Classics for Pleasure

by By Michael Dirda

Harcourt. 352p $25

Any avid reader enjoys perusing the bookshelves of a well-read friend. You pick up a book, say, Oh, Id love to read this sometime, and your friend, standing beside you, picks others off the shelf, and explains why you must also read these, the authors lesser-known works. You spy a book you have read and say, Oh, I love this one! Your friend agrees, and deftly opens to a favorite passage which he reads with delight, and follows with a memorable anecdote about its author. Such is the experience of reading This article appears in February 18 2008.

Paul J. Contino is a distinguished professor of great books at Pepperdine University and is the author of Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism: Finding Christ Among the Karamazovs (Cascade, 2021).