My newsletter was started to promote a book that I never talk about.

Hello friends, this month I've been doing a final round of structural revisions for my nonfiction book, What's So Great About The Great Books?, which will hopefully come out from Princeton University Press in April or May of 2026.

This nonfiction book is essentially a defense of lay reading: my contention is that it’s very possible for a regular reader, someone without a PhD or humanities background, to pick up Eliot or Dickens, or a translation of Proust or Thucydides or Plato, and just start reading these books, without any background knowledge aside from whatever's given in the front-matter of your particular volume, and that this form of reading can be a profitable activity.

You might think, That seems simple enough? Who could have a problem with that?

Well, this notion is not without its detractors. Many people would say that the Great Books are too difficult to profitably read on your own, without guidance. The Great Books project has always been fraught, there've always been critics who've called it too democratic, while other critics have called it elitist.

My book is an attempt to grapple with all these various ideas about the Great Books--it's a book that takes seriously a lot of the claims against the Great Books. My book is for people who have wondered what it would be like to read the Great Books in a sustained way, and for people who've questioned whether reading these books is a useful or realistic goal for somebody like themselves.

The book is 100 percent original material! Incredible as it may seem, nothing in this book has ever been published in on my blog. There is virtually no overlap. I mean, I won't claim I've never replicated a few ideas here and there, but if you open this book, I guarantee you won't have that thought Hmm, I've read this exact some post a few years ago in Women of Letters.

Now you might ask, "How is that possible? How could you possibly have produced an entire book on a subject at the same time as you've written a blog about the subject, without ever re-using any material?"

Well...the answer is simple.