Why We Shouldn’t Feel Guilty For Not Being Extremely Well Read

David Lodge, in his 1975 campus novel Changing Places, imagines a cocktail party game that makes fiendish use of imposter syndrome. Visiting professor Phillip Swallow introduces the faculty of fictional Euphoric State University to “Humiliation,” a game whereby every participant names a literary text which they haven’t read and where they are then awarded a point for every other participant who has read that given work. The elegant sadism of the game is that it appeals to a scholar’s sense of competition, but that it’s only through intellectual debasement that anyone can win.

Should a player, wishing to preserve their reputation as name some book that they haven’t read which is so obscure—say the collected theological writings of Bogomil or Bernardino Orchino’s response to Girolamo Muzio—than they are not only playing the game in bad faith, they’ll also accrue no points because nobody has read those things. On the other hand, if they name things so widely read (The Great Gatsby, Nineteenth Eighty-Four) they risk unmasking themselves as an educated rube.

It is helpful to remember how much of our guilt over what we haven’t read or not is marketing as much as it is pedagogy or wisdom.

A character in Changing Places explains that the game is particularly dangerous for those with a “pathological urge to succeed and a pathological fear of being thought uncultured,” a dangerous exercise that can set these “two obsessions at war with each other.” This is the awful predicament for assistant professor Howard Ringbaum, who at first keeps naming obscure eighteenth-century political tracts, as other players (slightly) embarrass themselves by selecting works that, if not commonly read by the wider public, it would have been assumed somebody with a doctorate in English would be familiar with (Paradise Regained, Hiawatha, etc.).

Finally, to the initial disbelief of the partygoers who with a dawning horror realize that he’s not joking, Ringbaum declares “Hamlet!,” thus debasing himself into triumph. Consequently, Lodge writes, Ringbaum “unexpectedly flunked his review three days later and it’s generally supposed that this was because the English Department dared not give tenure to a man who publicly admitted” to having not read such a celebrated work. Though I’ve certainly humiliated myself in over the years, “Humiliation” is a game that I’d dare not play—and if I did, I’d have the good sense to lie (though I’ll attempt a degree of honesty here).

For anyone who lives a literary life, whether as a professor or teacher, editor or writer, it’s decent to be haunted by the sheer enormity of all of that which we’ve not read. That disquiet, however, is compounded by a misunderstanding among the general public of what exactly a literary life looks like, especially if you’re a scholar of literature. A doctorate says nothing about the breadth of your reading, only the depth, which shocked an interlocutor of mine when he discovered that I didn’t have a random Robert Burns’ lyric memorized (as if comprehensive examinations were just recounting works). Which is maybe just a defense mechanism as I admit that though I have read Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom, a veritable stack of dissenting religious pamphlets from the seventeenth-century, and Peter Stallybrass and Alon White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, my familiarity with Wuthering Heights is mostly limited to the Kate Bush song. Nineteenth-century British literature (but not American!) is such a profoundly embarrassing lacuna for me, my knowledge limited to a handful of the critics (Arnold, Ruskin, etc.) and the most canonical doorstoppers of Charles Dickens (Bleak House, Great Expectations, along with Martin Chuzzlewit for some reason).

Because I can’t even type these words out, I’ll confess that (though I’ve seen many of the movies!) there is a certain Regency author associated with Hampshire and Bath whose foundational novels I’ve never read. By way of consolation, I try and remind myself that Augustin (who I have read!) never finished the Bible cover to cover, though he didn’t have access to a smartphone either.

“Our propensity to lie when we talk about books is a logical consequence of the stigma attached to non-reading,” writes the French literary scholar Pierre Bayard in the deliciously titled How to Talk About Books Which You Haven’t Read, which I haven’t read (in its entirety). Published to controversy on this side of the Atlantic in 2007, Bayard argues that there are legitimate varieties of “non-reading”—reputation, skimming, synopsis, secondary source—beyond reading cover-to-cover. I’m not sure that I’m totally comfortable with Bayard (maybe I need to read the whole book), but I do think that it’s worth investigating our readerly anxiety, especially as concerns the canon.

Bayard describes an “oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps,” an accurate summation of the risks of gauging knowledge entirely through a canonical checklist. Bayard has a point in critiquing the attitude which maintains that engagement with literature can basically be reduced to an itinerary. “Being cultivated is a matter not of having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system,” writes Bayard, and I think that there is merit here, probably more so in the second clause. As for myself, in my more nervous and guilty moments, I try and find consolation in Francis Bacon’s advice from a 1597 essay in which he intoned “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be tasted and digested.”

There are still good pedagogical reasons for a student of literature to be familiar—and to have read—the bulk of canonical works, regardless of the mercurial nature of any such listing of the supposed best of that which has been thought and said. A friend of mine who attended St. John’s College, that weird Great Books school in Annapolis, made the point that whether or not Hamlet really is the sweetness and the light, we read Shakespeare because he was also read by Melville and Wolf, Baldwin and Morrison. That’s not exactly how most people approach the canon, however, where true to the religiously-inflected nature of that word, there is a scriptural element to Don Quixote or Middlemarch.

Just as churchgoers will lie about familiarity with Leviticus or Deuteronomy, so too will readers lie about having read Miquel Cervantes and George Eliot. A canon was the word of God before it referred to the reading list of a book club. Canonicity has a history, and there have been differing opinions on how exactly the educated reader should approach the greats, as Bacon’s quote testifies towards. Renaissance humanists certainly emphasized a corpus of Greek and Roman classics for the self-fashioned man, the predictable coterie that includes Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Virgil. For example, much of what is today considered canonical was dismissed as the work of upstart crows, a culture wars debate satirically enacted in Jonathan Swift’s 1704 The Battle of the Books, wherein “’Tis wonderful to conceive the Tumult arisen among the Books” about who is preferable, the Ancient or Modern.

Media technology has given this process a different urgency. Augustin, after all, didn’t read the entire Bible because of slothfulness but simply because he didn’t have access to the whole book. That Renaissance humanists emphasized a dedicated canon while the printing press made access to writing exponentially easier is not a coincidence. More significant than what happens to be in the canon (for any book list differs in the particulars) is the idea of a canon in the first place. It reflects faith that all of that which defines an education can be handily enumerated, and furthermore, that an individual student will have the material and economic means to accomplish said list.

Consider the proliferation of “Great Books” curricula that arguably originate with the visionary chancellor of the University of Chicago Robert Maynard Hutchins in 1930. That curriculum is the primogeniture of similar programs, often with an explicitly conservative agenda, from St. John’s College to the bevy of homeschooling-adjacent classics programs popular throughout the United States. By 1947, Hutchins had established the Great Books Foundation alongside the pop-philosopher Mortimer Adler who began handily marketing a 54-volume set entitled Great Books of the Western World on cheap print—made possible by the same printing technology also responsible for cheap paperbacks sold at newsstands and train stations—that were sold to middle-class suburban families as an aspirational totem.

“An educated person is one who, through the travail of his own life, has assimilated the ideas that make him representative of his culture,” writes Adler in his 1977 Reforming Education: The Schooling of People and Their Education Beyond Schooling. A venerable concept, but from Adler, who was at best a middling scholar and more in the American evangelical tradition of snake-oil hucksterism than serious philosophy, there is also the frustratingly middle-brow about this. Bayard, though admitting to gaps in his own reading, sees familiarity with literature as a means of orienting yourself intellectually, whereas Adler understands a student as merely a sedentary receptacle. Adler’s may be a plea for reading, but it’s not one for understanding.

The issue isn’t that you shouldn’t read the “Great Books,” or even have a conception of “greatness” in the first place, but in how you read them. Good to read broadly, better to read deeply.

Alex Beam in A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of Great Books mimics the attitude of the average salesman in Adler and Hutchins’ project as telling a potential mark “Wisdom of the ages, schmisdom of the ages. Forget about learning—your boss will be impressed, women will seek you out…and your kids will get into college.” Maybe it’s inevitable that when the eternal verities met American commercialism it would result in something like The Great Books of the Western World with its smudgy, un-annotated Bible-paper with poorly translated works from Aeschylus to Leo Tolstoy, but it is helpful to remember how much of our guilt over what we haven’t read or not is marketing as much as it is pedagogy or wisdom.

For the past generation, the person most associated with such thinking has been the late Yale professor Harold Bloom, who moved from being type a provocative anti-theorist into the author of The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages which supplies a handy and definitive list of authors he deems necessary for any educated person (much less a PhD in literature) to have read, including Goethe, John Milton, and, of course, Shakespeare. Of his twenty-six authors, only four are women. Bloom, who was popular for his series of dozens of superficial “Bloom’s Guides” to canonical literature where most things were judged as having come-up-short of Shakespeare and are long rumored to have largely been assembled by graduate students, claimed that “Without…[his] Canon, we cease to think.”

By all accounts Bloom was incredibly well-read, with a prodigious memory, and able to quote reams of poetry without difficulty, but the Bloom of The Western Canon can’t help but seem as if he’s produced a checklist more than an analysis, a profoundly American desire to acquire as much as to intuit, even while he argues that his book is a salvo against pernicious individualism. Bloom was a vociferous critic of genre fiction, seeing in it both aesthetic and ethical deficiencies, but there is an odd similarity between the ethos of The Western Canon with its tabulations of required reading and the denizens of Good Reads who proudly list dozens of books successfully finished as if reading were a marathon. The sage of New Haven bore more of a similarity to the aesthetic influencers of Book Tok who use titles as props than he’d ever have wanted to admit.

None of this is an argument to not read, or to be proud of ignorance, though I’d argue that the only ignorance worth being ashamed of is that which isn’t rectified. Rather it’s to challenge the culture of joyless reading, whether in a pre-ordained list of Great Books or a marketer’s litany of that which you’re expected to have consumed if you’re a “well read” fan of fantasy, or science fiction, or Westerns. The issue isn’t that you shouldn’t read the “Great Books,” or even have a conception of “greatness” in the first place, but in how you read them. Good to read broadly, better to read deeply.

Admitting to the general feeling of “shame” and “inadequacy” which her subject causes in many readers, Naomi Kanakia in What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though it Might Destroy You) makes a convincing case for how this corpus has been stress-tested to allow us to sink “into the dream of the text, experiencing it with as much immediacy” as we can. Reading not as a chore, but to take the top of your head off, as that axe for the frozen sea inside of you (references to two canonical writers that the more well-read amongst you will get).

Tradition, rigor, and even required reading can serve a purpose, but one doesn’t need to appreciate every individual flower to know that flowers are beautiful. As a means of conspicuous consumption the canon is poorly served, but as a destination to explore, as a complicated, contradictory, sometimes boring and often beautiful place, there can be much to be gained through a meander, a perusal, a stroll. Because the best part of having not read something is that in your future you still have something wonderful to first encounter. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a reader in possession of curiosity must be in want of another great book.