Great books are often imagined as soldiers in ideological battles. Capital and The Wealth of Nations (and their authors' surnames) are made dutiful metonyms for systems locked in one grand binary conflict; the Gospel of Matthew and The Prince enliven the ur-fight between light and darkness, grace and expediency, good and evil. In the last fifteen years, this tendency has been renewed by internet-addled saps supposedly waging a "culture war." The fanciful belligerents: those who want a small elite to rule versus those who prefer self-governance (groups that demonstrate the ancient and actual push-pull of fear and curiosity). Meanwhile, the great books rest silently on shelves, speaking steadily and only when asked.

I've thought a lot about great books the last twelve years. I started to focus on canonical texts when I enrolled at a small college in which Great Books (note the capital letters) are studied and discussed in small classes. I went in a hungry writer hellbent on theft, intending to pull off a slow but thorough literary heist. Yet crime demands from its criminal peculiar tolerances. Classes at St. John's avoid a few standard intellectual habits; most jarringly, conversations omit considerations of a text's historical and cultural contexts. Instead students are encouraged to focus on the text itself, understanding it first by its own terms, then as an expansion of questions posed by earlier texts read in common. Over four years I came to see that studying at St. John's hones three skills: being empirical, or seeing what is in front of you; listening closely, particularly to those with whom you disagree; and thinking clearly through complexities with which you have no prior expertise. In blunter terms, the school helps people enact a sober and patient curiosity. After graduating, I stuck around via a relaxed day job in which I help students organize their lives. It's not the only show in town, but it's a damn good one.

As I began to closely read great books with other people, a few of my beliefs rapidly dissolved. I realized canonical texts are always much subtler, much weirder, than their precedent reputations. Iliad is about anger and glory and war, sure, but it is also about the tender joint of pride and doubt; The Wealth of Nations extols a burgeoning international capitalism, but Smith strongly emphasizes the literally dehumanizing effects of specialist-reliant production; War And Peace is a kaleidoscopic novel, but it is serves as an elaborate preface to an aristocrat's mechanistic theory of history. The fact of great work's consistent strangeness means many who cite canonical books in a neat and tactical manner are more often than not artless propagandists. Reading great books well banishes their caricatures.

Yet great books do not magically evade the grasp of sound judgement. Great books are often composed of dumb shit: self-contradiction, speculation cast as wisdom, shaky premises in lieu of firm arguments. Great books contain plenty of prejudice and incoherence. For example, Deuteronomy is a marvel of literary construction, blending first, second, and third person perspectives to clue us in to the grand, terrible, and perhaps doomed task of legislating—but it is also a book that prohibits murder while encouraging people to stone each other to death a lot. The messy nature of great books informs my pet binary theory of political dispositions, which is that each person favors one of the following identifying propositions: history is a product of mostly good decisions made by rational people; or history is a product of mostly bad decisions made by crazy people. Regardless of your inclination, I should respond to those who object to reading great books anachronistically, meaning applying contemporary knowledge and values to old texts. This method is often useful, particularly in the formation of one's principles, but it can inhibit the empiricism required of reading a book well. It is a frustrating truth that you have to leave your ideology at the door, at least temporarily, in order to understand and appreciate a text in full. Otherwise the mind—a scared little goblin hankering for weapons—will quickly, or even automatically, form the words in front of you into a cudgel with which you can beat your enemies, be they real twerps or digital phantoms.

Reading expediently is dishonest. But conversely, a quality that sabotages good reading is reverence. One needs only a minimum positive regard for a text in order to read it well. That regard has a simple name: respect. You need to respect a great book, meaning you must assume it has something to teach you. Reading great books with other people helps you practice this respect, since you should also extend it towards your fellow readers. But respect needn't be an infinite forbearance: a person who often says dumb or cruel shit should be dismissed then ignored, and a book that often evinces prejudice or incoherence should be similarly shelved. For example, the writings of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt are sometimes regarded as brilliant and prescient political theories rather than Machiavelli-recycling apologia for the most destructive and boring movement in human history; people should save themselves some trouble and stuff Schmitt in the cabinet of cranks-as-curios. Reverence is an attitude that apologizes in advance for any possible flaw; respect allows one to assess each contribution—to a tradition, culture, conversation—as it stands.

The two essential qualities of a great book are that it definitively influences the future and that it appears to boundlessly reward attention and analysis. Platonic dialogues keep dreamy moralists and our Sim City-minded busy while also appealing to earnest high schoolers who really want to know what really knowing means. And the same dialogues clearly shaped Grecian, Roman, Christian, and Arabic cultures. Since both qualities can only be discerned with time and distance, claims that a contemporary book is "great" should be interpreted as symbols of a strong admiration and/or predictions of the book's fate. This consequentialist definition of greatness also defangs petty crusaders for whom "the canon" represents a totalizing solution to the question of how to be. Hagiography can't stand on a horizon.

Carefully reading a great book requires a rare courage: the reader must first understand then moralize, reversing the common order of the day. This complex act requires patience, skepticism, praise, and blame mixed together in unpredictable proportions. Reading a great book well is more akin to studying an animal in the wild than diagramming an imagined machine. Practicing such a holistic and open-ended empiricism strengthens our "connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation)." As Foucault argues, this connection is the foundation of a free life. It stands to reason that reading great books well benefits the constituents of any living community. More simply: I recommend it.1