What I am doing here...

"Begin at the beginning,", the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop”

A few months ago, I was browsing Metafilter when a front page post caught my eye. It was about Shimer College, a small liberal arts college off-shoot from the University of Chicago with a syllabus based on reading the "Great Books". Shimer had recently repelled an attack by some radical right wing administrators, who wanted to take it over and turn it into a completely politicized institution.

Seeing fanatics trumped is always a pleasure; but this post had a more personal appeal. It reminded me of something from my past.

In my late teens, I was browsing through my parents book-shelves when I came across a peculiar series of colour coded books. They were arranged in boxes, by year, with a simple logo on the side in the shape of a stylised flame and the words "Great Books School of Chicago".

As I looked at the titles I had to admit I was impressed. Plato, Thucydides, Cervantes, Rabelais, Freud... These were all works that I had heard of, growing up in an academic household, but certainly not ones that I had read, despite thinking of myself as fairly literary at the time (mainly because I tended to do well in English - in retrospect, what I read for fun was actually pretty embarrassingly bad "extruded fantasy product").

Also, I had recently read the Count of Monte Christo and I remembered Edmond Dantes learning from the Abbe Faria in jail. Faria, the "mad priest", claimed that everything a man would need to know could be found contained in 150 books - and by carefully memorising those books, he, Faria, could now perform the function of a walking library and tutor Dantes well enough to turn him into the mysterious and glamorous Count.

That seemed pretty exciting. It also seemed appealingly efficient. Find the right 150 books and you could be a master of anything and everything. Nobody could read all the books that were ever written, but maybe you could imbibe a distillate, a sort of cider of knowledge. And, if you were ever imprisoned, you could teach your fellow prisoners to become stylishly vengeful and erudite aristocrats - a handy side-benefit.

All of this meant that when I chanced on these "Great Books", I was deeply pleased. It seemed that somebody else had done the hard work for me. Here was everything anyone thought was worth reading, in one place! Problem solved!

I asked my mum where the books came from. To my surprise, she told me that they were actually her mother's. My grandmother, who died before I was born, had been a librarian in Canada. She had organized book clubs where people read these books. Each boxed set was supposed to be a year's worth of discussion material. Everyone would get a box at the beginning of the year and read their way through it step by step. When she came over from Canada to England, my mum had brought the Great Books collection with her in her trunk.

I tried to make a start on reading the books, but didn't get very far. Partly I found them a bit too challenging at that stage - I just wasn't as smart as I thought! Then, too, there were the pressures of reading for university. I had just recently begun my undergraduate degree, and the workload was pretty intense. Some of the "Great Books" I wound up reading later, anyway, in Political Thought or English literature courses. I also learned enough to know that these colourful boxed sets didn't represent some ultimate distillate of knowledge - they were the culturally particular choices of a group of mid-twentieth century people and rather short on anything that wasn't by a dead white European male.

Gradually, I forgot about them. I grew up and lost the idea of becoming some kind of superhero polymath. Then, a few weeks ago, thanks to the Shimer post, I remembered their existence and, in a mood of mild curiosity rather than teenage megalomania, went back to them and checked them out.

I was surprised to find that they comprised lots and lots of things that I genuinely wanted to read - not to be able to appear witty or wise, although that would be nice; but because, as an adult, as someone now a father, as someone who was becoming ever more aware of being a part of society - I actually wanted to know what they had to say. Even if I disagreed with them, even if I thought they were stupid and wrong, and even if I thought, in some cases, that they were downright evil - nevertheless, I wanted to engage with them and through them, perhaps, with a grandmother I never knew.

So, I decided to read them. And, there being no Great Books groups near me at present, I also decided to blog about reading them. That way, if anybody wants to join the discussion, they can.

I hope it goes well.