NYC event on May 27th @ McNally Jackson Seaport

My book, What’s So Great About The Great Books?, is coming out on May 26th. I am doing two events to promote it. On May 27th, I will be in New York at McNally Jackson Seaport at 7 PM, in conversation with Clare Frances. You can RSVP for the event here.

I also have an SF event on May 30th, where I am in conversation with Ross Barkan. To get into this event, you must RSVP, which you can do here.

What’s So Great About The Great Books?

I hope it goes without saying that you do not need to buy my book, and you definitely don’t need to read my book. Life is precious, you should only read books you’re interested in.

This book feels a bit awkwardly-situated between two genres of books that I enjoy very much. The first is the full-throated polemical defense of the liberal arts education (a la Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind). This kind of book is so enjoyable to read, but it suffers from the unfortunate difficulty that nobody is really against liberal arts education. Nobody is out there saying Plato sucks and nobody should read him.

Many people imagine, in their minds, that Plato is under attack, and thus they are able to write very strong, stirring defenses of him—defenses that I enjoy reading. But I unfortunately do not think Plato is under attack, so I am unable to write such a book.

The second kind of book that is very good is the humble guidebook, like The New Lifetime Reading Plan, the book that’s been my companion for almost twenty years now. What an excellent book this is! It just contains page and a half descriptions of the work of about a hundred and thirty authors. It is so good.

Unfortunately, this kind of guidebook is very hard to write. Basically, you need to actually be familiar with all these authors. And most people, even very erudite people, don’t really have the level of familiarity that is needed. I personally didn’t feel confident that I could improve on The New Lifetime Reading Plan.

So…what I’ve written is somewhere in between, which is a defense of a specific course of reading. And what’s great about my book is that it is actually controversial. Everyone is in favor of Plato in the abstract, but not everyone is in favor of the idea that you should just pick up the very readable Benjamin Jowett translation off Project Gutenberg and start plowing through the dialogues (the way I did) without much background or context for them.

Lots of people would say that this is something which is unlikely to be very productive for the average reader. But…I say different. I think it is likely to be productive. However, I treat very fairly with all the arguments both for and against this activity (reading the Great Books in translation, on your own, without a huge amount of outside context).

And…that’s my book! You will surely be hearing a lot more about it over the next six weeks, but by July 1st the release cycle will be over, and I’ll probably take a break from blogging for a month.

Preorder a copy from Amazon or from Bookshop or from your local bookstore. And you can RSVP for the NYC event here and the SF event here.