The Time Will Pass Anyway

Naomi Kanakia’s “What’s So Great About the Great Books?”

Earl Harvey Lyall, from The Cubies’ ABC (1913)

You don’t get much free time in this short life. Ten percent of your total span on earth, perhaps, depending on your job, family status, income, and other obligations. Competing for that limited chunk of hours is an endless array of activities, more options than have ever been available in human history: you could work your way chronologically through the entire history of filmed entertainment, you could learn an instrument, you could garden, you could juggle, you could cook elaborate meals, you could ingest Chinese research chemicals from the internet. How is one to choose?

Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You), out in May from Princeton University Press, is a short treatise on why one might opt to spend a solid chunk of this time reading what Naomi calls the Great Books, and what you might know as the classics or the canon, a mutable but generally agreed-upon list of literary works stretching from Beowulf to Beloved (I follow John Pistelli in using the familiar “Naomi” rather than the distant “Kanakia,” to signify this as an engagement with a friend whose work I admire rather than a disinterested consumer report). Previous books on this topic have followed two models. There’s the professorial approach—The Western Canon, The Closing of the American Mind, The Culture We Deserve— in which a great man of letters produces a gaseous lament for the declining standards of our time, flings around big words like Truth and Beauty, and subtly implies that those who don’t choose to cultivate the life of the mind are essentially automatons, human batteries choosing to live in the Matrix. And there’s the middlebrow regular-guy approach: My Life in Middlemarch, How Proust Can Change Your Life, David Denby’s Great Books, which usefully approaches these texts with an eye towards what they might do for the man or woman on the street, but often end up treating them as some sort of banal self-help course, taming their rough edges and making their impieties and challenges safe for contemporary bourgeois life.

What’s So Great… leans more towards the latter approach, but largely avoids the glib New Yorker tone. I have always admired Naomi’s writing, both fictional and essayistic, for its sense of directness and honesty. She has the rare quality of being able to avoid the usual evasions and politesse and describe literary and social dynamics as they are, simply and clearly. “Is literature a false God?”, a searching post written just after Trump’s inauguration, wrestles with the tension between politics and aesthetics, and describes how going too far in one direction or the other will grant you some time in the sun, but inevitably consign you to irrelevance once the party line shifts. “A creative-writing degree can be quite useful” is a sort of pitiless realpolitik description of how writers are made and sold, much more interesting and informative than most accounts of this process, which are either steeped in bitterness from decades of rejections, or overly sunny in their belief that talent will always win out. Her grand view of the social landscape, one that demonstrates a sympathy for all parties involved and their ordinary human failings, is a quality one finds in Austen or Tolstoy, and thus I was heartened to find that she concurs that the main benefit she took from the Great Books is not some grand life lesson or guidance in her darkest hour but the quiet “standard they set for uncompromising honesty.” That honesty remains on display in What’s So Great About the Great Books?

The book is structured as a dialogue, a series of responses to questions posed by a rather humorless and prosecutorial left-liberal interlocutor (“Why not read other books that are equally beautiful, but have better politics?” “When we say ‘The Great Books are worth reading,’ do other people hear ‘White men are inherently superior’?”). At first, I was annoyed she was giving so much space to these arguments, which I find are mostly advanced as a spurious moral cover for apathy and disinterest—few serious left-wing thinkers will actually say you shouldn’t read Proust or Shakespeare. Yet it is true that there is a certain sense in which reading the Great Books has become, as they say, right-coded, and it’s common to read a witty and erudite article on, say, a new translation of Gogol in First Things or Claremont Review, sandwiched between The Case for Mandatory School Prayer and The Trans Menace in Our Military. Naomi, a trans woman herself, writes movingly in a late chapter about the lonely and difficult experience of realizing that many fellow advocates for the Great Books consider her not an ally but an affront to their vision of civilization. When she comes to her conclusion that these books are nevertheless “the birthright of every human being,” it reads as a revelation earned rather than as so much Bloomian cant and blather.

These autobiographical sketches coexist with the more straightforwardly rational arguments in the book. She writes of her self-education, which began when she applied to MFA programs, and assumed everyone there would already have a deep knowledge of the classics (“If you’re writing fiction, no one expects you to have read Balzac or Stendhal or Milton,” she writes. So much the worse for us!), of her romantic and social life, and of her various encounters with this or that book in the canon. Naomi has complained, in the past, of having to compromise her vision and make her novels more autobiographical than she might have wanted; that what editors expect from an Indian-American trans woman is a book about the experience of being such a person. So I wondered, while reading What’s So Great… if the autobiographical details were gently encouraged by her editors, and if she would have preferred to do without them. Yet if the book succeeds, it succeeds because she is highlighting her own story in all its particularities rather than offering some cultural lament or prescriptive take on how we could reform society so everyone grows up performing Shakespeare instead of playing Roblox. I really fell for What’s So Great… when I read the following passage, early in the book:

I enjoyed college quite a bit, particularly the quarter where I dropped LSD every weekend—I reached the point where, for a year, even when sober, every night I’d hallucinate a six-legged cat that’d cuddle and purr in my bed as the Angel of Death hovered powerlessly over me, just out of arm’s reach.

As a result of this background, I don’t have strong opinions on what should be taught in college.

This is funny, and details such as this lend personality to the book throughout, but it also gets at something true. Most discussion of the Great Books is centered on what should be taught in college, and thus the various arguments that you’ll read on the subject in The New Republic or The Point all read like a squabble among a tiny clique of academics. So here I must depart from the book a little and offer up my own experience, as both a contrast to our perpetual obsession with what’s on the syllabus, and an affirmation of Naomi’s larger point that reading these old books can, corny as it is to say, change your life.

I can remember some humanities classes I took that I found interesting and exciting, but I personally didn’t experience college as some crucible of intellectual formation. Even for someone like myself, probably in the 95th percentile or above for “interested in books and learning,” the attraction of sitting at the feet of some besweatered Dead Poets Society guru and reading Plato paled in comparison to the chance college offered to experience unconstrained adult life for the first time: to take advantage of the dizzying opportunities of the city, to fall in and out of love, to ingest mind-altering substances, to make dreadful experimental techno music. I suspect this is the case for many, and anyone offering yet another prescription for how to reawaken a widespread love of learning in our universities might do well to consider the conflict between the discipline required for rigorous humanistic inquiry and the intoxicating first flush of youthful freedom.

When I rediscovered reading for pleasure in my early twenties, I stuck to the Young Men’s Section of the canon: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Melville, Pynchon, the strange and gnomic sides of modernism. Eventually, I figured, I could get around to Romantic poetry and domestic novels and verse epic and the other giant, imposing cultural mountains that loom for the autodidact to scale, but I could do it piecemeal, on my own time. After all, who was I trying to impress?

That all changed in 2024, when John Pistelli, on whose Substack newsletter I was a regular commenter, started his series of lectures, The Invisible College; roughly one lecture per week on a canonical work of world literature, structured into units ranging from Romantic poetry to the Greek classics to the modern American novel. Suddenly my leisure time had a degree of discipline that it had hitherto lacked: read these Keats poems by Friday and you’ll have something entertaining to listen to at the gym, get through ten more pages of Pride and Prejudice before you fall asleep and you’ll have kept to your self-imposed schedule. And just as suddenly these works I had promised myself I would get around to eventually began to fall like dominoes, and I began to feel something different, an inner authority that I hadn’t possessed before. It means something, to feel as if you have the right to speak, to contribute to the great ongoing conversation about art, and at least for myself, that right to speak was contingent upon having actually read the books most central to world literature. Directly after the summer unit covering Ulysses (which I had tried and failed to read twice already) and Middlemarch, I wrote my first long essay on this website, and since then, this activity has structured my days: when I’m not doing my day job and attending to my social obligations and cooking dinner and taking out the trash and all the other stuff of everyday life I’m reading, writing, or thinking about doing so. My goals for and vision of myself have completely changed; I find it hard to recollect what I wanted from my life or what my larger ambitions were before I started writing. It seems as if it had always been there waiting for me.

It’s a nice story. The trouble with it as an argument for reading the Great Books is it’s completely recursive. Saying that reading a lot of classic books gave me the confidence to write literary criticism is not much of a reason for doing so; it’s a bit like telling someone to get baptized so they can better spread the Good News of Jesus Christ. If you’re not already bought in, who cares? And there is indeed a hint of irritating religiosity in those who advocate for deep and serious and not always entirely pleasurable reading, an idea that we are the keepers of some privileged secret which one can only access through this mystical experience, which just so happens to be available at your local Barnes & Noble.

And yet, I don’t know, we kind of are, and it kind of is. I am convinced that my life has been seriously altered for the better, first by the wide and formless reading I did in the years after college, and then by the more focused and disciplined reading I’ve done since 2024, whether for the Invisible College or as research for essays. Some of it is most likely simple gamification; it’s pleasurable to get a fun, enlightening, often gossipy three-hour podcast as a reward for what can sometimes be tough reading, and it’s pleasurable to write and watch your own thoughts take form and hopefully enjoy a blissful day of reading comments, reposts, praise, and counterarguments. Yet the rest—the really important part—is an ineffable mystery: the mystery of aesthetic experience itself. Naomi addresses this early in the book, comparing In Search of Lost Time and Gone Girl. Gone Girl is riveting and intense, Proust is “slow going, frequently difficult and boring, and sometimes incomprehensible on a surface level.” It’s understandable that one might prefer Gone Girl and think that everyone who claims to enjoy an exhaustively detailed 1.3 million word novel about time and memory and Parisian high society is lying or posturing. Nevertheless:

You can make what arguments you’d like to make using mere words, but Proust is indeed the superior author. To find out why, you simply need to read and appreciate him, because what you learn from reading him is something you need to read him to learn! If it could be conveyed without reading the book, there’d be no need to read the book. The answer is distinctly unsatisfying, but true.

To which I might add: besides their aesthetic qualities, if I hadn’t decided to confront the mystery of these books for myself, there are many places I wouldn’t have gone, experiences I wouldn’t have had, interesting people I wouldn’t have met. Naomi, of course, being one of them.

What makes What’s So Great… work is that it is not, in the end, a plea for everyone to read the canon—Naomi openly acknowledges that many people simply aren’t interested in doing so and have chosen different and equally fulfilling ways to spend their life. Rather, it is a larger case for using one’s limited leisure time ambitiously, for setting a lofty goal and trying to reach it, rather than being satisfied with passive day-to-day existence. Naomi’s choice to do this with the Great Books has given her many gifts: a rare set of skills as a writer, a lively and intelligent online community, and, though she didn’t know it while she was writing What’s So Great…, a book deal with a major publisher. There is no guarantee that whatever activity one chooses to spend one’s time on will bring any material or social success; indeed in most cases it almost certainly will not. But break from your routine, devote yourself to some improbable project or strange obsession, try to read all the greatest hits of world literature, catalogue every species of beetle in your area, hike from Tijuana to Vancouver, write about every painting in the National Gallery, restore a 1965 Thunderbird, and you may discover that great and hitherto-unknown vistas open up within you, and strange and wonderful opportunities emerge.