On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books — Karen Swallow Prior
A cogent analysis of selected great works of literature and their lessons on virtue, from a Christian perspective

I primarily choose to read nonfiction, but either through my education or my own choices I have read several great works of literary fiction in my life and I have enjoyed most of them immensely. Still, however, I commonly feel self-conscious when talking about the “great books” of literature (as opposed to non-fiction) for two reasons: 1) I feel that I haven’t read enough of them and that fact will become clear, and 2) I feel that in most of the “great books” I have read I need someone well-educated in literature to help me understand it as deeply as it deserves. This is true of my favorites (like A Tale of Two Cities) and the ones I hated but feel like I missed something (sorry, Joseph Conrad, but I still don’t like Heart of Darkness after being assigned to read it twice!). Karen Swallow Prior, in her newly-released book On Reading Well, is here to partially alleviate my literary inferiority complex by attacking both of those sources.
On Reading Well is a book about great books. Each of the twelves chapters is focused around a work of literature that has achieved enormous popularity among both the general public and those educated in these sorts of things. I would give you the full list, but I feel that some amount of surprise is an important factor in enjoying the book. It is important to note, however, that the point of On Reading Well is not just to summarize a list of “great books”, and Prior did not simply choose her favorite works of literature. Instead, the fuel of the book is in uncovering virtue.
Prior chose twelve virtues commonly agreed upon either by classic Western thought, the Bible, or a combination of the two. She then selected a book that explores the meaning of that virtue either by example or non-example. Instead of the chapters only interacting with the selected texts, they delve into the virtues themselves. This means that On Reading Well is useful not only to those like me who have a literary inferiority complex, which I suspect describes a lot of people, but also to a more general audience of those interested in cultivating virtues.
It seemed to me an odd choice, at first, to structure a book about the “great books” around virtues. I wondered if one of the chief reasons to read an old, time-tested book is for its moral reasoning. But it became clear to me, through the arguments the book made for itself and through personal reflection, that cultivating virtue really should be a major motivation for reading literature. It is a useful medium for the task, and it begins to make sense when you see how many of these great books are oriented toward exploring these virtues themselves. One of the hallmarks of “literature”, as opposed to fiction, is that it makes some difference to the world, that it holds some importance within it. How can a story truly be great if it makes no difference to our lives? And how can it make a difference to our lives if it has no moral claim, no example to follow nor sin to avoid?

As I mentioned earlier, I have always loved A Tale of Two Cities (to the endless amazement of my friends and colleagues), but in reading it there are always large chunks of the story where I feel like I am missing quite a lot. In uncovering the major theme of justice in the story and diving deep within that theme, On Reading Well prepared me for my next re-reading with new tools to use on Charles Dickens. It also added tremendously to my reading list, which grows almost exponentially at this point. I would love to read The Road (the only 21st-century book on the list), I am already listening to an audiobook of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and I also added Shusaku Endo’s Silence to both my Goodreads list and my Amazon Prime Instant Video list.
Silence was an inclusion I was especially glad to see not because I knew anything about the book but because it is arguably not a work of Western literature. On Reading Well, like others of its kind I have seen and heard about, is focused on the great books of Western literature specifically. That is why a novel by a Japanese writer about the the persecution of Jesuit missionaries in Japan is breath of fresh air from the broader world. Prior’s book would have been worse off if she would have included more non-Western works, but I would love to see a book of “great books” that includes some from cultures around the world and provide some diversity in both time period and geography.
If you like reading, On Reading Well is for you. It will change the way you look at literature and motivate you to dive into some great books. And your life might be greater for it as well.
On Reading Well releases today, September 4th, and it is available from Amazon and many Christian bookstores.
I received this book as an eARC courtesy of Brazos Press and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.




