The future of literature belongs to amateurs

Reviews have started to arrive for my forthcoming non-fiction book, What’s So Great About The Great Books?

Kirkus is a trade journal that reviews most forthcoming releases—libraries and booksellers use it as a guide for what to order. The reviewers at Kirkus are always anonymous, so they can often be quite harsh.

However, they gave their seal of approval to my nonfiction book:

This is less a book about the Western canon or the goals of college than it is a personal journey of reading in search of that happy and a peaceful life. The author affirms values shared by all: straight and queer, cis and transgender, white and of color. The cultivation of taste and the appreciation of beauty are not, then, socially excluding practices. They are what gives us common ground. The Great Books don’t offer simple answers. They provoke complex reflections. In that act, we become, perhaps, not better people, but more accepting ones.

A convincing case for Great Books as the road to self-discovery and moral action.

Thank you, Kirkus, for leaving your knives at home for this one.

Three Substackers have also written up their reactions to the book:

• Isaac Kolding:

  I’ve been a fan of Kanakia’s newsletter, Woman of Letters, for a while, and this book is essentially a gigantic Woman of Letters post. So if you like that, you’ll like this. It’s written in her now instantly-recognizable voice; she approaches Literature in her matter-of-fact left-brain sort of way; there’s a refreshing and striking lack of pretense about the whole thing.

• Robert Boyd Skipper:

  I predict that once you get started reading about Kanakia’s journey in self-education, you’ll be entranced. Her book is intimate and confessional, smooth as silk, and hard to put down. When my copy arrived in the mail, I shoved aside all my projects and became engrossed in her story: that of a plucky writer who faced down the Great Books on her own and found out they weren’t so scary after all.

• Alexander Sorondo:

  What I deduced about the book’s goal is that Kanakia wants us to think for ourselves about the Great Books debate. It’d be hypocritical, in some sense, to write a book in which she explains to you how to appreciate the ambiguity and moral muddying of the Great Books.

  The way I’d sum it up, in terms of what the experience is