What's So Great About the Great Books?

Kanakia has quickly drawn many readers to her newsletter—me included—with two rare skills: an ability to consume vast quantities of literature (for a fascinating recent essay on New Yorker fiction she read 500 stories in three months) and an equal facility for synthesizing that reading in a clear and disarmingly conversational writing style. Both skills are very useful for another of her projects: reading the so-called Great Books as well as the reams of literature about such projects. It’s the latter skill that’s most evident in this book—she sharply cuts through decades of puffy verbiage about why, or why not, we should read these classics. And I can hardly imagine a more approachable enthusiast for these allegedly daunting tomes, from Gilgamesh to Achebe—she makes you want to dive in yourself ASAP (so much so that I would have loved to hear even more about the books themselves).