Almost as if in answer to my “Full Catastrophe Reading” post of June 13th, The Guardian published “The 100 greatest non-fiction books” on the following day. In my post, I had suggested that, to read well, we must be fully awake to the texts we encounter. I applied the principles of mindfulness to reading, and in the course of my discussion, said that we should not pay attention to other people’s lists because that distracts us from mindful reading. As far as I’m aware, no one at The Guardian reads my blog, and why would they? That would only distract them from their own mindful reading.
While The Guardian acknowledges the limitations of such exercises, that doesn’t prevent it from engaging in them. There are obvious limitations of course. It’s a British list and so its offerings are weighted in favour of a British/Western European/colonial perspective. Although it includes a few non-Western offerings (Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Sun Tzu, Cao Jinqing, Mahatma Gandhi), there are far more authors who can only be read while listening to Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance (Gibbon, TE Lawrence, Boswell, Pepys, Wilde, Orwell, Burton, Hume, Mill, Hobbes, Darwin, Dawkins, Hawking, Woolf, Frazer, etc.).
A less obvious limitation is revealed by the fact that the selections are broken down into arbitrary categories. Travel includes nine titles while science has five and religion a mere two. The titles may represent great works, but they’re anything but representative of their categories. If you were to restrict your reading to a few well-known texts, there would be no breadth or depth not only to your reading but also to your understanding.
Take the Religion category as a case in point. While I love Williams James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (and know absolutely nothing about the other suggestion), I do know that there are many many other works that have enriched my life and deserve a place on my shelf beside James. Here are a few:
What about seminal works by Augustine, Aquinas and Luther? If The Guardian can include Herodotus in the History category, then why not Augustine in Religion?
Shifting to modern writers, what about Bonhoeffer? How about Lonergan, Eliade, Buber, Merton, Tillich, Barthes, Gutiérrez, Schweitzer, Moltmann, Soelle, Schüssler Fiorenza? A real mish-mash, no?
One could argue that these authors don’t really fit in the category of Religion; they properly belong under Theology. James is more a cross-disciplinary writer who applies psychology to theological investigations. In that case, what about the cross-disciplinary writings of Clifford Geertz?
And that’s only the beginning. One could read for a lifetime in any one of The Guardian’s categories.
The pinnacle is pointless without the rest of the mountain.