By the time we discover him gallivanting across the countryside, the world of knight errantry had been long dead. So where does this unhinged but earnest codger get the idea to don armor (such as he has) and mount his trusty steed (such as it is) and embrace a life of saddle-weary chivalry prone to endless abuse and reversals?

He reads it all in books! Gobs of them. Don Quixote, a hidalgo, or member of the lower gentry, acquires all the chivalric tales he can find, selling off acres of farmland to buy more volumes, which he reads nonstop—until, says the narrator,

the lack of sleep and the excess of reading withered his brain, and he went mad. Everything he read in his books took possession of his imagination: enchantments, fights, battles, challenges, wounds, sweet nothings, love affairs, storms, and impossible absurdities.1

Don Quixote takes these tales of courageous knights rescuing damsels, avenging wrongs, slaying giants (“with just one back-stroke” splitting “two fierce and enormous giants clean down the middle”) as genuine events, actual histories, and argues with the village priest about which knights in all these tales were the bravest and truest, compared to all others.

“And so, by now quite insane,” says the narrator, “he conceived the strangest notion that ever took shape in a madman’s head, considering it desirable and necessary, both for the increase of honour and for the common good, to become a knight errant.”

The paradox? Reading can drive you crazy and drive you to do crazy things (there’s a reason we have the word quixotic—about which more in the bonus below). And Cervantes warns us of the danger by giving us . . . another book.

Birth of a Novel

Cervantes was a soldier and bureaucrat with a talent for writing—but not very much if early fame is an indicator. He’d written some plays and novellas. His first drama, possibly his play El trato de Argel (Life in Algiers), came around 1581 or 1582, though the specifics are hard to nail down. He wrote it immediately after his own five-year imprisonment by Barbary pirates in Algiers and subsequent ransom. The best that can be said for it, according to Cervantes himself, was that it wasn’t booed or hissed off the stage.

Despite marginal success, Cervantes kept on writing while angling for other opportunities, ultimately landing a position in 1587 as a royal commissioner of provisions for the Spanish Armada. The role entailed purchasing—or seizing—goods to supply the navy. He kept lousy accounts and, accompanied by complaints about his activities, found himself imprisoned for unauthorized sale of wheat in 1592. Following his release, he became a tax collector, which led to (thanks to more shoddy bookkeeping) three months’ imprisonment in 1597.

Instead of getting used to his bars, however, Cervantes—possibly while still confined—cooked up something big. In the prologue, he refers to his book as “a child born . . . in prison, where every discomfort has its seat and every dismal sound its habitation.” With debts to settle and a literary axe to grind, he started writing, motivated in part by lampooning “books of chivalry, despised by so many and praised by many more . . .”

From the outset Cervantes conceived his novel as a book about books, offering a narrative that plays with other forms of narrative from within the narrative itself. The chivalric books he targets, for instance, often claimed to be true accounts, and Don Quixote takes them as such. So Cervantes spoofs the whole enterprise by claiming the same for his story, claiming to have found the true account of the knight Don Quixote. But the humor arrives immediately since there’s no agreement in the supposed histories about Quixote’s name. But the narrator plows ahead, promising not to “stray one inch from the truth.”

What’s more, as the story progresses the narrator’s principal source runs dry right in the middle of a fight. It takes him some time to find the rest of the story, written by an Arab historian. He has the book translated but then immediately tells us it’s untrustworthy. And yet that’s the story we get.

Tilting at Bookcases

With all the literary pomp and style usually attached to the valiant, the narrator gives us the exploits of this lowly, lunatic hidalgo, decked in fake armor, saddled atop his broken-down nag Rocinante, and trailed by the enabling Sancho, who can’t think his way out of a paper bag but who loves his master wholeheartedly and sticks with him on the promise of receiving the governorship of an island once Don Quixote has won his fame through deeds of virtue and valor—something that proves more than a little difficult because the hero has lost all grip on reality, beginning with his transformation of a local peasant woman into his lady-love and muse Dulcinea del Toboso without a hint of her awareness.

On his first foray, sans Sancho, Don Quixote mistakes an inn for a castle and convinces the innkeeper to knight him, to the amusement of all the guests. Emboldened by his commission, he then rides out to right grievous wrongs beginning by intervening as a farmer is beating his servant. His meddling causes the boy worse harm after his savior departs for further adventures, ending when Don Quixote gets beaten half to death while trying to defend Dulcinea’s impugned but imaginary honor, which he jeopardized in the first place.

When he returns home to recover, his friends and his local priest try to rescue him from his madness by burning the books that seeded his delusions. Once they begin sorting the library, however, the purge dissolves into a comic picture of literary criticism: this book is important, another one beautifully written, still another worth saving for a special virtue (“its author is a friend of mine”).

The chapter works as Cervantes’s soft poke at the idea that the books themselves are Don Quixote’s problem or that censorship can serve its purported purposes; the men who entered the library to destroy the books can’t stop arguing about their merits. How could you possibly judge? Don Quixote’s problem is that he can’t read fiction as fiction, a problem Cervantes mocks by presenting an impossible fiction as literal history.

Don Quixote’s friends resolve the issue by—a pattern for nearly every character in the story—making things worse: The housekeeper burns the condemned books, and they plaster over the library door, telling Don Quixote an enchanter has spirited it all away. Cue sad trombone. The scheme flops; for the rest of the book the lunatic believes an unseen enchanter is foiling his plans. Hardly dissuaded, he rides forth yet again, this time with Sancho in tow to serve his ever-mounting needs (and play comic foil).

Now for the Windmills

On the second foray, Don Quixote commences the most famous of all the episodes, jousting with windmills, which he takes in his delusion to be giants. “You can see over there, good friend Sancho Panza, a place where stand thirty or more monstrous giants with whom I intend to fight a battle and whose lives I intend to take; and with their booty we shall begin to prosper.”

Sancho tries to correct him, which Don Quixote rebuffs. “It is perfectly clear,” he says, “that you are but a raw novice in this matter of adventure . . .” Then off he flies on Rocinante and straight into one of the whirling arms of the nearest mill, which dashes him to the ground. When he gets up and realizes his foes are indeed windmills, he chalks it up to the enchanter who “turned these giants into windmills, to deprive me of the glory of my victory . . .” And so it goes, with, for instance, a flock of sheep he takes for an army, a chain gang of felons he takes for the oppressed, and a barber’s basin he takes for the enchanted helmet of Mambrino.

In these mixups, Don Quixote gets mixed up with a pair of unlucky lovers whose crises he inadvertently helps resolve while his friends try bamboozling him into returning home. They finally succeed in binding him hand and foot and tossing him in a cage on an oxcart. On his way home in that sorry state, he’s introduced to a goatherd by one of the friends, who calls him “the famous Don Quixote de la Mancha, the redresser of injuries, the righter of wrongs, the protector of damsels, the terror of giants and the victor in battles.”

“That sounds to me,” says the goatherd, “like what you read in books about knights errant, who used to do all those things you said this man does, but it’s my opinion that either you’re joking or some of the rooms in this character’s upper storey are empty.” Indeed. Wink, wink. Chuckle, chuckle. But the story’s not over.

The Phony Quixote!

Don Quixote went to press in late 1604 and was published in early 1605. The response was instantaneous. Readers loved the comic nature of the story, and Cervantes and his printer produced a second edition within months. Meanwhile, pirated editions took advantage of demand while Cervantes struggled to extend his publication privileges, which were regionally controlled by authorities vainly hoping to control the print market.

Within a decade the book was translated into both English (1612) and French (1614), and Cervantes’s fame spread across the ocean. Copies were shipped to the Spanish Americas—400 copies in the publication year alone. Soon, anticipating the cosplayers of Comic-Con, people were dressing as Don Quixote and Sancho in festivals in Spain and the New World as well (Peru in 1607 and Salamanca in 1610).

Meanwhile, Cervantes busied himself with other projects, though they went unpublished for several years and finally came in a rush: Exemplary Novels (1613), Journey to Parnassus (1614), Eight Comedies and Eight Interludes (1615), and Persiles and Sigismunda, published posthumously (1617). Most important was Part Two of Don Quixote; that came in 1615.

Another writer forced his hand. In 1614, the pseudonymous Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda published Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. So we’ve got cosplayers and fan fiction here in the early seventeenth century, and we’ve also got metafiction, which Cervantes embraces in Part One and aggressively exploits in Part Two.

Cervantes was already working on his own sequel when the counterfeit emerged. He now felt not only compelled to finish his own version to set the story right, but also denounce his competition in print and have fun doing so. He published his Part Two in 1615; what we now think of as Don Quixote is both books together, all thousand or so pages.

In Part Two, Don Quixote discovers that his earlier escapades have been published (Part One); the bookworm has become a book! What’s more, he finds many of the people he meets in his journeys have read it. They know his habits, play to his delusions, and begin using what they’ve read on the page to manipulate the man in front of them. Having read the book, for instance, a bored Duke and Duchess are well equipped to bend Don Quixote and Sancho to their amusement for days.

In Part One, Don Quixote tries to bend the world to the books he’s read; now a book tries telling the world who he is and what he’ll do. Finally, Don Quixote revolts. In one episode the narrator places Don Quixote and Sancho in an inn where someone asks a friend to read aloud from Avellaneda’s knockoff version of Part Two in which the imposter says Don Quixote has abandoned his love for Dulcinea.

When Don Quixote hears this, he explodes with indignation and sets the men right. After a conversation they ask where he intends to go next. “Saragossa to take part in the jousts for the suit of armor that are held in that city each year.” No surprise, really; that’s exactly what the phony book said he’d do! So Don Quixote changes his plans. “Well, for that very reason,” Don Quixote says, “I shall not set foot in Saragossa, and thus I shall announce that novice historian’s lie to the whole world. People will be made aware that I am not the Don Quixote about whom he writes.”

The Book Folds on Top of Itself

Pushing the metafictional angle even further, the narrator brings Don Quixote to a print shop where the fraudulent book is being printed. He declares it fit for fire and stalks out. By the end, the book has folded on top of itself.

The chivalric romances at which Cervantes rolls his eyes claimed to be history, and Don Quixote believed every word. But Cervantes borrows the devices they use to pass as history and makes each one fail: the sources disagree, his primary witness runs out in mid-fight, the new source is suspect, and a rival version turns up in print.

In Don Quixote’s world there’s no gap between “it’s written” and “it’s true”; it’s like the worst version of that one person in your family and all the Youtube videos and Facebook posts they send you. (See, we’ve been dealing with that a long time too.) But Cervantes’s narrator keeps prying open the gap, which lets us do what Don Quixote can’t: enjoy the story while judging what it asks us to believe.

Even when Don Quixote confronts a version of his own life he rejects, he calls its author a liar—that is, a bad historian. Then he changes his itinerary when he should have changed his epistemology. The only thing that finally breaks the spell for him is utter defeat.

Books are a powerful technology. We’ve known that at least since people began trying to control readers by burning what they read. Books can furnish the categories by which we interpret everything we encounter: our friends, enemies, obligations, hopes, disappointments, even ourselves. Contrary evidence needn’t break the spell. Once a book teaches you how to explain away the evidence against it, there’s no getting out. Just talk to a conspiracist; there might be a powerful enchanter on the loose.

The cure isn’t censorship and bonfires. Don Quixote’s friends burn his offending books and only strengthen his delusion. Cervantes exemplifies a better remedy: He writes a book capacious enough to expose the faulty books’ absurdities, absorb their virtues, and then eclipse them. He answers bad literature with better literature and bad reading by making the novel’s central claim—”this really happened”—fall apart in our hands while leaving the adventure whole, in one glimmering piece.

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Bonus: The Global Reach of Quixotic

If you want to say something is idealistic but a little (or a lot) unhinged and likely to end in failure, there’s a word for it: quixotic. The etymology, naturally, runs back to our hero, but the word traveled much further afield than our daffy knight errant ever managed in Spain. The word, like the novel, went global. Here’s an etymological world tour for paid subscribers.

Before You Go👇

Italian novelist and polymath Umberto Eco died in 2016 at the age of 84. He owned a library in Milan that housed 30,000 books and another outside Urbino with 20,000 more. How many could he have read? Eco gave a roundabout answer while discussing Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

“Even if we read a book a day,” Eco said, “we would read only 365 a year, around 3,600 in ten years, and between the ages of ten and eighty we’ll have read only 25,200. A trifle.” By way of comparison, he said, “Good libraries hold several millions of books. . . .”

But most of us will never come close to reaching Eco’s trifle either. Finishing a book a day is doable. An average adult can read roughly 250 words per minute. That’s about one page every minute or so, depending on the book. At that rate, you can put away a 300-page book in five hours, give or take some trips to the coffeepot and bathroom.

But doable and done are very different. For most of us five hours a day is more time and mental energy than we can dedicate. I only manage that much in a straight sprint once every few months—and I read a lot.

For most of us, reading is a marginal activity; that is, we squeeze it into the margins of our lives: between this and that, after work, before bed, waiting in line. Unless a free afternoon presents itself, we can’t afford to dedicate that kind of time.

Remainder Bin

The library may never run out of pages, but the calendar will. Given the constraints, how many books might we read? Let’s rightsize Eco’s thought experiment and extend it a bit to discover how many books you might still read before you the Grim Reaper breaks your reading glasses.

Let’s assume you beat Eco by a year and live to 85. The key considerations are your current age and the pace of your reading. American adults average something like a dozen books a year. That figure includes people who haven’t read more than street signs since high school; the typical American reads just four books a year. Serious readers would cover far more ground.

Then let’s say you’re 40 right now and read two books a month, plus one extra, for a total of 25 books a year; you can expect to read a little more than eleven hundred additional books. If you’re 25, you’ve got fifteen hundred books to look forward to. The numbers go down as your age increases and up as your pace does.

Whatever your particular age and pace, you can visualize the dwindling stacks you’ve got left with the adjoining graph. A middle aged power reader could reasonably hit another 4,000 titles on top of whatever they’ve already consumed. Of course, if you read while walking and wander into traffic, you’ll manage fewer.

Discouraging. But maybe we’re thinking about this all wrong.

Difficult Choices

An eye toward the dwindling stacks might assist us in making better literary choices. “You should pick them wisely,” concluded economist Russ Roberts after rehearsing similar numbers. And awareness of the ebbing piles might lend another advantage, as well, per Roberts: a reasonable justification for quitting bad books. As you know, I fully endorse that move. Sticking with a snoozer is the literary equivalent of the sunk-cost fallacy.

But such awareness might also lead to disadvantages. If you only had so many books left, would you ever reread? Roberts is iffy on the question. But I can’t imagine not rereading books I love. Neither could C.S. Lewis.

“I can’t imagine a man enjoying a book and reading it only once,” Lewis wrote in a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves in 1932, declaring much the same a year later: “One must read every good book at least once every ten years” (emphasis added). He overstated the case but hit upon something worth acknowledging. A reread book has value all its own.

Some books deserve going slow, reading and rereading. Some books are worth little when read young and much when read later. It’s the same book, but we’re different readers. “The words in a book you love will not change from year to year,” says writer Joseph Luzzi, “but your interpretations of them will. . . .” Booker-nominated novelist Karen Joy Fowler regularly revisits Jane Austen and is “always surprised by how often I see something new.”

And then there are books we never quite finish reading but visit often, like our favorite coffeeshop or restaurant. I’ve never found the bottom of Montaigne’s Essays. Why would I want to?

Infinity and Beyond

Maybe speed and tallies just don’t matter all that much. “When I was sixteen I read ten books a week,” recalled U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall in his essay collection, A Carnival of Losses. “I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster—but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down.”

Hall died just months before turning 90, beating our illustrative actuarial experiment by five years, but confessed he hadn’t finished a book in a year.

When Death revokes our library card, it’s good to remember that books are among the few things we take with us when we die because, unlike other possessions, they live in our minds and shape our selves. We carry whole libraries within us—plus room for more.

And if Jorge Luis Borges is right and Paradise is a library, then Frank Zappa was wrong anyway. We might have all the time in the world.

Question for you: How many books do you read in a year?

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Bonus: Books Before I Die

There are a handful of books I want to read before I die; well, maybe more than a handful. Some of my bucket-list books I’ve either finished this year (The Brothers Karamazov, Don Quixote) or am currently working on (War and Peace). But what else? Here’s my list for paid subscribers.

A guest post from the incomparable about reading Middlemarch with her sons, plus an extra treat from me for paid subscribers on Eliot’s writing process. MBR readers ranked Middlemarch No. 3 in the greatest novels of all time.

This summer will forever be remembered as “The One Where My Teen Sons and I Read Middlemarch.” It is our fifth summer tackling epic and somewhat daunting novels in our “Mother-Son Book Club.”

It started with a desire to supplement their education and share my love for reading. After four summers of undertaking classics, such as Great Expectations, Brothers Karamazov, Moby Dick, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, these teens know you don’t need to understand everything on a first reading.

This is why they are classics; you will revisit them again and again throughout your lifetime, bringing your own maturity and experience to the text. They have already noticed this with two books they like to reread: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and East of Eden. Both make more sense to them as they understand more of the world around them.

The Only Rule

The only rule in choosing our novel is that it must be a book I have not read. This way, I am not the teacher, but a peer in this book club. So, I was very surprised when I gave these boys, ages 15 and 17, a list of suggested novels and they chose Middlemarch.

Honestly, I didn’t know much about Middlemarch going in. I had just read my first George Eliot novel, Silas Marner, last December. I had fallen in love with its redemptive themes. I found my lack of Eliot to be a huge gaping hole in my Victorian literature education and wanted to press in.

In past summers we have met weekly, but this summer, these boys’ lives are changing. There were internships, summer jobs, camps where they were the counselors, not the attendees. Life is changing for all of us. So, this summer we only met once a month.

Middlemarch is an ambitious novel, telling the story of a community which lives and loves are intertwined amongst social classes of the town Middlemarch. That first meeting was hard. No one could keep up on the characters and how they were related.

But one character stood out, Fred Vincy.

Fred Is a Chud

I wasn’t surprised. Fred is closer in age to these boys. He’s the eldest son of the mayor. He had promising options ahead of him but returned home after failing his university exam. Fred gambles on horses with the money he does have, taking his chances that he will inherit his uncle’s large estate.

My sons said Fred was a Chud. In Gen Z parlance this means a loser.

They had strong opinions about what an idiot he was, especially as Fred is in love with his childhood playmate Mary. Mary is of a lower class. She works in Fred’s uncles’s house. They considered Mary the only interesting character. They thought she was sensible and jolly, a hard worker and she didn’t play games. She was someone you could depend on.

Most of the conversation for the rest of our meetings centered on the romantic pairings in the novel. Who was a good match? Who wasn’t? Which couple communicated well? Which knew each other well? Which didn’t?

As a mother hoping her sons will one day marry, and marry well, I relished in these observations and hoped they will affect my sons own future real-world experiences.

Mixed Emotions

These young men had no empathy for Dorothea, the main character and heroine of the novel. When Dorothea, who is in her late teens, marries a much older clergyman, my son who just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead said, “Doesn’t she know he won’t be able to father their kids!? He’ll be so old!”

Again, they returned to Fred and Mary. Mary consistently rebuffs Fred’s romantic gestures, telling him that he needs to do something worthy of her. When Fred discovers the town clergyman is also interested in Mary and more deserving her hand, he is inspired to make himself a better man.

My sons loved this. They thought Fred and Mary were the best relationship: they knew each other well. Mary knew Fred so well, she knew not to reveal her love to him. She pushed him to be a better man and even after he worked hard to be worthy of her, they waited until they were more established to wed.

“Fred is the only character that truly grows in the novel,” they said.

Even with faith of their own, they found Dorothea’s selflessness to be tiresome. “It’s like she has a savior complex.” This was difficult for me as I tried to argue how she grows in her faith and selflessness and effects the entire town with her efforts. They weren’t having it.

“Is her marriage really that bad? She got to go to Europe on her honeymoon for months and learned another language and still wasn’t happy.” I felt I just needed to let this one go.

The Growing Good of the World

Maybe, one day, they will reread Middlemarch with more mature eyes. They will understand why their mother cried when she read the infamous quote at the end of the book:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Maybe, one day, after they find their “Mary” they will understand that even a little thing like making your sons read classic novels in the summer with their mother improved their life tremendously.

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Extra: Writing Middlemarch

When George Eliot began writing what became Middlemarch in July 1869, its heroine, Dorothea Brooke, was nowhere in sight. For paid subscribers, here’s a note from me, JJM, on how Eliot came to write the novel MBR readers ranked No. 3 of the greatest novels of all time, and how Dorothea found her place.

Social media or a hastily snatched magazine are unworthy of such occasions. We require greater intentionality. As we all know, short and (ahem) digestible texts are usually best. Given that, some books are preferable to others in redeeming the time.

“Look for a boozy poet of the dark archway who,” says Roman poet Martial, “writes verses with rough charcoal or crumbling chalk which folks read when they s---” (Epigrams 12.61). Other translators try softening it—for instance, “poems which people read as they ease themselves.” But who are we kidding? The operative word here is cacantes. The other euphemism here is “dark archway” or “dark den.” Martial says nigri fornicis, which comes out more like “dingy brothel.”

Martial’s meaning is clear: There’s a kind of literature meant to be read in the bathroom, and it’s naturally bad, written by bad people. But, my dear Martial, au contraire! The possibilities for great bathroom reading transcend the sewer into which all things tend. And with that dizzyingly hopeful thought in mind, here’s a handful of eminently suitable suggestions.

Montaigne’s Essays

Montaigne lived in the sixteenth century, but he could be your nextdoor neighbor—that is, if your next-door neighbor were wiser, funnier, better-read, and more self-deprecating. There is no human emotion Montaigne fails to touch or treat in his Essays, and he writes about almost every subject imaginable, including the one under consideration. “Both kings and philosophers defecate,” he says, “and ladies too.”

Within the span of a few dozen pages, he covers everything from war horses to ancient customs, prayer, aging, and (appropriately) smells. He addresses parental affection, will power, thumbs, changing your mind, names, sleep, sumptuary laws, cannibals, inconsistency, fear, sadness, solitude, friendship, even how we laugh and cry at the same things.

Montaigne tries warning off potential readers in the preface, saying it would be “unreasonable to spend your leisure” on the book. But it’s one of the few things about which he was entirely wrong. For his vast scope and deep insight, it’s both safe and fitting to say that Montaigne is one of the most fully human writers to ever take up the pen. And his wide reach means you’ll never be bored. No bathroom is complete without a copy of the Essays.

C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters

Even without the suggestive, squatting posture of the gargoyle on the cover of this particular edition, contemplating the advice of senior demon Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood while in the confines of the small room is eminently sensible.

Screwtape is one of those books that rewards many readings and can be picked up at any place and satisfy just about any mood. Lewis is sly, funny, perceptive, and on-point throughout. The discussions about the physicality of prayer or the dips and highs of living are, for instance, revelatory at the first reading and great reminders ever thereafter.

And our affectionate Uncle Screwtape keeps us humble in ways that are only underscored by this sort of reading environment. “Humans are,” he says,

amphibians—half spirit and half animal . . . As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

Every trip to the loo reminds us of the same.

The Hebrew Psalms

If this one scandalizes you, you’re in great company. I once heard Fr. Tom Hopko mention a story about a monk who recited the psalter while on the toilet. His brothers, overhearing him, were horrified and dragged the offender before the abbot. To their chagrin, however, the elder vindicated the monk’s practice and his recitations continued.

It seems that qualms about prayer and the privy are the currency of the devil. Martin Luther tells the story of a monk who said his morning prayers while in the latrine. The devil appeared and scolded him. “What climbs up is for God,” answered the monk, “and what falls down is for you.” Bernard of Clairvaux had a similar exchange when the devil needled him about reciting psalms while relieving himself. “That which comes out of my mouth, I offer to God,” said the saint, “but that which I eject out of my belly, eat it!”

In these three cases, the prayerful have their material memorized. I’ve learned snippets and snatches of the psalms but require text for anything more. Thankfully, there are many wonderful psalters out there. Pictured above is the Holy Psalter from Saint Ignatius Orthodox Press. I also like pocket psalter from Holy Transfiguration Monastery (in faux Elizabethan lines), the New Coverdale Psalter from Anglican Liturgy Press and the little leather-bound ESV psalter from Crossway.

Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary

Here’s another way to give the devil his due. Possibly the original spoof dictionary, Bierce started what became The Devil’s Dictionary in 1881 with definitions filed in a weekly paper. By 1911 it was a full-blown and riotous tome, made all the better by the posthumously published Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary in 1967 (my favorite edition).

I came across it when visiting a friend of one of my aunt’s. Upon my mentioning H.L. Mencken and P.J. O’Rourke, authors I loved, he retrieved a copy of Bierce and said in so many words, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

There’s something amusing on every page. Here’s Bierce’s definition of cabbage: “A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head.” And belladonna: “In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.”

John Gross’s Oxford Book of Essays

Besides being edited by a man with the right surname for the job, The Oxford Book of Essays rewards even the most casual of thumbings. With over a hundred essays by over a hundred authors, it’s hard to leave disappointed.

Gross’s wide-ranging collection features everyone from Francis Bacon to H.L. Mencken, Jonathan Swift, G.K. Chesterton, William Hazlitt, Mark Twain, John Henry Newman, and George Santayana. Perhaps best of all, you can find Ambrose Bierce’s hilarious and social-media-timely essay, “Disintroductions.”

Humor me:

The devil is a citizen of every country, but only in our own are we in constant peril of an introduction to him. That is democracy. All men are equal; the devil is a man; therefore, the devil is equal. If that is not a good and sufficient syllogism I should be pleased to know what is the matter with it.

To write in riddles when one is not prophesying is too much trouble; what I am affirming is the horror of the characteristic American custom of promiscuous, unsought and unauthorized introductions.

You incautiously meet your friend Smith in the street; if you had been prudent you would have remained indoors. Your helplessness makes you desperate and you plunge into conversation with him, knowing entirely well the disaster that is in cold storage for you.

The expected occurs: another man comes along and is promptly halted by Smith and you are introduced! Now, you have not given to the Smith the right to enlarge your circle of acquaintance and select the addition himself; why did he do this thing? The person whom he has condemned you to shake hands with may be an admirable person, though there is a strong numerical presumption against it; but for all that the Smith knows he may be your bitterest enemy. The Smith has never thought of that. Or you may have evidence (independent of the fact of the introduction) that he is some kind of thief—there are one thousand and fifty kinds of thieves. But the Smith has never thought of that. In short, the Smith has never thought. In a Smithocracy all men, as aforesaid, being equal, all are equally agreeable to one another.

That is a logical extension of the Declaration of American Independence. If it is erroneous the assumption that a man will be pleasing to me because he is pleasing to another is erroneous too, and to introduce me to one that I have not asked nor consented to know is an invasion of my rights—a denial and limitation of my liberty to a voice in my own affairs. It is like determining what kind of clothing I shall wear, what books I shall read, or what my dinner shall be. . . . It is to be wished that some great social force, say a billionaire, would set up a system of disintroductions.

Can we get Elon on that next?

Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley on Ivrything and Ivrybody

As you might guess from the language in the title, Mr. Dooley doesn’t speak the King’s English. Or the Queen’s English. Or anybody’s but his own. Dunne wrote the Mr. Dooley books a little more than a hundred years ago to feature the ramblings of an Irish—what else?—bartender named—what else?—Mr. Dooley. He’s also known as the philosopher; think Montaigne but with Bushmills.

Mr. Dooley holds forth on the news of his day (some of it is very dated, though still amusing) and subjects of timeless curiosity. A smattering of topics include books, anarchists, family reunions, keeping lent, history, swearing, vice, gratitude, and political reform movements—for example,

A man that’d expict to thrain lobsters to fly in a year is called a loonytic; but a man that thinks men can be tur-rned into angels be an iliction is called a rayformer an’ remains at large.

Honorable Mentions

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Of my three kids still in school, I’ve got a senior, a sophomore, and a second-grader. They’re all embarking on noteworthy years. It’s my senior’s last in secondary education, and my second-grader is starting at a new school. My sophomore? I’m homeschooling him, first time I’ve ever tried such a thing. Say a prayer for us both.

I often think about the artificiality of education. Speaking is natural. Most of us are doing it by two or three, even if we can’t yet take profitable command of the complexities of expression. But for words on the page there’s nothing inherent in the human mental kit that manifests the ability to automatically decipher letters or understand their corresponding sounds—let alone how to manipulate the subtler matter of grammar and syntax in writing.

Sts. Augustine and Jerome

In his Confessions, St. Augustine described how he learned how to speak. “I would listen to the words,” he said, “and immediately I would work out from their positions in different sentences what they meant; and, as soon as I had learnt to get my tongue around them, I began to string them together in sentences of my own, in order to convey my own desires” (1.8.13, translated by Philip Burton).

Easy peasy. But words on a page were different, more difficult:

As for the reason why I hated the Greek literature in which I was steeped as a boy—for that I have still found no satisfactory explanation. I had fallen in love with Latin literature—not, that is, with the texts taught by my earliest teachers, but the literature taught by the so-called “grammarians.” My primers of reading, writing and arithmetic I found more of a burden and a punishment than the whole of Greek literature put together. . . . But it was through those books that I gradually acquired the ability to read any piece of writing that I came across, and to write myself anything that I wished to write; which ability, once gained, I still possess. (1.13.20)

Looking back on his experience, Augustine criticized the curriculum and the methods. “Education is a big business,” he said, and if students resisted their teachers, “out came the cane” (1.16.26). Yikes!

St. Jerome’s regimen sounds a bit more gentle and solicitous. Responding to a woman named Laeta asking him for advice on educating her daughter Paula, Jerome suggested the following:

Have a set of letters made for her, of boxwood or of ivory, and tell her their names. Let her play with them, making play a road to learning, and let her not only grasp the right order of the letters and remember their names in a simple song, but also frequently upset their order and mix the last letters with the middle ones, the middle with the first. Thus she will know them all by sight as well as by sound.

When she begins with uncertain hand to use the pen, either let another hand be put over hers to guide her baby fingers, or else have the letters marked on the tablet so that her writing may follow their outlines and keep to their limits without straying away.

Offer her prizes for spelling, tempting her with such trifling gifts as please young children. Let her have companions too in her lessons, so that she may seek to rival them and be stimulated by any praise they win. You must not scold her if she is somewhat slow; praise is the best sharpener of wits. Let her be glad when she is first and sorry when she falls behind.

Above all take care not to make her lessons distasteful; a childish dislike often lasts longer than childhood. (Letter 107, translated by F.A. Wright)

I think I know where Maria Montessori got some of her ideas. How many kids are put off education or don’t consider themselves learners because of lousy experiences in school? Jerome’s advice to Laeta was to stay focused on the long game; learning doesn’t do us much good if we come to hate it when school’s out.

Montaigne’s Education

Montaigne’s father would have resonated with Jerome’s advice. His approach with his son was both gentle and eccentric. “Among other things,” Montaigne recalled in his Essays, “he had been advised to teach me to enjoy knowledge and duty by my own free will and desire, and to educate my mind in all gentleness and freedom, without rigor and constraint“ (1.26, “On the Education of Children,” translated by Donald M. Frame).

And yet Montaigne’s father would go to extremes to engineer the right educational environment of his son—including hiring a German tutor who knew none of the family’s native French and forbidding use of anything but Latin in the home so Montaigne would learn it as his primary language.

My late father, having made all the inquiries a man can make, among men of learning and understanding, about a superlative system of education, became aware of the drawbacks that were prevalent; and he was told that the long time we put into learning languages which cost the ancient Greeks and Romans nothing was the only reason we could not attain their greatness in soul and in knowledge. I do not think that that is the only reason. At all events, the expedient my father hit upon was this, that while I was nursing and before the first loosening of my tongue, he put me in the care of a German . . . wholly ignorant of our language and very well versed in Latin. This man, whom he had sent for expressly, and who was very highly paid, had me constantly in his hands. There were also two others with him, less learned, to attend me and relieve him. These spoke to me in no other language than Latin. As for the rest of my father’s household, it was an inviolable rule that neither my father himself, nor my mother, nor any valet or housemaid, should speak anything in my presence but such Latin words as each had learned in order to jabber with me.

This immersive approach paid off later when it came to reading. “The first taste I had for books,” he said, “came to me from my pleasure in the fables of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. For at about seven or eight years of age I would steal away from any other pleasure to read them, inasmuch as this language was my mother tongue, and it was the easiest book I knew and the best suited by its content to my tender age.”

Montaigne wanted nothing to do with whatever vernacular adventures kids his age were reading, “rubbish on which children waste their time.”

Montaigne’s tutor put his passion for reading to good use. He let his pupil follow his whims, nudging and directing, rather than dictating a strict course of study.

For by this means I went right through Virgil’s Aeneid, and then Terence, and then Plautus, and some Italian comedies, always lured on by the pleasantness of the subject. If he had been foolish enough to break this habit, I think I should have got nothing out of school but a hatred of books, as do nearly all our noblemen. He went about it cleverly. Pretending to see nothing, he whetted my appetite, letting me gorge myself with these books only in secret, and gently keeping me at my work on the regular studies.

What do I take from all this? Education is challenging, and regimented learning is not always the right course. I know the arguments for it, but how many students are simply turned off from learning because the subjects bore them to distraction or grind them to discouragement?

Augustine mastered Latin but, cane or not, never did learn his Greek (which might have had serious consequences for the development of western theology). There’s something to be said for letting students follow their own whims and interests, learning as they go rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all track from above.

I know that’s been true for my kids, some of whom have had special challenges in school. My new homeschooler, Jonah, is now a pretty serious reader. But he couldn’t read at all until the second grade—couldn’t make sense of it until then.

Working by Whim

My own education, especially by high school, was accidentally similar to Montaigne’s at least insofar as his freedom to read what he chose. I attended a small Christian school that placed no serious emphasis on literature, sadly. But my dad was an English teacher at a local public high school. We had an ample home library, and he placed no real restrictions on what I read.

For school I read, as I’ve mentioned before, Johann Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson—possibly the worst novel ever. I have no fond memories of it. But at home I read everything from David Morrell’s First Blood to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I also read plenty of history, politics, economics, and theology—all subjects my dad cared about and which I loved too, along with Celtic mythology, Thrasher skate magazine, CARtoons, and plenty else Montaigne would surely label “rubbish.” It was. Did it matter?

Naturally, I ended up with an idiosyncratic education with gaping holes. I, for instance, read most of the Tarzan novels but missed The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby (an oversight I remedied only recently). One purpose behind my classic novel goals the past few years has been to patch some of those holes. But that’s just the point, isn’t it?

Along with those holes, I also acquired a thirst for learning and reading. I can fill those holes anytime I choose. But what about the kids who “have got nothing out of school but a hatred of books,” as Montaigne said, slugging their way through required reading and then rarely picking up a book once they’re done? They’ll choose Netflix. After all, back to Jerome, “a childish dislike often lasts longer than childhood.”

Go Ahead, Read Whatever

In her memoir Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston talks about her own idiosyncratic and often interrupted eduction. After being away from school for a while, she returned to find herself several years behind in the curriculum. She had one advantage: She was a serious reader.

“I had hundreds of books under my skin already,” she said. “Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading.”

Free to work by whim, Hurston escaped the downside of Jerome’s concern and Montaigne’s warning. When you follow your interests, you’re never bored or put off. She read whatever she could get her hands on, and the joy of the exercise fueled her persistence. But what about the “trashy” stuff she mentions? Wouldn’t it have been better if she’d only read proper books?

Far from a problem, Hurston considered the rubbish a net good. “I do not regret the trash,” she said. “It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.”

This was what fueled Augustine’s love for Latin literature, Jerome’s advice for making reading playful, and Montaigne’s voracious, somewhat indiscriminate reading. Good taste can be shaped and learned, but there’s little point if reading doesn’t become a habit, a love, in the first place.

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It was a first edition.

“Mailer couldn’t live without books,” said Lennon, his biographer. Indeed, Mailer’s library boasted more than seven thousand volumes. But plenty of those bore signs of violence and disfigurement. “Books cringed when they felt his hand,” said Lennon.

When he needed some pages for a public reading, he often tore them out of the book rather than carry it. . . . His copy of Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s Lee and Marina (1977), dismembered when he went to Dallas with Larry Schiller to interview Marina Oswald, was later patched together with duct tape. Dostoevsky’s The Idiot was similarly reconstructed. One of his favourites for public readings was a six-page description of an embalming from the opening chapter of Ancient Evenings (1983). Norris [Church, one of Mailer’s wives] was furious when he ripped this section from her inscribed copy, and then lost it.

Too late for a trigger warning?

How could someone like Mailer who made his life on words—particularly books—treat them so poorly? “He was not interested in them as objects,” explained Lennon, simply. And it raises an interesting question: What, if anything, do we owe our books in terms of care and respect?

Longstanding Concern

The standard abuses are well known and have been catalogued for ages. “Never allow looks to be near damp . . . for they mildew very soon,” warned Luke Limner in a preachy 1852 listicle. Ah, but neither should you overcorrect! “Never permit,” he added, “books to be very long in a warm, dry place, as they decay in time from that cause.”

Most of the sins Limner enumerated do obvious physical damage to the form of books, their shape and components. Some further examples:

• “Never, in reading, fold down the corners of the leaves, or wet your fingers; but pass the forefinger of the right band from the top of the page to the bottom in turning over.”

• “Never permit foreign substances, as crumbs, snuff, &c., to intrude into the backs of your books; nor make them a receptacle for botanical specimens, cards, or a spectacle case, as it is like to injure them.”

• “Never leave a book face downwards, on pretext of keeping the place; for if it continue long in that position, it will ever after be disposed to open at the same page, whether you desire it or not.”

• ”Never stand a book long on the fore-edge, or the beautiful bevel at the front may sink in.”

• “Never wrench a book open, if the back be stiff, or the edges will resemble steps ever after; but open it gently, a few pages at a time.”

• ”Never pull books out of the shelves by the headbands, nor toast them over the fire, or sit upon them. . . .”

You get the feeling he was having some fun at the end. I’ve never toasted a book over a fire, but I have temporarily stored books on their fore-edge. Limner was right about that: Not only did the bevel at the front sink in on a few larger books, but the spine—ack!—went slightly concave. I was mortified when I removed them from the box.

Still, these faux pas mostly pale in comparison to those mentioned in Richard de Bury’s medieval guide, Philobiblion, where he decried,

some headstrong youth lazily lounging over his studies, and when the winter’s frost is sharp, his nose running from the nipping cold drips down; nor does he think of wiping it with his pocket-handkerchief until he has bedewed the book before him with the ugly moisture. . . . He does not fear to eat fruit or cheese over an open book, or carelessly to carry a cup to and from his mouth; and because he has no wallet at hand he drops into books the fragments that are left.

Snot and cheese? Lord, have mercy.

Whose Standards?

More recently, when Penguin UK asked readers what horrifying things people do to books, most of the answers were predictable: cracking the spine, dog earring the pages, underlining and highlighting, writing in the book, leaving in the sun, and so on.

I hadn’t considered a few of the suggestions, such as reading with sticky fingers (nasty), but some of these supposed crimes are beloved practices for me. No, I never use bacon rashers as bookmarks (something de Bury would also abhor), but I do write in my books all the time. I’ve also stained more than a few with coffee. Can’t seem to help it. One person’s atrocity is another’s attraction.

When Alex Christofi admitted he cut overlong books in half “to make them more portable,” a colleague called him a “book murderer.” Christofi came clean on Twitter with an image of his handiwork—Infinite Jest, Middlesex, and a hulking Dostoevsky biography split right down the middle.

Aghast, the whole angry world piled on. Christofi’s post garnered tens of thousands of retweets, several times as many likes, and plenty of outrage before he eventually deleted it. Maybe he should have known better. Christofi is, after all, a professional editor; he works for a publishing house. What’s more, he’s written several books of his own.

But then again, doesn’t that personal history speak in his defense? It’s not as if Christofi has no love for books. If such affections could be measured, I bet he actually cherishes them more than many of his detractors. Besides, just how wrong is slicing books in two?

Consider Christofi’s job. When I was a professional book editor, I regularly cut books down to size. I once told a writer that we were going to have to prune his 200,000–word manuscript down to 100,000 words. I was in Nashville at a desk; he was in Manhattan on the sidewalk. “I’m going to throw this effing phone across the street,” he said when I gave him the news. In the end he apologized for his language, and I let him keep his words. Mostly, however, I cut when necessary.

When I first started in the editorial business, I asked a senior editor about cutting a paragraph. I was hesitant. Didn’t it violate the Hippocratic oath or something? “You’re the editor,” he said. Of course you should cut it, he was saying, somewhat irked he had to tell me. In his defense, he was on deadline and I was interrupting. Regardless, the lesson stuck.

Nip, tuck, delete. That’s what editors do: We prepare the work of authors for the benefit of readers; it would seem that’s all Christofi did—just after the fact, and with himself as the only reader in view.

So why is Christofi the editor immune from the vitriol dished upon Christofi the reader? Theoretically, authors have a say in how their books are edited (we do use track changes). But not always, and the publisher usually has the contractual right to not only edit the book however they desire, but also prepare it for publication most any way they choose.

And this has implications for how we treat all sorts of literature. Oxford book history prof shared a video of himself slicing—gasp!—his copy of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa down the middle with a bread knife (watch it here, if you dare). The Penguin edition of the eighteenth-century novel is gargantuan—1,534 pages in all. But originally, the book was published serially, and later in multivolume sets. The murder-your-grandmother-with-a-single-volume monstrosity is a modern invention that has nothing to do with Richardson’s original intent. In fact, as Smyth points out, the novel is epistolary; it practically wants to be divvied up into smaller pieces. If you squint at it just right, Smyth’s bibliocidal violence seems corrective, even restorative.

What makes a book more sacred once it’s printed than before it leaves the author’s outbox? And are we retroactively canonizing the decisions of later editors and publishers? Maybe we’re sanctifying the work of the printers and pressmen. Prior to publication, a book is only clay fit for molding; afterward, it’s a sacred object, a relic.

New Holy Book?

It’s at least curious, no? A secular age such as ours mocks the pious and sports with the sacred. We have no holy book—except the elevated form of the $17.99 paperback! Like the Torah it stands untouched. Like the Quran it dares its molesters: “Deface me at your own risk!”

Am I now defending the desecration of books? No, though I am making a gentle plea for less dogmatism about their care. I hate the mishandling of my books. But I also recognize not all the books out there are mine, and their owners have their own standards. Someone else might have different concerns. In fact, based on the variable responses of informal polling such as Penguin UK’s, we know they do.

I, for instance, love a dust jacket. When I see someone tear theirs off a new purchase and deposit it in the trash, I wince inside. If I’m honest, I entertain uncharitable thoughts. But I also recognize benighted barbarians are free to dispose of dust jackets if they choose. I try not to hold it against them, but I also think twice before I loan one of my own—and by think twice I mean I never let the book out of my sight without an RFID tracker, a copy of the borrower’s drivers license, and a blood sample.

I bet we also recognize that damaging a book can sometimes testify to our affection. Think of that ragtag copy of Augustine’s Confessions or Rilke’s Letters, the one that’s been in and out of your backpack for a decade. The deplorable condition of a book sometimes bears the record of our symbiosis with it.

More than once at church I’ve noticed a priest or deacon intoning the liturgy from an old, threadbare service book with the visible glint of packing tape down the spine. It doesn’t make me cringe; it makes me smile. Similarly, I can recall sitting in an outdoor church service in Uganda and seeing a woman with a tattered, coverless Bible missing the opening pages of Genesis and the final pages of Revelation. She probably loved that book more than anything.

Some of this is just how we choose to engage with the book. Above you can see my son Jonah’s copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, read for freshman English. He read it very closely, scribbling and highlighting all along the way; he also, for reasons even he doesn’t recall, folded almost every page in half as he was going. Worked for him. Who am I to judge?

I’m not suggesting we shred, deface, and destroy. And by all means, if you’re a collector, collect. I have significant respect for people that build large libraries of immaculate and well cared for books. But we needn’t be puritanical. Caesar divided Gaul. Christofi divided Middlesex. Who’s the real tyrant?

Mailer’s mangled library reminds us that books are meant to be used more than worshipped, and we should be reticent about imposing our standards on others—or at least demonstrate enough generosity to recognize other standards exist.

That said . . . step away from my dust jackets.

What about you? Cracked spines, water damage, folded pages—let us know what horrifies you most about the treatment of books. Share it in the comments below.

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