Books, Books, Everywhere … but What on Earth to Read?

An underrated benefit of living in the West in the 21st century is having access to the fullest catalogue of human culture ever assembled — in particular, books. The sheer range of readily available titles from across the ages and around the world would leave the academics of yesteryear viridescent with envy — and the badass librarians of Timbuktu out of a job.

But every benefit has a cost, and the cost of the 21st century’s plundering of the past can be a paralyzing indecision about how to unload the loot in the present. Should you start at the end and work your way backward, detective-style, or should you start at the beginning and work your way forward, narrative-like? Or maybe “should” has nothing to do with it, and you can just dive in and hope for the best.

Past a certain threshold of complexity, information is indistinguishable from noise. Culture interprets noise through a variety of institutional and grassroots filters. One key filter for literary noise is education, which, like a master chef (to use a different metaphor), not only pares information into digestible portions, but arranges them in courses which gradually bring out the flavor and texture of each helping.

The thing is, plundering the past as we have done dislodges the primacy of any one set of cultural filters. As my dad says, echoing Charles Taylor, once you become aware of the alternatives, “culture becomes a choice.” But a chosen culture can always be un-chosen; it’s no longer a constant in the existential equation. Even people who actively preserve traditional cultures tacitly acknowledge this truth, in action if not in word. For if “traditionalists” weren’t haunted by the fragility of their “way of life,” why would they be so consciously committed to shoring it up against the leveling wind?

But even if we had an undisputed monoculture with an educational consensus, the majority of potential readers are out of school, beyond the reach of such cultural filtration. And hey, while we’re compounding aporias, even for those who are in school, curricula are inherently limited. Formal education may point you in the right direction and hold your hand for the first few tentative steps into the dark wood, but eventually it must give you an avuncular pat on the shoulder and vanish into the gloom, leaving you feeling like Dante without Virgil. †

Civilizations are defined by how they solve this problem of interpreting noise, in all its varieties. And I suppose that of the problem’s many iterations, the particular quandary of choosing the right book from a crowd of options ranks pretty low on the scale of priorities. All the same, the quandary has been on my mind since a recent lunch with friends, where the idea for this essay was born.

I had been describing my harrowing first encounter with Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. One friend — who usually poses questions with a glint in her eye that portends a verbal pounce on all but the most intellectually sanitary (i.e. Thomistic) answers — frowned. When I had finished, she looked at me, but without the telltale glint, and asked, “How do you decide what to read without a curriculum telling you?”

I hadn’t given the question much thought before, but it was no sooner voiced than it resonated. This friend had recently completed her doctorate after years of graduate school (murder me), but everyone else present had finished college only a few years back. We have all been crawling out from the long shadow of being academically institutionalized; we are all, to some extent, Dantes without Virgils.

I don’t remember what I said to her at the time, but I’ve been thinking about her question for weeks, and I’ve finally arrived at the rudiments of an answer. (I speak only for myself, of course, but it’s easier to address this to “you,” dear reader.)

How do you choose what books to read next, in the absence of a set curriculum?

First of all, I think it’s wrongheaded to try to replicate the experience of studying a curriculum. I know a few people who have adopted exactly this course of action, and it doesn’t seem to have worked terribly well for them. A curriculum is like a training regimen: it’s designed to stimulate and strengthen specific muscles. But by definition, a training regimen doesn’t last forever. At some point, your muscles are yours to flex with the spontaneous freedom for excellence à la Servais Pinckaers; at some point, you have the nerve-wracking duty of choosing.

But that choosing, to introduce my second point, should be free of urgency. This can be difficult for Catholics, but I’m convinced that it’s necessary. Urgency focuses your attention exclusively on whatever you think is ‘essential.’ I can’t tell you how often I hear old friends from college tell me that, because their reading time is scarce, they only want to read what’s great. But that strikes me as a vapid maxim. The “great books” weren’t always great, nor the classics always classic: someone took time and a chance on each of them. You will enrich your reading if you risk spending at least some of what little time you have exploring new worlds.

But urgency isn’t the only culprit behind inaudacious reading. Even when the scales of urgency have fallen from their eyes, many Catholics persist in hoeing fallow rows (e.g. chronically rereading The Lord of the Rings) because they contemn both secular criticism and popular acclaim on principle. This contempt stems, I suspect, from a simplistic reading of St. Paul’s famous exhortation to think about whatever is true, honorable, pure, etc. (cf. Philippians 4:8).

Now, I generally agree with St. Paul, but with two caveats. First, I’m skeptical of a steady diet of superlatives, because the perfect can all too easily become the enemy of the good. We have an intuitive sense of what’s good, generally speaking, but what’s best is a matter of learned opinion. If you fixate on what’s best, you risk enslaving yourself to the judgment of others and being recreated in their image. The situation is otherwise in matters of doctrine, but in “felicitous reading,” to use Gaston Bachelard’s phrase, this posture is fatal. If we constantly compare a book we’re reading to some ideal “best,” our minds and hearts are not at rest; and reading, in my experience, is only felicitous as a form of rest.

But I have a second and more important caveat to St. Paul’s famous exhortation. There’s a distinction that often isn’t drawn by the folks who cite him to justify their prudish judgments. Superficial beauty — what we seem to mean by the chilly word “appropriate” — is a patina which does as little to offend our sensibilities as it does to inflame our souls. For some things, and under some circumstances, that’s sufficient: décor and clothes, for instance, should rarely be more than appropriate in this sense. But too often folks want this kind of beauty in art. That, I think, is a mistake.

Real beauty — the beauty I think St. Paul means — lives in, not on, things. Its presence isn’t always obvious; you need to linger with a book for a bit before you decide whether beauty lives in its pages, and sometimes you’ll realize it doesn’t. But the lingering is key: if you want a genuine aesthetic experience, with all its ecstatic promises, you have to be willing to live with ambiguities which may strike you as “inappropriate.” Only with such willingness can you successfully unearth the semina verbi; only with such willingness can you cultivate the wide-ranging taste that distinguishes the thoughtful reader from the merely informed.

Now, I have offered many “don’ts.” Do I have any positive recommendations? At the risk of infuriating readers, in a way, no — but in another way, yes. I say I don’t have any positive recommendation, because the “method” I have in mind isn’t really a method at all. What I have in mind is the attitude that integrates indeterminism.

Such an attitude, with respect to reading, is twofold. There is the indeterminism which flows from the inner logic of the imagination, and the wider, deeper, and more controversial position of metaphysical indeterminism. I suggest integrating both.

First, the indeterminism of the imagination. We have a duty to cultivate our imaginations alongside our minds, but the processes of cultivation differ as much as the faculties. We develop our minds by asking questions, proposing answers and scrutinizing them according to logic and experience. Thus not only do we need a rigorous command of logic, we must know which questions to ask, and in what order to ask them. Cultivating the mind is like raising rare orchids or a Japanese garden: it demands care, attention, and above all, control.

The imagination couldn’t be more different. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard observes that “images do not adapt themselves very well to quiet ideas, or above all, to definitive ideas. The imagination is ceaselessly imagining, enriching itself with new images.” By contrast with the mind, the imagination is like an English garden: spontaneous, abundant, and rambunctious. Reading is a key means of husbanding our imaginations. In choosing books, therefore, I think we should heed the more pliable approach of the English gardener, balancing our preexisting plans and preferences with the organic development of the images we discover and the directions they lead.

Yet even in cultivating the mind, we can only control so much — and here we transition to the question of metaphysical indeterminism. Truth, according to the scholastic formula, is the adequation of thought with reality: we think we know the truth when our judgments reflect the order of things in nature. The spirit with which you seek truth and evaluate wisdom, then, depends on how you conceptualize that order. The scholastic conception treats nature as a stately cathedral, in which causes and effects are arranged in a neat and discernible hierarchy, the way foundations support columns, columns support capitals, capitals support buttresses, and so on.

But what if nature, broadly conceived, is less like a cathedral and more like the ocean? What if causes interact less like columns and capitals (or like kings and ministers…) and more like the several conflicting forces which, in the aggregate, shape the ocean as we know it, e.g. earthly and lunar gravity, wind, density, saturation, etc.? The unprejudiced study of natural history — from prokaryotes to pulsars — suggests that nature resembles an ocean far more than it resembles a cathedral. And since, in the rubble of the old cosmology — with its incorruptible matter and angels piloting heavenly spheres — pure reason’s ability to reflect more than metaphorically about supernatural beings other than God is severely limited, shouldn’t we be more faithful to what we know about the world below, however “disenchanting,” rather than to what we wished we knew about the chimerically enchanted world “above”?

If reality has less the stability of a static cathedral and more the turbulence of a dynamic ocean, then it seems to me that we are more likely to bring our souls into reflective conformity with “things as they are” by relaxing our minds; by accumulating impressions and ideas like a tidepool trapping fauna, rather than trying to catch the ocean in a shell. And yet perhaps that analogy is not quite right; perhaps the imagination is the tidepool, and the mind is a beachcomber wandering the shoreline of existence, collecting shells, rocks, and a lot of wet sand, in the hopes of dredging a pearl.

Whatever analogy you use to illustrate it, the central contention of metaphysical indeterminism is that accident plays a starring role in the epic drama of life. Accidents, though, obey Christopher Nolan’s optimistic take on Murphy’s Law, which assumes a certain minimum of anterior chaos.

Let me distill these reflections on indeterminism into a single statement of advice. When choosing and reading books, look to cultivate a crop of chaos from which spontaneous ideas and impressions can arise, in both your imagination and your mind; all the foregoing don’ts are little more than irrigation canals to make that crop fruitful.

Concretely, what does this look like? I suggest two ways of integrating indeterminism. First, while being open-minded about other cultures is a start, being open-minded about your own culture is perhaps even more important. It’s easy to overlook the immensity and intricacy of your own civilization; the more you explore it, the better you will adumbrate the immensity and intricacy of other cultures. And that leads me to the second suggestion: about any feature of your own culture, or even your own personal life, occasionally ask yourself, “How else could this be done?” Of anything you believe about the world, ask, “How else could this be conceived?” And then actually look for an answer to your questions.

It won’t be long before you start discovering authors from everywhere, their movements and counter-movements, and the books that defined them. Quite often, you find yourself saying, “Oh, what the hell” before diving into something on a whim. (Little is so ephemeral as whim, which is why any indeterminist should take it seriously.) In answering questions and heeding whims, Wikipedia is your friend — as are those remarkable Amazon and YouTube algorithms! Sure, they poison political discourse, but only because they’re so good at “guessing” what you may enjoy, but for which you haven’t searched.

Neither the attitude I recommend nor my concrete suggestions should be taken as concessions to relativism, though I could see how they might smack of it. I try to live in constant awareness of unpredictability. “The world is deep, deeper than day had been aware,” writes Nietzsche. Unpredictability is baked into the being of things — which, on deeper reflection, is how it should be. Or why should I be suspicious of calling unpredictability an ingredient in the goodness of the world when the God Who made it all goes by the name of fire? “Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars.”

This fiery God wrote the book of the universe and filled it with noise — the noise of countless stars collapsing and forming into planets; of countless species stumbling into and out of existence on at least one of those planets, where their stumbling has somehow filled the globe with life; and of one species of featherless bipeds who build things they know are bound to fall, and gaily build them again. It’s almost as if noise, at least of the statistical variety, has a special place in God’s heart; almost as if there’s beauty in the challenge of deciphering it, even if the very process of deciphering adds, yet again, to the noise.

If that’s the case, those of us who have the privilege of living in the 21st century should be thrilled. The great sea of human culture lies before us, accessible as never before, and it’s there for everyone — at least everyone interested in felicitous reading — to explore for themselves, according to the movements of their own imaginations and the drift of their own thoughts. It’s an exciting adventure, I have found. You never know whom you’ll meet combing the beach, examining the tidepools, or sailing these vast and unpredictable waters — and that, too, is as it should be. “He is not a tame lion,” after all. Why should we expect the world or His children to be?

(How’s that for an intellectually un-sanitary answer?)

† Catholic readers may be wondering, “What about the faith?” While it’s true that faith is an indispensable guide for interpreting noise and conducting life, it doesn’t wholly lift those burdens from the shoulders of believers. The faith has never inhabited a cultural vacuum; wherever it animates souls, it animates a culture. The modern awareness of alternative cultures that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay raises as many questions for Christians as for anyone else, and for distinctly Christian reasons. When Catholics confess Jesus as the Incarnate Word and religiously submit their intellects and wills to the teaching authority of a historically continuous Church, they necessarily entangle the articles of faith in a mess of historical accidents. It’s not an insoluble imbroglio, as Newman shows in his magnificent Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Newman’s way out of the mess, however, demands that we be deep in history and attentive to theological language and devotional practice, all with the goal of identifying what is essential to the faith and what is inessential — which is to say, Newman searches for patterns in noise. No one escapes complexity.