'A Little Shallow Learning Lightly Carried'

“A little shallow learning lightly carried goes a long way, at least with the young; my genial pose seems to have worked yet again.”

It’s reassuring to know a reputation for broad reading still carries cachet in certain quarters. A reader asks for a list of books I would recommend to someone who hopes to “become a more educated person.” He earned a degree in political science twelve years ago but, in his words, “I feel as though my formal education left something out.” While applauding the drive for self-improvement, I’m not convinced a list of books will accomplish that goal. I’ve always resented such lists. To this day I reflexively ignore anyone who tells me I must read something, especially if it’s for my own good.   

Let’s not even get into what it means to be “educated.” Specialization has fractured learning. I work daily with scientists, engineers, mathematicians and their students, and even the freshmen know more about Bayesian probability and protein folding than I ever will. Few of them, it’s probably redundant to point out, have read Rasselas or The Golden Bowl, or feel any compelling reason to do so. Are they “uneducated”?

The sentence quoted at the top is from “Joseph Epstein’s Lifetime Reading Plan” (Once More Around the Block, 1987). Epstein takes his title from Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan (1960), a book revised three times during its author’s lifetime as The New Lifetime Reading Plan. It’s a peculiar document, a relict from another age and rather depressing. On the list of prescribed books you’ll find Braudel but no Gibbon, Boswell but no Johnson, Blake but no Keats, Hawthorne but no Cather, Garcia Marquez but no Naipaul. Now I’m starting to sound school-marmish. Let me break it to my young reader gently: Reading a lot of books doesn’t make you a better person and it probably won’t make you much smarter. We all know well-read jerks and dolts. Epstein writes:

“Once you start talking about the delights of reading, funny things happen. Some years ago, discovering that a fairly bookish friend had never read any of the books of Isaac Bashevis Singer, I said to him, in what I thought was complete sincerity: ‘You’re lucky, really. I envy you all the pleasures in store for you.’ He looked at me strangely. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I never realized how damned condescending you can be when you put your mind to it.’”

A life of reading, in my experience, fends off tedium. Everything becomes food for thought. Even chronic bores become interesting if you have devoted some thought to why some people strive to be boring.