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It’s not uncommon for a company to develop a side project that overshadows the main business. For instance, there was an online snowboarding shop whose developers started building out their payment processor: a tool that became Shopify.

This blog, Woman of Letters, also started as the off-shoot of another project. In 2022, I signed a contract with Princeton University Press to write a defense of the Great Books movement: a 20th-century educational program that encouraged ordinary Americans to read their way through the canon of world literature.

At the time, I had spent the previous fifteen years working through a list of Great Books that I had compiled in my early twenties. During this period of time, the Great Books movement itself came back into vogue and started to play an influential part once more in America’s culture and politics—a change that I think is mostly positive, even though it’s allied to other right-wing trends that I find disturbing.

I worked on this book (tentatively titled What’s So Great About The Great Books?) through the spring and summer of 2023. Around that time, I started thinking, “Hmm, to make this book a success, I should start connecting with potential readers.” I had been blogging on Wordpress for years under a variety of names (first Blotter Paper and then The War On Loneliness). I mostly wrote about the writing-life and publishing, with only occasional mention of books I was reading. But my format wasn’t really working—the world was saturated with author-blogs and mine wasn’t offering anything special.

As a result, I hatched a scheme to rebrand my web presence and transfer it to Substack. This happened in the summer of 2023. My intention was to only write about the Great Books and classic literature—any contemporary publishing topics would be paywalled and not a major focus.

Over the course of that first year, from summer 2023 to summer 2024, my blog grew slowly, from 200 initial subscribers to around 600 in June of 2024. Then in 2024, I got really depressed—I’d released two novels that year to little fanfare. I felt like there was no point working on books anymore. So I decided to focus my full energies on this newsletter.

I revamped the format, started posting fiction, covering contemporary literature, and engaging in a variety of other experiments. Somehow, this was the rocket-fuel that the blog needed, and now it’s approaching ten thousand subscribers.

Selling the Great Books

I usually avoid self-promotion on this blog because what’s the point? I am a writer—anything I want you to read, I’ll just send straight to your inbox. It seems silly to use my words to try and convince you to read my words in a different form—instead you can just read my words directly!

But now I have a book coming out. The book is very good. It is my sustained argument for the value of reading the Great Books on your own. The main audience is people like myself at age 20: folks who love reading, but who haven’t engaged deeply with classic literature.

In my book, I try to avoid a lot of sweeping rhetoric about the power of literature. We’ve all heard a bunch of talk about how literature will put you in touch with universal truth and teach you the meaning of being human, and although I think these messages aren’t wrong, they also miss the point. Everyone agrees reading is good. Everyone agrees literature is good. The real question is: “Why Plato instead of Frantz Fanon? Why Tolstoy instead of Don Delillo? Why Walt Whitman instead of Danez Smith?” In short, I don’t just make an abstract case for literature; I make a concrete case that reading this canon of old books, that’re mostly by white men, is the best way of accessing whatever value literature has to offer.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying peoples’ lives won’t be worth living if they eschew reading these older books—that’s obviously absurd. I read tons of contemporary books, for the first half of my reading life, I only read science-fiction books. More recently, I spent much of the last month reading fifteen Louis L’Amour westerns. We read primarily for fun, and people should read whatever they’re called to.

However, I think most readers are interested in older books. Most readers have some curiosity about whether Plato or Tolstoy are worth reading. But they also have some valid questions. Reading the Great Books is a lot of work, and they want to be reassured that the work is worth it.

These people often ask, “What’s so great about the Great Books?” And to this question I have three answers:

1. Quality - Almost uniformly, the Great Books are diverting and beautiful, even in translation. Before everything else, the Great Books are just a set of very good books.

2. Influence - These books have been held up for generations as exemplars. They influenced the work of many people who came later; if you read the Great Books, you will see the roots of many contemporary styles, ideas, and forms.

3. Diversity - The Great Books were written by people far-removed from us in time. And they often come from cultures that are impossibly alien. There is a tremendous diversity of style and viewpoint in these books—you will find things in the Great Books that you’re not likely to see in any contemporary work.

Personally, it’s this last point that’s most convincing to me. If you’re looking to engage with different worldviews, then the best way is to read older books. Even a writer like Jane Austen, who’s been embraced by modern readers, writes in a style that is very alien. People do not write like Austen anymore—they don’t use words like she does, they don’t construct scenes or sentences the way she does. It is such a foreign world, and it’s very exciting to enter into.

In my book, I also discuss this question of whether the classics are racist, sexist, homophobic, etc, and whether these regressive attitudes might somehow harm the reader. My perspective is that yes, the Great Books often advance different ethical, moral, and religious ideas from our own and…that's good! That's exactly why we read them.

And what's the worst that can happen? Maybe you will read something in these books that genuinely changes your mind about something you thought was fixed. If someone reads Tolstoy and becomes Christian, then that is a good thing. Ideally, we would want to live in a world where it's possible for people to encounter fresh ideas in books and actually change their minds. To the extent that a book can ‘harm’ the reader, that's actually a good thing. Because whatever happens, it'll happen because you encountered a new idea that you found convincing—an idea that changed your life.

This happened to me just last year, when I read the Mahabharata and became convinced that some version of the Hindu cosmology was actually true. In my twenties I would've been horrified by the idea of evincing any form of Hinduism. But…I was wrong. Hinduism has its problems, but it is a good thing.

The Great Books are not in danger

This book also has a secondary audience—people who already love classic literature and who enjoy reading books in the ‘defense of the classics’ genre. This audience will really like my book, I think, because I come at things from a very different perspective: I am not a professor, I am not a PhD—my livelihood is not tied up in the Great Books.

Much of the writing about classic literature is couched in these hopeless, doom and gloom terms. But I don’t agree with all the doomerism; I don’t really think classical literature is under threat. From my perspective, you can walk into any bookstore and buy Paradise Lost—Milton is doing fine. All these old writers are doing fine. These writers will outlive the university, they will outlive the contemporary publishing landscape—they will outlive America. They may even outlive the human race itself.

Because many defenders of the classics feel like they’re fighting a desperate last stand, they often defend the Great Books in stark, civilizational terms (“Our culture is dying!”) that are a bit of a turn-off to some readers, because this kind of rhetoric echoes the way people talk about immigrants (“They don’t understand our values!”) A lot of people enjoy that kind of doom-and-gloom rhetoric, but I’m writing for people who would appreciate a different approach.

My hope, with this book, is to call attention to the healthy, thriving lay culture of reading the classics. The world is full of ordinary people who love the classics, love reading about them, and love discussing them online. It’s this lay culture that makes Substack and Woman of Letters so special. I wanted to write about how special and life-affirming this culture is, and to talk about how it’s possible for anybody, living anywhere, to become part of this culture.

The big idea of my book is that the Great Books tradition is a weird American cultural phenomenon, and that’s good! That’s exactly why this tradition is so useful and productive for contemporary Americans. There’s a lot of charm in this vision that you can just mainline the best of literature, without any preparation or background or special guidance, and I think this vision is quite well-suited to the American character and way of life.

If you’ve read any of my longer blog posts (like my recent post on Westerns) you’ll have an understanding of my style—I like to give the historical context for a phenomenon and intersperse that story with descriptions of particular books and my experience reading those books. With the Great Books, there’s a lot more to say, so I needed a whole book to say it.

Selling my (great?) book

I feel optimistic about this book’s chances. This is the type of book that often gets covered extensively by the literary press—previous books from my publisher on this topic have gotten reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, etc. I also think we’re living in a moment where there is a huge lay interest in the humanities. Many millennials and Gen Z’s are looking to fill gaps in their educations and to connect to something that feels older and timeless.

Because of my non-academic background and my online presence, there’s a chance this book will get a lot of coverage. I certainly hope that happens. I was very impressed by how John Pistelli’s Major Arcana and Ross Barkan’s Glass Century utilized the Substack ecosystem to get a lot of press coverage last summer—I hope my book can benefit from a similar effect next summer.

I’ve read a lot of books like this, and mine is very different from the rest, because it’s not a memoir and it’s not a polemic. It’s a sustained argument in favor of a certain program of self-education, and it’s an argument that takes seriously all the various objections someone could have to that program. I think a lot of people will enjoy reading it.

Preorders are appreciated

The book is coming out May 19, 2026. Preorders are open at Amazon.com and at Bookshop.org. Please preorder if you can, since that really helps indicate to the publisher that there’s a lot of interest.

I will certainly do an event in SF. I’ll try to do something in New York as well. Other cities will be TBD. I think that with enough lead time, I can probably get together an audience of 10 or 20 people in most American cities, but finding bookstore partners (especially for a small press book) can be hard. If you have any leads, let me know.

If you want a pre-release copy so you can review the book, please sign up here. I don’t want to gatekeep copies too much—book publicity is driven nowadays more by online bloggers, bookstagrammers, booktokers, etc, than it is by regular critics. I imagine my publisher will make me exercise some selectivity in terms of who I send copies to, but I want it to get in the hands of writers, editors, bloggers, critics, so they can think about scheduling coverage. I think if it has more mind-share now, sooner, then that’ll lead to more coverage and more sales later on.

I’ll be telling you many times about this book over the next six months, but I hope to find ways to make it interesting. As always, thanks for your time and attention.

P.S. Remember, you can pre-order here (Amazon / Bookshop), and you can sign up here for a galley copy. Thanks so much for your time and attention—I am still working on finishing the copy edits for this manuscript, so there’ll be no tale this week. See you again on Oct 21.