some specific information (like how to grow houseplants or how to buy a car). These are all good reasons and I’ve read for all of them, with varying degrees of success. But in thinking about a reading list to recommend to the general reader, I’m focusing on one purpose in particular. What do you need to read to be a literate, thoughtful and informed contributor to our society?
Over the next few weeks I’ll make some suggestions that I think might help; I hope readers will feel free to add their own ideas. My goal is to have a list that is long enough to do some good, but short enough to encourage rather than discourage people from trying it out.
This kind of useful reading list must, I think, begin with the great books from classical antiquity that shape our civilization. Without a first hand exposure to the literature of Israel, Greece and Rome, it’s extremely difficult to follow or participate meaningfully in the cultural and political life of our time. The ideas and values that emerge from this literature have influenced thinkers and actors in generation after generation ever since; American political institutions were developed by people who had been deeply educated in all three classical literatures, and the more modern commentators who also influenced the founding fathers (like Locke and Montesquieu) were also students of the ancients.
Very young people are the best readers for these very old books. This is partly because the ancient writers are fresh and direct; books like the Iliad speak to us from what feels like the dawn of time in a way that speaks naturally to youth. It is also because it’s useful for young people to have these ancient books behind them as they venture into later writing; they will know more about the background of those later writers and catch the references moving forward. Many educators over the centuries have tried to organize the curriculum on some kind of chronological basis. Wherever possible, that strikes me as the right way to do it.
Ideally, Latin would be part of the package and it would start early. In the UK, they introduced us to it at age 11; this seems about right. Sitting here in my de rigeur Brooks Brothers blogging pajamas (with the lobster lounge pants) at the stately Mead manor I can’t place my hands on the reference at the moment, but I think it was Cardinal Newman who wrote so eloquently about the usefulness of teaching Latin to young students. The process of beginning with the study of the units of the language — the vocabulary and the complex cases and grammar — and then gradually seeing how from this lowly foundation one reaches the ability to understand complex argument and appreciate great literary beauty teaches young people much more than the language skills.
My own education worked more or less along those lines and I’m reasonably happy with the result. World history is so complex and multifaceted that a great danger is that young readers will give up on making any kind of sense out of it. Dozens of civilizations, scores of powers, religions and cultures rising and falling everywhere you look, uncountable throngs of significant schools of art, more battles and wars than you can shake a stick at: getting things in chronological order is the best and perhaps the only way to help young people find their footing in the torrent.
After a buildup like that, it is perhaps not surprising that the first books I’m going to recommend for the lifetime reading list are works of ancient history.
I’d start with Genesis and Exodus, the first two books of the Bible. These books tell the story of humanity from the first creation through the exodus of the ancient Hebrews from Egypt into the desert. Traditionally ascribed to Moses, they contain a variety of stories and traditions from many different sources and bear the marks of several different edits and compilations. They have a religious and doctrinal value, of course, but they are particularly important in a historical reading program because they provide a good idea of the way the ancients encountered the past. Stories, anecdotes, legendary accounts of ancestors and tribal wanderings, genealogies that start in recent times and quickly ascend into the inaccessibly remote past: this is what the past looked like to the people in the past.
We have almost three thousand years of increasingly accurate and attested historical record between us and the edge of the great forest where all the paths grow dim and the big beasts live; our ancestors lived on the edge of that forest and they could still hear the howling of the legendary dragons and hydras as they huddled by the fire. Genesis and Exodus, whatever else they are, take us back to that time when history itself was still young.
I would then go to the books of the Bible that tell the early story of the people of Israel in the Promised Land: Joshua, Judges and the first and second books of Samuel. These take the story up through the life of King David and again show the picture of civilization and historical memory gradually emerging out of a half-understood legendary past. The Israelite debates over whether to abandon their old tribal confederacy and establish a central government under the rule of a king still echo in today’s debates over the role of the federal government in the United States — especially since many of the participants still spend a lot of time reading their Bibles. It’s also fascinating to see how sensibilities and conditions change; in the period of the judges people don’t seem to have used coined money in Israel, but a market economy is already taking shape by David’s time.
From Jerusalem, go to Greece and read The Histories by Herodotus. He’s rightly called the Father of History; his is the first book we have that tries to trace out the causes of historical events (other than divine intervention) and that brings the stories of many people and places into one narrative framework.
The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides comes next; although it is less charming than the Herodotus it is more believable as history and is still taught in courses on military strategy and international relations today. (It’s one of the key texts in the Grand Strategy course at Yale.)
Next, by all means jump over the Adriatic to Rome and read Livy‘s History of Rome. Much of it is lost, but what remains is well worth the reading. It’s long enough so that it is usually sold as separate volumes; this link will take you to the Penguin Classics volume that includes the first five ‘books’ (chapters would be a better name) of the history. I have posted about Livy before; he’s one of the writers I keep coming back to.
Finally, this first sweep through the ancient world would conclude with a reading of Plutarch’s Lives. Plutarch was born in Greece but became a Roman citizen; his most famous book is a set of short biographies of important Greeks and Romans. The English poet John Dryden translated the biographies into English; a revised and updated version of the Dryden translation is probably the best way to approach them. (The link is to the first volume of a two volume set.) The Plutarch will not only give you a new perspective on some of the events and people you read about in the earlier books; it provides you a way to start thinking about the similarities and dissimilarities between Greece and Rome. Looking at the interaction between these two cultures — quite similar in many ways, linked for more than 1000 years, but in the end quite different and even hostile to one another — is one way to enrich your understanding of cultural politics in the world of today.
There is much more to read in and about ancient history, but this is surely enough for a start. These authors cannot always tell you what ‘really’ happened; it is far from clear, for example, that anybody named Horatio actually stood at the bridge. But for thousands of years now these books have shaped our ideas about the past. They are facts of the imagination if not always facts in the literal sense. David and Goliath, King Midas, Cincinnatus, Pericles: they are all here.
If nothing else, reading these books will give you an experience like the one I had the first time I walked into the Pantheon in Rome. This building, originally constructed by a colleague of Caesar Augustus as a pagan temple, is now used as a church. It is one of the few structures of antiquity that has survived more or less intact from the time of Hadrian through almost two thousand years of fire, barbarian attacks and urban redevelopment. On walking into this building there was not only the shock of its extraordinary beauty and of admiration for the ingenuity of its design. There was also a shock of recognition; I realized that directly or indirectly the architects and decorators of buildings I’d seen all over the world were quoting this one — echoes of the Pantheon appear almost everywhere you look. To see this building was to see hundreds of other buildings in a new and richer way.
These histories work that way, too. Historians, novelists, analysts, poets, painters, even musicians for thousands of years have had these books in their heads as they created. Reading these books, and some of the others I’ll be adding on the classical reading list will make you a better reader of almost everything else that comes out of the western world. These books should be in your head as you go about your life.