The Embrace of Complexity

Naomi Kanakia was exposed to the Great Books as a teenager. She went to Catholic schools and even learned Latin. She recalls being “impressed at an early age with a story about the progress and struggle of Western culture, and with the sense that all this struggle had to do with me and with how I lived today.” At the age of 24, she found herself in her childhood bedroom, “feeling like a failure, and without any friends or future,” wanting “desperately to become a better writer or thinker.” It was then that she really discovered the power of the Great Books for herself. She says she was “akin to the casual Christian—someone like George W. Bush before he got sober—who in a time of struggle finds new strength in the Good Book.”