. A blogumn by Howard Leder To continue where I left off with my last post and my dread over losing touch with the written word: with my usual manic fervor, I launched myself on an ambitious new reading program. Now don’t laugh: I’m reading the Great Books.  Literally, the Great Books.  The Great Books of the Western World were a series put together by American philosopher & pedagogue Mortimer Adler in the mid-1940’s, an encyclopedic survey of the bedrock of Western thought from Homer to Freud that was published by the Encyclopedia Britannica. I first learned about the Great Books when I was a senior in high school from watching a documentary about Adler on PBS. In the documentary Adler & a group of students were discussing some idea or other (Justice?  Liberty?  Freedom?) in the most brilliant way imaginable, like a modern day Socrates & his disciples in that market at Athens.  For me, it was a seductive image. Now, this was back in the late 80’s, and the idea of the Great Books was very much under attack, particularly at my college Oberlin.  The notion of “Great Books” was seen as little more than a trophy case for dead white guy writers.  But still they kept luring me back, always with a certain guilt & fascination.  “I am!  I am reading Toni Morrison,” I would say by day, while secretly longing for Herodotus at night. (And while Morrison has not cracked the Great Books glass ceiling in the most recent edition, they did add Virginia Woolf & Willa Cather…) Mostly, it was the idea of The Set, the set itself of the Great Books that always exerted this strange pull on me.  On one level, it’s just a list or syllabus. ...