The Common Reader Newsletter by Henry Oliver

Every time I talk to an academic, or email with one of them, which is not infrequently thanks to this blog, I ask them the same thing. Do your students still read? If you read the news, or some Substacks, you will get the impression that the answer is: “no”. But the answers I get range from “they struggle read a novella” to “everything is basically fine” or “the best students are just as good” or “it’s nothing like as bad as reported”.

This essay appeared in Prospect’s Culture newsletter a couple of weeks ago. That newsletter is a good mix of short reviews about the literature, music, and art, as well as one longer piece each week. You can sign up here. This is a time of Waugh.

Long-time readers will know there is one rule on this blog. No lengthy plot summaries. If you want to know what happens, read the book. There are two reasons for this. First, it ruins things for me to give you my hasty summary when you could instead read the author’s own work. Second, and more important, it’s philistinism run amuck. What sort of literary culture can we expect to have when our reviewers do little more than we can expect from Wikipedia? And not as well.

Everywhere I go, I tell people I am writing a book about late bloomers. And I get three responses. Some people ask how old you have to be to be a late bloomer. The short answer is that there is no age. It’s about flourishing after you are expected to. Martina Navratilova was late for high-end tennis in her twenties. Bill Traylor didn’t start drawing until his eighties.

I am going to add my thoughts to this question at Nabeel’s suggestion, for which many thanks. Here is the MarginalRevolution post that served as his inspiration. Several readers are academics and writers, so I am hopeful there will be interesting and useful comments on this piece. Overall, remember that not everyone will read the classics and that’s fine.

I am offering a subscription discount for students—20% off. Subscribers get to join the Common Reader Book Club. As well as monthly meetings, you get my notes and ideas on the book we discuss, like this post on David Copperfield. Subscribers also get occasional additional posts, like this one on Hazlitt and this one on Mill.

An extra post this week because the novelist Martin Amis has died. We don’t often give hard reviews on The Common Reader but Amis was an unavoidable part of twentieth century literature and as Samuel Johnson said, If we owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth. You’ll find plenty of lionising elsewhere.

Derek Parfit is the most important philosopher you’ve never heard of. Well, you may have heard of him, but he has almost no reputation outside of academic philosophy, despite the fact that so many modern moral concerns—long-termism, altruism, existential risk, our moral obligation to people in other times and places—are essentially Parfitian. At meetings of the WHO or the World Bank, discussion is influenced by his thought experiments.

The rusted old water tower that glowed bronze in the sunset is the image I shall remember of Milwaukee. On the highway that curves above the river—a road on the sort of angle you usually associate with video games—you get the best view of the city, the clock that is larger than Big Ben, and the buildings of the financial district. Mostly driving through the town is a drab experience. The roads are so bad I finally understand the jokes in the Simpsons about potholes like craters.

My first sighting of a New York cockroach, dying on its back in the hallway of the midtown walkup where I am staying, came on the same day that I met a Russian-speaking parrot. The city is uglier than I remember—Frank Lloyd Wright once said there was no architecture in New York, an affectation perhaps, but nothing here is truly old, and so much feels replica. New York’s style is composite.