I am about to start a reread of The Great Conversation, which is the first volume of the The Great Books of the Western World collection. This slim volume was written by Robert Maynard Hutchins, who served as President of the University of Chicago, and the Editor in Chief of the Great Books project. As I reread this volume, I have been thinking about the concept of great books, and what is meant by the western canon.

Canon is not a checklist

Reading from a canon is not, by itself, the goal. I am not arguing against reading canonical works. I am arguing against treating them as a box-checking exercise. If I am only reading “Great Books” and checking titles off a list, I am missing the point.

Adler’s work on the Syntopicon (to accompany the 54 volumes of Great Books of the Western World) is a reminder of what the project is for: reading well, reading widely, and making connections across texts and ideas.

Read deeply, and make connections

It is not enough to read books that appear on a canon list. The deeper aim is to read attentively, think carefully about what I am reading, and connect books to other books, questions, and experiences.

A caution: “fetishizing” canonical books

Another temptation is to fetishize canonical books, telling ourselves that if a book is old, it must be superior. Even then, I think we can miss the point.

When the editors (including Adler) assembled Great Books of the Western World, they intentionally excluded many newer works. That decision was not necessarily because newer books cannot be good. It was because canon formation, in this sense, has something to do with staying power.

Socrates is not “great” merely because the works are old. Socrates is read now. Readers are still impacted, still drawing wisdom, and still making connections centuries later. Darwin is similar: even when specific scientific claims do not hold up, the habits of inquiry and the intellectual background remain instructive.

Many books written in the past few decades may eventually have that kind of staying power. They may be read for the next fifty or one hundred years, and people may continue to draw insight from them. But there is usually a (not formal, but real) process of time and testing: we watch whether a book continues to matter.

Not every old book belongs on the shelf

I see this in book communities that focus on preserving older books. People post photos from estate sales or used bookstores and ask, “Is anything here worth taking?” You might see thirty old titles, and a few are genuinely worth grabbing. But many are not.

Not every book deserves a permanent place on my bookshelf, and not every book deserves a place in what we call a canon.

“Canon” also depends on what world you are talking about

There is another, larger issue: what we mean by the word canon.

The Great Books of the Western World project draws from a particular region and tradition: Europe, the Near East, and the Greek and Roman world. That does not mean works outside that tradition are not worth reading. It means they are not included in that particular canon.

Robert Maynard Hutchins, in the Preface to The Great Conversation, points out that omission of Eastern works from the Great Books of the Western World was not an attempt to depreciate them, but rather because ‘the great conversation” that they were following was peculiar to Western works – meaning that Western writers were following this thread over hundred and hundreds of years. He expressed hope that editors familiar with Eastern works and traditions would at some point assemble a similar canon.

Making room for other canons

So, if I accept the Western canon as “the list,” and I only work my way through it, I risk a narrow education. Even if those books deserve deep attention, I should leave room for other canons.

Compiling a list of “great books” of the Eastern world has become somewhat of a side project of mine.

Even in my first few passes, I have been struck by how much is out there: literature, prose, poetry, philosophy, and religious texts.

I am Western, I live in a Western country, and I am immersed in Western literature. That shapes what I see first.

But the more I look, the more obvious it becomes that there is a vast body of work outside the Western canon that is worthy of consideration.

The scale of the reading life

After reading the first volume, The Great Conversation, and dipping into a few topics in the Syntopicon, I am reminded that even the Western canon alone is a tremendous amount of reading. And the editors were clear that not everything considered “great” is included in that set.

The Syntopicon also references works that are not in the collection. For instance, many discussions assume access to religious scriptures as separate books.

All of this makes the point sharper: there are more books than I can read, but there is also more wisdom than any one canon can contain. So the aim is not simply “read the canon,” but “read well,” “read wide,” and “make connections,” while remaining open to other traditions that also deserve sustained attention.