We don’t get to choose our fans.
Naomi Kanakia, for example, probably doesn’t want me — a religious-minded, gender-critical writer — to review her book, What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though it Might Destroy You), published on Tuesday. The book is a defense of the classics, written for the Left, and it has agonizingly cringe chapter headings such as “Aren’t the Great Books kinda problematic?” In it, Kanakia trots out all the usual progressive objections to the canon, including that Western novels can psychologically damage marginalized people, and that to say you like Great Books can be read as an endorsement of white men (the horror). The biggest problem with the great books, though, is the people who read them: Right-wingers, religious people, racists, and transphobes.
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