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What I’m Reading Now

Posted November 22, 2009 by Patrick Young, Esq.

When I first was asked to blog here two years ago, I must admit that I was not particularly familiar with the form. So I googled myself a grand tour of the blogs.
In amidst the Wonkettes and Andrew Sullivans, there were a lot of blogs that seemed devoted to pixies, Star Trek, and seemingly endless family vacations. I was reflecting the other day on the need for more solipsism on this site, and so I thought I’d introduce some, since Ted is so darned objective.
When I was in my first year of law school, I recall my criminal law teacher, Professor Regan, lamenting that we all got into law school because we were great readers, but that lawyers are often so busy that they never read for pleasure again. He suggested we continue our reading and regularly pick works not connected with our professional lives.
I took that advice. Ever since have read at least one book per month.
For many years I kept a life list of all the books I have read since I was in my mid-20s. Unfortunately, when CARECEN downsized and moved last year, I lost the list. I thought I would re-start it on this web site.
Since the list was a product of my life as a law student, it begins each year in September and ends the following August. A bit of a disclosure: I buy a few books in both traditional and audio form so I can continue them in my car during frequent commutes between offices.
Each month I’ll post “What I’m Reading Now” along with some reflections on other books I’ve read during the year.
What I’m Reading Now: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
What I’ve Finished This Year
A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam (Public Affairs 2008)
I grew up with a mother who read.
Mom was a sickly woman with a rare hereditary disease which took each generation of her family in their forties. Her mother had died from it. Her sister would die from it. And mom died from it.
She never went to school beyond high school, but she was a dedicated reader. At least 50 books each year. Quite a contrast with Dad, an NYU graduate, who, I found out, had read two books in the twenty years before his death. And frankly I was surprised it had been so many.
Mom didn’t see any purpose to reading. It wasn’t for advancement or to demonstrate superiority to others. She didn’t work and she was the most modest of women. She read for the same reason she breathed.
As her boy, I loved to read. She challenged me by encouraging me to read outside myself. Books by ancient historians, German philosophers, and Catholic theologians were included in my 7th grade reading list from Mom.
In visiting a relatives house, I became aware that someone, other than Mom, seemed to have systematized a reading list for the country. On a groaning book shelf sat a set of 68 volumes with the conclusive title: Great Books of the Western World.
Some other kid might have cried for a new bike. Me, I begged for the books.
And she said no.
Now maybe the hospital bills were piling up and she couldn’t afford them, but she told me that the books weren’t worth the price. That they were there to impress, not to be read.
Well, that is also the verdict of Alex Beam in his book on The Great Books.
The Great Books grew out of a laudible effort by the University of Chicago to bring the discussion of the leading intellectual works of the last 2,500 years to Americans who hadn’t gone to college, or whose entry into business after college had ended their intellectual engagement. Some of the Chicago seminars for the general public were really revolutionary efforts in adult education.
Unfortuantely, what was a great idea at the time, became a mess when it went from an idealistic democratization of learning and became a commercialized effort to sell the appearance of elite knowledge to suburbanites in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Big, beautifully bound volumes were pushed by high-pressure salesmen on insecure house wives, afraid that if they didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on a set their house would have the intellectual equivalent of an unmowed lawn.
Inside those volumes were inferior translations (because they were cheaper than good ones) of some of the greatest (and not so great) literature the world has to offer. For example, even a bad edition of Homer is worthwhile, but why did people need to read a manual by Hippocrates on hemorrhoids? What young man or woman wouldn’t stop reading The Great Books after reading this from Christian Huygens in Volume 41: “For we have stated before this that the line N being the radius of a spherical wave of light in air, while in the crystal it spread through the spheroid ABPS, the ration of N to CS will be 156,962 to 93,410”.
The great books, once a sales phenom, are hardly sold any more. But Great Books lovers live on.
A few years ago I saw an announcement that a reading group at a local library would be discussing Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. I read, and I went.
An elderly woman who seemed to be running the group of six asked me why I had come. “To see who reads Thomas Hobbes today”, I replied. Everyone in the Great Books reading group laughed and then spent the next two hours talking about a book that had come out of the turbulence of the English Civil War. A great discussion of a difficult book by people who were neither philosophers nor historians.
So, while the desire to make money may have undermined the ideal of The Great Books, it did not make it any less compelling for people who wanted to come together to discuss the ideas that help to shape our world.
Oh, and by the way, no one there read The Great Books edition of Hobbes. We all had inexpensive tattered paperbacks like those used at the first Great Books seminars.