Naomi Kanakia - What's So Great About the Great Books

A popular novelist answers claims that the classics are too difficult, problematic, and white—and explains what we gain by reading them Help us welcome author Naomi Kanakia to discuss her latest book, What's So Great About the Great Books? Naomi will be joined in conversation by Jerusalem Demsas To be held at Solid State Books on H St. NE When she was in her early twenties, then-aspiring writer Naomi Kanakia set out to read the Great Books—humankind’s most highly regarded literary classics, representing “the best that human beings have thought or said,” as determined by the two elderly intellectuals who’d written the guidebook she consulted. After twenty years, she has made her way through about two-thirds of these books, and she’s found reading them to be an immensely pleasurable and insightful activity. Plato, Milton, Tolstoy, Proust, all those dead guys—their books have stood the test of time. But since beginning her journey, Kanakia has found that although reading the Great Books is part of a longstanding tradition of engaging with the thought of previous generations, it is also a highly contingent activity that arose out of a specific time and place, the brainchild of a small group of early twentieth-century popularizers associated with Columbia University and the University of Chicago. And people have always been skeptical about the idea of reading the Great Books, asking if this is truly a realistic or even desirable goal for the ordinary person. A more recent and growing group of Great Books skeptics asks if these works are too problematic, reactionary, and irrelevant to bother reading. Kanakia, a self-described “left-of-center person,” grapples with these objections, attempting to restore context for the Great Books even as she sticks up for them. Because books that expose us to fundamental truths about the nature of beauty and reality are worth fighting for. Naomi Kanakia writes a popular literary blog, Woman of Letters, that’s been praised by The New Yorker, Vox, and New York Magazine. She is also the author of three YA novels and a literary novel for adults. Jerusalem Demsas is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Argument, a magazine revitalizing liberalism through rigorous, public debate.The Argument publishes reported essays, original polling, and columns on economics, abundance, AI, gender and culture. She was most recently a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she created and hosted the magazine's flagship policy podcast Good on Paper and made a name for herself reporting on the housing crisis, immigration, and democracy. Her reporting eventually turned into the book On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy, an argument that local democracy has been captured by the people with time to show up. Earlier she was a policy journalist at Vox and co-hosted The Weeds. She now co-hosts The Argument podcast weekly with Matthew Yglesias, where the two of them take their offline disagreements online.