Six Books

Way back when, well, actually it was in May, I noted here that I was giving a Final Lecture to the graduating seniors.  Said talk needed a point, so I went with my standard:  Read the Great books.  (That wasn’t the whole talk, though.  I also added, among other things, why economics is better than every other discipline, made fun of Amherst and Hampshire (easy targets to be sure), and explained how to make a Martini.  I wanted to add some jokes about Lynn, but in trying to think of some way to make fun of her, I realized you can’t make fun of Lynn.  Pretty annoying.  Shouldn’t it be a requirement to be a college President that it be easy to tell jokes about you?)  In the substantive part of the talk (the Great Books part—though come to think of it the How to Make a Martini part was also substantive), I added a specific suggestion.  Make a list of six books you really feel like you should have read by now, but haven’t, six books which you believe have something to teach you, six books which will make you think.  And then after making that list, promise yourself that you will read all six of those books in the next year. 

Having told a few hundred students they should do that, I figured I should probably do it myself.  So, I made my list of six books and vowed I would have them all read by the end of the summer.

Mission accomplished.  And, I am happy to report it was a great exercise.  I highly recommend it.

The six books, all previously reviewed here, in the order in which I enjoyed them:

Silas Marner

O Pioneers!

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Common Sense

Venus and Adonis

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 1

Looking back, the obvious question is: Why those six books?  No particular reason.  As noted in the reviews, in each case it was a book I really did feel a twinge of guilt that I had not yet read.  (Yes, I know feeling guilty for not reading those six books is surely a psychological problem; but no need to worry, now that I have read them, I no longer feel that twinge of guilt (well, about those books)—psychotherapy by reading books!)  The other interesting thing about that list is that if I had guessed at the outset the ranking of how much I would enjoy them, I think it would have looked like this:

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 1

Venus and Adonis

O Pioneers!

Silas Marner

Common Sense

Such is the joy of reading Great Books—even though you know they will be good, sometimes they really surprise you by just how good they are.

After doing it, I highly recommend the six book exercise.  It’s fun to think of which six books you should put on your list, and then it is even more fun to read them.