On the End of the Canon Wars

The highlight of my freshman year in college was a double-credit course where we read three books a week, starting with the ancient Greeks and ending with Virginia Woolf, for two whole semesters. It transformed my life for the better. I’d come to campus with a self-imposed mission to learn how to be a writer by becoming well-read; I left it a fanatic for a particular idea of what reading really means. All of who I am today is bound up with my unreconstructed belief that experiencing and discussing literature, philosophy, history, art and politics are part of what it means to lead a fully human existence.