A retiring lawyer mentioned at a party that he now intended to read the hundred greatest books. He had already obtained the list, and was nearly ready to start.
He'd never read any of these books before, and I was reminded of people who read War and Peace in their teens. When we ask them what they thought of the book, they talk about mounds of detail and exhausting descriptions and how the book goes on forever. As new readers they didn't know how novels can operate and they had no repertoire of other novelists for comparison, so they didn't see that in fact Tolstoy's prose is supremely concise, direct and fast. Tolstoy can do more in a hundred pages than merely good writers can do in five hundred. We see through his words to the events they describe; the words become transparent; we don't notice them and couldn't quote them if we were asked. His prose so rapidly creates vivid objects that don't seem to be made of words at all - that's the magic of Tolstoy. And the world of War and Peace does go on forever - one has the sense of an indefinitely large background that completely merges with our own. Only a handful of novels achieve that effect. I didn't think the lawyer would see much of this, and I didn't think his project would come to much in the end.
I wasn't completely wrong. In one respect, in fact, the teenager has the advantage over the old lawyer, because teenagers readily develop and elaborate new interests. That's one reason, of course, that lists of great books are heavy with works that seem to require no special background other than the ability to read. Novels, epic poems, some shorter and lighter works of social science and religion and the like - those are the staples. There are some histories, but it's hard to see what good would come of reading Thucydides or Tacitus, Gibbon or Hume right out of the blue. There isn't any physics or chemistry, and any philosophy or theology we find is conducted at a popular level. It isn't unknown for older people to break new ground - some of us do take up the study of mathematics, or of classical languages - but even then, our horizons are limited. And, of course, few grand schemes get carried out at all, whether we're old or young.
But the old lawyer's project isn't such a bad one. He has seen a lot of life; he has done a lot of reading, if not of novels; and he is accustomed to complex narratives in which he has learned to see the whole without losing sight of the parts. To stay with War and Peace, he might well find it very satisfying without ever articulating why. The enjoyment he takes in various novels might even be broadly proportionate to how highly critics rate them - it's possible to cultivate taste without being able to give reasons for it. And if he sticks to the sort of novel that appears on these lists, his taste is apt to become rather good. In any case, there's no clear way to move step by step from lesser books to greater ones. There is no uniquely correct progression; books can be prerequisite in different ways, and for different future courses of reading. And we can't resist skipping ahead at books we find ourselves aiming toward.
Graded progression makes sense where the development of basic skills is at issue. Children who are just learning to read begin with books using limited vocabularies, simple sentence structures, and so on. Older students focus first on traditional forms of literature - well-known sonnets, tragedies and the like - before moving on to more challenging forms. Or when, as was common until fairly recently, literacy required learning ancient languages, a student of Latin couldn't get to Cicero without going through Caesar, and a student of Greek would begin with Xenophon or some simpler passages from the New Testament. But in each case the object was to lay down a basis for further study, study that was expected to take some time if it was undertaken at all. Our lawyer isn't beginning a career as a classicist or a professional critic. He'll be reading books in translation, and he isn't expecting to publish articles about what he reads. Perhaps with a bit of guidance he'll plan to read some books earlier than others - Dickens before Conrad, for example - but he doesn't need to go any further than that.
Depending on how the project unfolds, in fact, he need not go even that far. He thinks at the outset of a hundred-stage project - but it would be very strange if it turned out that way. If he doesn't find anything he truly likes reading, it's hard to see why he would continue - he'd be in the same position as the teenage War and Peace reader. He doesn't realize that for the project really to work, it will have to cease to be the project he thinks it is. That can happen in a lot of different ways. He might find that he likes a particular author, so that he reads more of that author's books, and takes up related biographical and historical material. He might find a given genre especially charming, and digress to explore it more. There are any number of features in which he might take an interest that is stronger than his interest in "the hundred greatest books."
But there is, after all, an advantage to his starting point. The best that can happen to him, though he doesn't know it yet, is to find a book that really fits him, that compels his continuing attention, that becomes a lens through which he sees things. And the books on his list are the best places to start looking. Books that we can really live with and think about over extended periods of time have the same qualities that make them enduring classics. They're consistent, coherent, not just a jumble of shiny parts. They're comprehensive in scope - almost general, one might way, despite their specific content. They provide frames on which we can rework our own experiences.
We don't come across books that fit us so well very often. It takes time for a book to assume that role, and it can be a long time between such books. And that's the main drawback to the lawyer's late start - he might never find such a book, and he'll probably never find more than one or two. A lifetime reading good books, of course, might not yield more than that - or it might offer five or even ten. But they're gold, whether there's one or a dozen. The lawyer's opening motivation might seem comical to us, but he might just find what he doesn't yet know he's looking for.
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