“Great works.”
“Canonical literature.”
“Books everyone should read.”
Lauded by most, and yet so few willingly take the bait to actually read the novels that fall into these descriptions. You know the type. If “Great Books” were a person with an eHarmony profile, it would be of a clean-shaven, too-tan, paper-skinned man claiming his age to be about a decade younger than it really is, wearing loafers without socks and a Tommy Bahama short-sleeve button-down in an attempt to convey that he’s more laid back than he is as he fights to stand out and stay relevant amidst of sea of lumberjack beards, flannel, touchscreens, and Thought Catalog articles.
(^Found your Moby Dick, Ahab!)
Pushing aside that cringeworthy thought, a quick Google search pulls up many “Great Books” lists, some specific to religion, age group, location, etc.
Scrolling down on this page from the University of Chicago…:
https://grahamschool.uchicago.edu/academic-programs/liberal-arts/basic-program/core-curriculum
…we see that their Graham school has an entire four-year program built around a traditionally Socratic curriculum utilizing these vastly-considered great books.
The author of this website, meanwhile, used an algorithm to determine what the greatest books were by how often each appeared on a list:
http://thegreatestbooks.org/
Looks like exhausting work, and most definitely of the thankless variety. What is the insistence, then, that we all drag these books with us into the future?
I’m of the opinion that more is more when it comes to reading and building literacy practices, and I think that many of the authors we’ve seen in class would agree with this notion. The difference is in how it’s done and what materials are used to aid in learning. Gee, for instance, posits that video games are just one way of exposing audiences to literacy skills. He insists that learning can be framed in more ways than reading words on a (really old) page.
Racking up “great books” reads might be as fulfilling as racking up pedestrian kills on GTA for some, but for others it’s another pandering assignment meant to forcibly create more well-rounded students, regardless of the societal relevance or the general interest of the reader.
I can’t say if I’d be a better or worse person if I hadn’t read Hamlet in high school, but I know I didn’t appreciate it at the time so perhaps the effect is null and void.
But I get to say I read Hamlet and in some circles, that’s as good as actually doing the act, so…
