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Two prominent book lists seem to be making the rounds on my vaguely conservative substack feed. The MENSA reading list for high school students, and St. John's Great Books curriculum. While these two lists are pretty different from each other, and I generally find the St. John's list to be more broad, I find both to be vaguely unsatisfying and narrow in a way that I can't really put my finger on.
I'm reminded of Sam Kriss's critique of a similar kind of list on the /lit channel on 4chan. There's a certain kind of anglo-centrism to this list, an anglo-centrism that is focused on a specific type of worldview. I can't quite put the feeling I have into words here, but if I were to try, I would describe this list as emphasizing a modern (in reference to the modern era of history), Western, progressive (as in history as progress, not woke), Liberal, and individualist perspective of the world. A few big gaps I see below
-No Eastern Bloc/communist authors. Communism might be bad, but it is an ideology that determined the course of the 20th century. Why not add some Soviet Science fiction, or one of the works of Stanislaw Lem.
-No East Asian literature. Journey to the West is something that sticks out, but if you wanted to be more "edgy" you could add some Yukio Mishima, who certainly is quite different from the general theme of this list.
-No post-modernism. Yea, yea insert comment about degenerates, drugs, and nihilism, but this should be something that the youth should decide for themselves. Camus is on here which is borderline, but I would recommend some DFW (Infinite Jest is the best), Italo Calvino, Michel Houellebecq, or David Mitchell.
-No Latin American literature (on the MENSA list, St. John's seems to have Borges and Gabo) The fact that Gabo isn't on here is a crime. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a great, short one that could easily be added to this list, but Ficciones (Borges), The Invention of Morel (Bioy Casares), or The House of the Spirits (Allende).
-No environmentalist literature. Lord of the Rings sort of counts, but I would add Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, or some Wendell Berry.
-Very little history. One of the big problems I see on both the left and the right is a complete ignorance of who we are and how we got here. The Oxford History of the US (although incomplete) would be great to ad to this list, but I'm not sure what else to add that would give more than a basic survey of history which I don't think is useful.
At the end of the day I think lists like these are counter-productive. Rather than encouraging independent thinking, I think they just create another shibboleth on the right to stand opposed to the shibboleth on left: post-modernism and marxism are evil and wrong, the answers to all our problems can be found in the past, and the Western, Modern, Liberal worldview is probably correct. Rather I would suggest reading widely, and with things you disagree with. As Haruki Murakami once said, if you only read what everyone is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. This is just as true for this MENSA list as it might be for the slop that we've normalized.
Now that being said, if you want to build a university degree/program of study, you need to have some kind of reading list. In that sense St. John's list isn't too bad. But to really develop as an independent humanistic thinker, reading the books on their list is not enough. You need to cultivate independent seeking out of literature beyond the "lists" and beyond the slop that is peddled to us by popular culture. You also need to kill the anglocentrism, preferably by learning to read in one or more languages outside of English. If I were in charge of St. John's curriculum, I would cut back these reading lists by about 50%, add in a language requirement, and some kind of independent reading requirement. We had something like the later in my Global Voices (world literature) class in high school, where you had to pick a non-Anglo author and write an essay/give a presentation on its plot/themes/character.
Man I should have gone into the humanities instead of into the sciences. I am so much more passionate about this stuff than STEM.
A big part of understanding the purpose of a list of Canon Classics is to understand that it isn't primarily a question of the editor or professor selecting the books to be read, the authors that come after have already selected them and it is just a matter of discovering which books the authors have selected.
Western Literature and Philosophy starts as a conversation with Homer and the Scriptures*. If you continue in chronological order from there, you build your influences. You have to read Homer to (begin to) understand the allusions Plato, Plato to understand Aristotle, the Bible and Plato to understand Augustine, Aristotle and the Bible to understand Aquinas, and it builds from there. This tradition flows through Rome, through the Middle Ages, through the Enlightenment, in a clear tradition of "everyone after X has probably read X and defintely been influenced by X." I'd argue that it ends as a clear tradition with Joyce and Ulysses,** no writer after Joyce failed to be influenced by Joyce or by people he influenced. There's a Hegelian succession, a dialectic, by which you can see how Homer inspired writers who inspired writers who lead to Joyce.
That's the reason for the Anglo-Centrism of the list, it's meant to tell the story of the Anglo intellectual tradition. Take a classic question: what is the first novel? The Tale of Genji is often cited, but it's influence is essentially limited to Japan. Don Quixote is the first novel in the Western tradition. It's a Columbus vs Vikings situation. Cervantes is essential reading if you want to understand the form of the novel, even modern Japanese novels are influenced by it. Genji is interesting to read, but unless you're looking at Japanese literature specifically not necessary.
As for the accusation that lists like this are ultimately poseur-core: Yes. I'm fully aware that my pursuit of reading the Classics and the Canon is a game of LARPing as a Victorian gentleman or something like that. I find that to be a wortwhile goal. One of the biggest weaknesses of those kinds of lists in my mind is that they stop the LARP too early: if you want to read and understand the 100 great books, you should also be going to the Opera and the Symphony and church and watching plays and playing sports and games and going to museums. Participating in that kind of tradition is valuable and good.
*Obviously there are predecessors to both, they came out of a then-existing tradition, but the only extant examples we have are mostly fragmentary, the only one worth considering is Gilgamesh. I have no problem starting with Gilgamesh, the great books course I took did, it's short and it's worth reading, but I don't think you need to start there as its influence is more in the Campbell-Monomyth vague way than in the direct allusion way, you're perfectly safe starting at Genesis and the Rage of Achilles. Much in the same way that pre-Socratic philosophers undoubtedly existed, but we barely know anything about them, so it makes sense to start with Socrates.
**I picked Joyce because I think he's probably the last unanimous genius in the literary tradition, because his work is dense in classical and biblical and canonical allusion and theme and pastiche and criticism, because the publication of Ulysses is a pretty good stopping place symbolically because of the censorship saga it underwent which unleashed the floodgates of smut under the cover of art, after that world literature truly becomes world literature and it's impossible to tell the story of literature without talking about Mishima and Gabo and the Iron Curtain and it all gets pretty messy. That and I'm a sucker for the beautiful circularity of a tradition that starts at the Odyssey and ends at Ulysses, that starts with the Trojan war at the Eastern limit of Europe, and ends in Ireland at its Western limit.
Nothing wrong with LARPing as a Victorian gentleman, and in many ways a worthy goal for an individual in a world that is decidedly against many aspects of that. As a goal for an educational curriculum that's supposed to prepare youth to be citizens, leaders, and humanistic contributors to be members of Western society, I'm less sure. It's almost certainly better than what we have now, but it's also a system that produced, in large part, the generation that allowed Europe to commit collective suicide in the First World War. Maybe it's not fair to pin the blame on the war on the education system, but the way the European elite were educated during that era certainly influenced the propaganda, mass hysteria, and doubling down that allowed the war to get so out of hand.
All this being said, I think your LARP is good for both you and for the community. It is good to go church, the Opera, museums, play sports, and read old books. There are plenty of countervailing influences in society that want to shove the things I believe are absent from these lists in your face (although they never seem to choose actually good books/media from any of these categories). I just worry that as an ethic to guide society it's incomplete, which is perhaps true of any system we could come up with (José Ortega y Gasset seemed to think so at least).
In terms of the first novel, may I introduce the "Golden Ass" by Apuleius as another contender. It as episodic as Don Quijote, but also contains an overarching plot that I think would qualify it as a novel. And it was published in the 2nd century AD. It has elements of what we might consider post-modernism (nothing new under the sun), while still forming a bridge between antiquity and more modern novels.
In my mind Don Quixote is the first novel because the literary tradition that would follow all flows through Cervantes. Stuff like Genji or The Golden Ass or Daphnis and Chloe all have a good argument for being examples of the form that came before Cervantes, and influenced Cervantes, and novel is kind of a vague concept anyway. But I'll return to the Columbus analogy: there's various stories of various European explorers, or occasionally Zheng He, traveling to the Americas; but Columbus is still the guy because his trip lead to continuous open communication with the new world. In the same way, writers had occasionally written stuff that was novel-like without it leading to a continuous flow of novels being written, but it was after Cervantes that the novel becomes a continuous great form written consistently, and the Quixote and the works it influenced would influence all later novels.
It seems odd to blame the classical European educational system for WWI destroying the world of the classical European educational system. Everything that was worth saving about that world was built by the men who had gone through that system.
And at any rate, St. John's is under no illusions that it is anything other than a set of weirdoes preserving a tradition. They have no need to think about what the world would be like if everyone tried to go to St. John's, or if a hundred other colleges chose to imitate the curriculum. It's not going to happen, not anytime soon. We're not in any danger of suddenly returning to strict standards. The fact that anyone is preserving these strict standards means something.
I hear your point on reading widely and encouraging exploration, but too often that turns into a standard's-free slopfest. At 33, I can balance that literary diet pretty well naturally, without resorting too heavily to listicles, my mind craves Plato and Gibbon; at 16 we need to be working on nurturing a good palette in our young men, and that is going to require some degree of forcing them to read the right stuff. In my mind, your ability to interpret and explore is improved by being immersed in a canon, really any canon. My choice is the classical anglo-high-culture canon because that is my culture, but it is more about taking a bite out of one cohesive set of works as a base from which you can digest other works. China has its own canon of literature and philosophy that can be imbibed profitably. I've heard the Russian Canon praised in that the important works from Pushkin to Pasternak can be read in an industrious year or two.
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