What's So Great About the Great Books?

Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You)

Naomi Kanakia

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9780691251936
  9780691251929
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691290218
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Literature

A popular novelist and literary blogger answers those who claim the classics are too difficult, too problematic, and too white—and explains what we gain by reading them

When she was in her early twenties, then-aspiring writer Naomi Kanakia set out to read the Great Books—humankind’s most highly regarded literary classics, representing “the best that human beings have thought or said,” as determined by the two elderly intellectuals who’d written the guidebook she consulted. After twenty years, she has made her way through about two-thirds of these books, and she’s found reading them to be an immensely pleasurable and insightful activity. Plato, Milton, Tolstoy, Proust, all those dead guys—their books have stood the test of time.

But since beginning her journey, Kanakia has found that although reading the Great Books is part of a longstanding tradition of engaging with the thought of previous generations, it is also a highly contingent activity that arose out of a specific time and place, the brainchild of a small group of early twentieth-century popularizers associated with Columbia University and the University of Chicago. And people have always been skeptical about the idea of reading the Great Books, asking if this is truly a realistic or even desirable goal for the ordinary person. A more recent and growing group of Great Books skeptics asks if these works are too problematic, reactionary, and irrelevant to bother reading. Kanakia, a self-described “left-of-center person,” grapples with these objections, attempting to restore context for the Great Books even as she sticks up for them. Because books that expose us to fundamental truths about the nature of beauty and reality are worth fighting for.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Why should I read the Great Books?
• What do you mean by “The Great Books”?
• Have people always read the Great Books?
• Isn’t it true that the Great Books are too difficult to read on your own?
• Where did your list of Great Books come from?
• Aren’t the Great Books kinda problematic?
• Why not read other books that are equally beautiful but have better politics?
• Does it matter what we read? Isn’t it more important to develop our thinking skills?
• How do we know whether a book is “Great”?
• Why do we need a list at all?
• When we say, “The Great Books are worth reading,” do other people hear, “White men are inherently superior”?
• Can’t reading the Great Books be psychologically damaging for marginalized people?
• Weren’t some of the Great Books written by reprehensible people?
• What if, at the end of the day, I simply prefer to read other books?
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix—How do I start reading the Great Books?
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index