We have acquired new, smaller bedside tables. More than a third of the surface area is occupied by the alarm clock and a lamp, leaving less space for reading matter. All further accumulation of books and magazines will, of necessity, be vertically arranged, a single stack, which makes it convenient to answer some questions from a reader:  “Do you read more than one book at a time? How do you manage to keep them straight in your head? Do you ever forget what you have already read and have to read it again? What are you reading now?”   The answers: Yes. I don’t know. Yes. Give me a minute.   I’ve never had difficulty reading several books simultaneously. Usually they represent contrasting genres, which minimizes confusion. In other words, I would probably never read Nostromo and War and Peace at the same time. Think of it as exercising different sets of muscles in the body. Sometimes I’ll go weeks without opening an active volume. On occasion, I’ll give up on a book – something I wouldn’t permit myself to do when young. Here are the books and periodicals on my bedside table:   The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham (Wiseblood Books, 2024)   Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature (Editiones Schoolasticae, 2024) by Edward Feser   From the Holy Mountain (Harper Collins, 1997) by William Dalrymple   The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor (Farrar, Straus, 1969)   The New Criterion, January 2024   Both The Claremont Review of Books (Fall 2024) and The Jewish Review of Books (Winter 2025) are published in the tabloid format, so I keep them in the drawer below.   Respectively, literary essays, philosophical text, history, fiction, periodicals. Little chance for confusion. Taylor represents a respite from the other books. I know and love his stories and even met him once back around 1971. I’m reading Cunningham for review so I’m taking heavy notes. The Feser I’m reading out of pure selfishness and, again, taking heavy notes. The Dalrymple volume is a lark.

"What we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds."

Another request for a reading list from a young reader. Any reply will be incomplete and risk discouraging aspiring literati. The only infallible inducement to literature is personal pleasure, a notoriously subjective criterion. I love Gibbon and Doughty, and you may find them appallingly tedious. I favor the time-tested and rely on books carrying the seal of approval from generations of readers, and your interests may be strictly contemporary. It’s not dismissive to tell a young reader: jump in anywhere. Like Borges, I assume that one book is potentially all books. That is, gamble a little, select a book that sounds interesting and see where it leads. There’s no shame in closing a book if it disappoints.  In 1909, the English novelist Arnold Bennett published Literary Taste: How to Form It, a sort of self-help guide to English literature. Bennett includes a list of several hundred recommended books, arranged chronologically and giving their prices as of 1909. This is not a snob’s list (though it includes Gibbon and Doughty), and at least a third of the books I have never read. Bennett’s opening sentences:   “At the beginning a misconception must be removed from the path. Many people, if not most, look on literary taste as an elegant accomplishment, by acquiring which they will complete themselves, and make themselves finally fit as members of a correct society. . . . This attitude, or any attitude which resembles it, is wrong. To him who really comprehends what literature is, and what the function of literature is, this attitude is simply ludicrous. It is also fatal to the formation of literary taste.”   Neither Bennett nor I wish to impose a “canon” on anyone. We merely know some of the books that have given us pleasure and perhaps taught us something. We’re small-d democrats. We’re not here to lecture, especially to young readers. Bennett is honest about the potential audience for reading the best books:   "A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is intensely and permanently interested in literature. It lives on because the minority, eager to renew the sensation of pleasure, is eternally curious and is therefore engaged in an eternal process of rediscovery. A classic does not survive for any ethical reason. It does not survive because it conforms to certain canons, or because neglect would not kill it. It survives because it is a source of pleasure, and because the passionate few can no more neglect it than a bee can neglect a flower. The passionate few do not read ‘the right things’ because they are right.”   So much for fashion.

Eleanor Barraclough on the ordinary people of Norse history The post The Epic Viking Saga of the Everyday appeared first on The American Scholar.

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