Good taste is accumulated through wide knowledge, but that knowledge can only be acquired through one crucial trait - i.e. curiosity. Which is what drove Klein to attempting to investigate classical music, and which is a trait I'd wager many of those who are 'content with mediocrity' (including, sometimes, myself) usually lack.
Even taking the example of Harry Potter - there are those who read it and then feel compelled to seek out information about the works and people cited as J.K. Rowling's influences and favourites, from Jessica Mitford to E. Nesbit to Jane Austen (I had a friend whose interest in Latin American magical realist literature was triggered, indirectly, through the Harry Potter films films - she loved Alfonso Cuaron's one so much that she made her way through his entire filmography and then sought out 'books with the same feel' - she was 19 at the time). I've had friends who read Asterix as small children and then, as adults, proceeded to investigate - even if it was through a mere wikipedia search in some cases - every work of art and literature referenced in the comics (the same friend mentioned above read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar because said Julius frequently turns up in Asterix - she didn't like it, but mentioned to me that she enjoyed it more than she'd thought she would because she pictured Julius in the play the way he was drawn in the comics).
The 'Harry Potter adults' who only read YA fiction, are operating in the opposite direction - they aren't seeking a greater understanding of the forces that created the thing they like, they just want 'something like it'. Something the algorithm understands very well, with the 'if you liked this, you'll like that' genre of recommendations proving so popular.
Yeah, that's a super fun activity - i first did that with jazz recordings- tracing the history and the geography across the US continent, through the individual musicians. What's also cool to me is that each piece of art has a life of its own in my head/myself. A particular movement, the andante of Ibert's flute concerto was catastrophically good to me, eclipsing the other 2 which i still haven t really explored, despite buying the score. If Ibert could make something so good, he clearly had a reason for making the enclosing movements - so the problem is probably me! I guess we can all improve our aptitude for appreciation, even if a style that doesn't move us frames or leads to something we love. Would be a great subject for a school class...
This reminds me of the central question at the heart of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, i.e. what is quality? We recognise quality, somehow, and yet it is somewhat subjective. We can't measure it like quantity, at least not in purely rational way. But we can't pretend quality doesn't matter, that everything is strictly utilitarian. In the age of LLMs and AI, this feels more and more like a pressing question. Maybe AI will push us to fully appreciate quality over quantity, moving us beyond the thinking-machine-worship that began in the 1970s and has accelerated to where we are now.
The idea of good taste is not gatekeeping or snobby at all. It’s about knowledge, as you say. Say you’ve got person A, who’s only read Harry Potter, and person B who’s read Harry Potter plus the entire Western canon - when it comes to reporting back to the rest of us which books are worthwhile, what advantage does person A have over person B? None.
You can like Harry Potter, but don’t be upset if the literature-curious outsider puts more stock into Person B’s aesthetic sense. The proverbial pretentious literature snob is often merely a scout who’s been out further into uncharted lands than most people.
There may well be someone out there who has read everything under the sun and come back and decided, actually, Harry Potter is the peak of literary achievement, but I’ve yet to find them.
Growing up in a working class background that encouraged philistinism, I always had a gut feeling that there was something better to be found if I searched. I went to university in my early forties and as soon as I walked through the door I'd come home. The lecturers introduced me to a magic world of literature and philosophy. I realised where I belonged-to myself. With the help of Kafa, Dickens, Orwell, Shakespeare, Plato et al I dicovered that the mind can be an intellectual galaxy to be explored; the journey need not end. I'm 80 now and still feel the excitement when I open a good book or contemplate seeing a film that demand effort to appreciate. My only regret is the classic readers dilemma: I won't live long enough to read everything I want to. Grandiose, arrogant yes, why not? It beats the inferority that dogged my steps growing up. Culture may not have given me all the answers-but the questions are magnificent!
You and I possess a treasure that no one can steal. The solace that a fine work of literature, a painting, movie or great music brings is beyond measure. Our sense of self and hard won good taste was a reward for the nights we stayed awake studying-and the quest isn't finished. If my family didn't appreciate my search there are millions of others who do, some on Bookstack! I have only one purpose, to encourage others on the road. Who cares what the begrudgers think? They have no taste.! To qiuote a great educator" Evertime they open their mouths they show their lack of READING!
I am a total grown-up now and have relatively good taste. However, when my husband met me, I wore dresses I made myself out of red satin and silver quilting fabric (I could not actually sew), and plastic shoes with fake goldfish in the heels. I loved Nutty Buddies (okay, I still love Nutty Buddies). Had I been quite so tasteful then as I am now, I doubt my husband, who declared that he loved only "small, soft, quirky girls," would have become my husband. I am happy to have aged into good(ish) taste with someone who knew me when I had bad taste.
Of course, back then, I had what the likes of Woods would probably consider "good taste" in literature. I was at that time a snob about absolutely nothing other than books. My literary snobbishness cut me off from a great deal of very good writing. I have since amended my ways. I read widely and well, and I find that contemporary books that are held up as "literary" (or marketed that way by the publisher) are often less skillfully done and less finely written than works considered too genre-specific to be excellent.
Finding good taste is like digging for treasure in your backyard. You might start with a map drawn by others, but the gold is found only when you start digging yourself.
Thanks for this. I listened to the Ezra Klein interview and felt it put too much emphasis on I like what I like and I don't need to be ashamed of it, and not enough on developing discernment, etc. Your piece helps!
Taste is knowledge, sure. But it’s also power. And when you come from a place like Afghanistan, you learn pretty quickly that what the world considers “good taste” is really just what it has decided to pay attention to.
I read this and couldn’t help but think—if taste is about depth, about challenging yourself, then why is so much of the world’s literary diet so shallow? Why do people who consider themselves well-read know The Iliad but not Shahnama? Why do they dissect T.S. Eliot but have never heard of Rumi beyond an Instagram quote? Why does “good taste” always seem to align with Western traditions, while everything else is an “acquired taste”?
Afghanistan has produced poetry for over a thousand years, but you’d be hard-pressed to find it on a university syllabus outside the region. Our architecture, our art, our music—so much of it dismissed, reduced to the backdrop of war. Even when the world looks at Afghanistan, it sees rubble, not the ruins of civilisations that once shaped entire empires.
Maybe good taste isn’t just about refinement or expertise—it’s about curiosity. It’s about looking past what’s been handed to you and wondering what got left out. Because if taste is really about knowledge, then the greatest ignorance of all is assuming you already know enough.
I agree with you. Curiosity is the basis of my argument too, and as you say, it's a question of how far you take it. My logic and yours are not so far apart, in fact.
But it's also a question of context: it is inevitably more difficult to read something very far outside your own cultural tradition. Good taste aligns with Western traditions because that is most comprehensible to Western people. Most readers read primarily in their own language, and what translates well is also a barrier.
This reminds me of a conversation I was having with a friend about my ranking of books on Goodreads, as someone who reads quite literally every genre out there. She couldn't understand how I had given four star ratings to both a handful of light-hearted romance books AND novels by authors like Clarice Lispector, Octavia Butler, Maggie O'Farrell, etc.
My thought process when it comes to rating (especially on a platform like Goodreads, which is more for keeping track IMO and less for dissecting content) is the level of enjoyability. I enjoy all my four star books about the same. However, I fully acknowledge, understand, and agree that the intelligence, content, and quality of romance novels versus award-winning fiction are quite vast. I'm ranking four stars within a certain genre, not comparing Elsie Silver to Claire Keegan.
My friend was very baffled by this. I thought it quite simple.
Yeah I agree, you judge a work according to what it is, and, thus, Agatha Christie and Shakespeare can both be 5 star authors, in their own particular way. What matters is knowing what those particularities are.
Although taste certainly is difficult to define, I would argue that it is more able to be defined than something like Beauty.
Irrespective of the specifics, taste is or ought to be a comportment or dress, speech, writing, art, or decorum that recognizes the dignity of the individual, of others, and the ability to edify both through thought, word, deed, and composition be that through dress, manners, or general sense of self.
The reaffirmation of the Canon reflects this in that each contributor strived to recognize dignity and exercise the words, deeds, etc. that affirm dignity.
I like this a lot, but I think this is underplaying the role of history. Many things are in the cannon for resasons of historical importance, not just because they are great works of art (great though they are).
Art does not conflate with the aesthetic (it's much more expansive than that, e.g., normative), any more than the canon necessarily equates with the aesthetic (as it's greatly shaped by the social and political, even the accidental) - anymore than the canon necessarily equates with readership...
This is nonsense. You can be an educated person who understands the beauty and moral merits (and failings) inherent in Harry Potter as well as those in Tolstoy. Simply reading "the cannon" (thought we had sufficiently put that beast in the grave) doesn't give you any idea of the variety of human existence.
Dear Mr. Oliver, I was wondering what is your take on Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of taste and social inequality (cf. his book "Distinction"). Don't you think that taste is not exclusively a matter of self-education but that instead mechanisms of social reproduction and cultural hegemony also play a role?
I get what the author is trying to say but I don't agree with the generalisation that all of those who read popular books do not read serious literature. Here's a list of books that I read in last year. Is my taste good or bad?
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - Charles Darwin
The Simple Truth - David Baldacci
Hope - Len Deighton
Absolute Friends - John le Carré
Silverview - John le Carré
Bad Luck and Trouble - Lee Child
Un'indagine Fragrante - Raffaella Bossi
In Fragranza di Reato - Raffaella Bossi
A House for Mr Biswas - V S Naipaul
Dogs of Riga - Henning Mankell
Underground - Haruki Murakami
Poirot Investigates - Agatha Christie
Maigret Hesitates - George Simenon
When I was Old - George Simenon
The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
The King of Torts - John Grisham
The Man Who Fell to Earth - Walter Tevis
The Housekeeper and the Professor - Yoko Ogawa
The Brothers Karamazov - Feodor Dostoyevsky
I also read books in Hindi and Marathi but not listing those here because those will be unknown to most western readers.
What about authors who write YA fiction? Can we say the same thing about tastes of C S Lewis or Lewis Carroll?
On the other hand, I have left many a books after 50 pages (critically accliamed, prize winners etc.) because I felt that the author was just trying to be clever and was experimenting with the form. I am not fond of authors who write with the maxim "I am a genius. I will write whatever I want and it's the reader's fault if he cannot appreciate me."
We are living in an Orwellian cultural dystopia. Fine Art still exists, but you see less and less of it presented via the mainstream. Many have subsumed into an Idiocracy where infantilized and insipid music is consumed. Creative artists are still around but they are ignored by and forced into financial ruin by corporations. There are many reasons for cultural decay, but there will be a renaissance in the Arts as surely as day follows night.
The public at large will consume a greater amount of fine art, but only if they are curated into appreciation of it.
Good taste is accumulated through wide knowledge, but that knowledge can only be acquired through one crucial trait - i.e. curiosity. Which is what drove Klein to attempting to investigate classical music, and which is a trait I'd wager many of those who are 'content with mediocrity' (including, sometimes, myself) usually lack.
Even taking the example of Harry Potter - there are those who read it and then feel compelled to seek out information about the works and people cited as J.K. Rowling's influences and favourites, from Jessica Mitford to E. Nesbit to Jane Austen (I had a friend whose interest in Latin American magical realist literature was triggered, indirectly, through the Harry Potter films films - she loved Alfonso Cuaron's one so much that she made her way through his entire filmography and then sought out 'books with the same feel' - she was 19 at the time). I've had friends who read Asterix as small children and then, as adults, proceeded to investigate - even if it was through a mere wikipedia search in some cases - every work of art and literature referenced in the comics (the same friend mentioned above read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar because said Julius frequently turns up in Asterix - she didn't like it, but mentioned to me that she enjoyed it more than she'd thought she would because she pictured Julius in the play the way he was drawn in the comics).
The 'Harry Potter adults' who only read YA fiction, are operating in the opposite direction - they aren't seeking a greater understanding of the forces that created the thing they like, they just want 'something like it'. Something the algorithm understands very well, with the 'if you liked this, you'll like that' genre of recommendations proving so popular.
Yes definitely—tracing influences is a great way to acquire good taste.
Yeah, that's a super fun activity - i first did that with jazz recordings- tracing the history and the geography across the US continent, through the individual musicians. What's also cool to me is that each piece of art has a life of its own in my head/myself. A particular movement, the andante of Ibert's flute concerto was catastrophically good to me, eclipsing the other 2 which i still haven t really explored, despite buying the score. If Ibert could make something so good, he clearly had a reason for making the enclosing movements - so the problem is probably me! I guess we can all improve our aptitude for appreciation, even if a style that doesn't move us frames or leads to something we love. Would be a great subject for a school class...
This reminds me of the central question at the heart of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, i.e. what is quality? We recognise quality, somehow, and yet it is somewhat subjective. We can't measure it like quantity, at least not in purely rational way. But we can't pretend quality doesn't matter, that everything is strictly utilitarian. In the age of LLMs and AI, this feels more and more like a pressing question. Maybe AI will push us to fully appreciate quality over quantity, moving us beyond the thinking-machine-worship that began in the 1970s and has accelerated to where we are now.
The idea of good taste is not gatekeeping or snobby at all. It’s about knowledge, as you say. Say you’ve got person A, who’s only read Harry Potter, and person B who’s read Harry Potter plus the entire Western canon - when it comes to reporting back to the rest of us which books are worthwhile, what advantage does person A have over person B? None.
You can like Harry Potter, but don’t be upset if the literature-curious outsider puts more stock into Person B’s aesthetic sense. The proverbial pretentious literature snob is often merely a scout who’s been out further into uncharted lands than most people.
There may well be someone out there who has read everything under the sun and come back and decided, actually, Harry Potter is the peak of literary achievement, but I’ve yet to find them.
I wholeheartedly agree with you.
Growing up in a working class background that encouraged philistinism, I always had a gut feeling that there was something better to be found if I searched. I went to university in my early forties and as soon as I walked through the door I'd come home. The lecturers introduced me to a magic world of literature and philosophy. I realised where I belonged-to myself. With the help of Kafa, Dickens, Orwell, Shakespeare, Plato et al I dicovered that the mind can be an intellectual galaxy to be explored; the journey need not end. I'm 80 now and still feel the excitement when I open a good book or contemplate seeing a film that demand effort to appreciate. My only regret is the classic readers dilemma: I won't live long enough to read everything I want to. Grandiose, arrogant yes, why not? It beats the inferority that dogged my steps growing up. Culture may not have given me all the answers-but the questions are magnificent!
I'm right there with you, my friend. I find it difficult to convey to my family and others the vital role literature and the arts serve in my life.
You and I possess a treasure that no one can steal. The solace that a fine work of literature, a painting, movie or great music brings is beyond measure. Our sense of self and hard won good taste was a reward for the nights we stayed awake studying-and the quest isn't finished. If my family didn't appreciate my search there are millions of others who do, some on Bookstack! I have only one purpose, to encourage others on the road. Who cares what the begrudgers think? They have no taste.! To qiuote a great educator" Evertime they open their mouths they show their lack of READING!
this is excellent :)
I am a total grown-up now and have relatively good taste. However, when my husband met me, I wore dresses I made myself out of red satin and silver quilting fabric (I could not actually sew), and plastic shoes with fake goldfish in the heels. I loved Nutty Buddies (okay, I still love Nutty Buddies). Had I been quite so tasteful then as I am now, I doubt my husband, who declared that he loved only "small, soft, quirky girls," would have become my husband. I am happy to have aged into good(ish) taste with someone who knew me when I had bad taste.
Of course, back then, I had what the likes of Woods would probably consider "good taste" in literature. I was at that time a snob about absolutely nothing other than books. My literary snobbishness cut me off from a great deal of very good writing. I have since amended my ways. I read widely and well, and I find that contemporary books that are held up as "literary" (or marketed that way by the publisher) are often less skillfully done and less finely written than works considered too genre-specific to be excellent.
Agree about genre--catholic taste is good.
Finding good taste is like digging for treasure in your backyard. You might start with a map drawn by others, but the gold is found only when you start digging yourself.
Thanks for this. I listened to the Ezra Klein interview and felt it put too much emphasis on I like what I like and I don't need to be ashamed of it, and not enough on developing discernment, etc. Your piece helps!
Glad to hear! You should know what you like but the knowing is the hard part
Taste is knowledge, sure. But it’s also power. And when you come from a place like Afghanistan, you learn pretty quickly that what the world considers “good taste” is really just what it has decided to pay attention to.
I read this and couldn’t help but think—if taste is about depth, about challenging yourself, then why is so much of the world’s literary diet so shallow? Why do people who consider themselves well-read know The Iliad but not Shahnama? Why do they dissect T.S. Eliot but have never heard of Rumi beyond an Instagram quote? Why does “good taste” always seem to align with Western traditions, while everything else is an “acquired taste”?
Afghanistan has produced poetry for over a thousand years, but you’d be hard-pressed to find it on a university syllabus outside the region. Our architecture, our art, our music—so much of it dismissed, reduced to the backdrop of war. Even when the world looks at Afghanistan, it sees rubble, not the ruins of civilisations that once shaped entire empires.
Maybe good taste isn’t just about refinement or expertise—it’s about curiosity. It’s about looking past what’s been handed to you and wondering what got left out. Because if taste is really about knowledge, then the greatest ignorance of all is assuming you already know enough.
I agree with you. Curiosity is the basis of my argument too, and as you say, it's a question of how far you take it. My logic and yours are not so far apart, in fact.
But it's also a question of context: it is inevitably more difficult to read something very far outside your own cultural tradition. Good taste aligns with Western traditions because that is most comprehensible to Western people. Most readers read primarily in their own language, and what translates well is also a barrier.
Yum yum. (Sorry.)
This reminds me of a conversation I was having with a friend about my ranking of books on Goodreads, as someone who reads quite literally every genre out there. She couldn't understand how I had given four star ratings to both a handful of light-hearted romance books AND novels by authors like Clarice Lispector, Octavia Butler, Maggie O'Farrell, etc.
My thought process when it comes to rating (especially on a platform like Goodreads, which is more for keeping track IMO and less for dissecting content) is the level of enjoyability. I enjoy all my four star books about the same. However, I fully acknowledge, understand, and agree that the intelligence, content, and quality of romance novels versus award-winning fiction are quite vast. I'm ranking four stars within a certain genre, not comparing Elsie Silver to Claire Keegan.
My friend was very baffled by this. I thought it quite simple.
Yeah I agree, you judge a work according to what it is, and, thus, Agatha Christie and Shakespeare can both be 5 star authors, in their own particular way. What matters is knowing what those particularities are.
Although taste certainly is difficult to define, I would argue that it is more able to be defined than something like Beauty.
Irrespective of the specifics, taste is or ought to be a comportment or dress, speech, writing, art, or decorum that recognizes the dignity of the individual, of others, and the ability to edify both through thought, word, deed, and composition be that through dress, manners, or general sense of self.
The reaffirmation of the Canon reflects this in that each contributor strived to recognize dignity and exercise the words, deeds, etc. that affirm dignity.
I like this a lot, but I think this is underplaying the role of history. Many things are in the cannon for resasons of historical importance, not just because they are great works of art (great though they are).
Disagree!
I'd be very curious to hear why 😉
Well you asserted an opinion that I don’t agree with.. the canon is a repository of aesthetic merit, as evidence by readership
Art does not conflate with the aesthetic (it's much more expansive than that, e.g., normative), any more than the canon necessarily equates with the aesthetic (as it's greatly shaped by the social and political, even the accidental) - anymore than the canon necessarily equates with readership...
If evidence by readership is the only qualifying category then Harry Potter will be canon in 150 years..
This is nonsense. You can be an educated person who understands the beauty and moral merits (and failings) inherent in Harry Potter as well as those in Tolstoy. Simply reading "the cannon" (thought we had sufficiently put that beast in the grave) doesn't give you any idea of the variety of human existence.
I don’t exclude any of that, and in fact have a very catholic taste in books myself
Dear Mr. Oliver, I was wondering what is your take on Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of taste and social inequality (cf. his book "Distinction"). Don't you think that taste is not exclusively a matter of self-education but that instead mechanisms of social reproduction and cultural hegemony also play a role?
I get what the author is trying to say but I don't agree with the generalisation that all of those who read popular books do not read serious literature. Here's a list of books that I read in last year. Is my taste good or bad?
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - Charles Darwin
The Simple Truth - David Baldacci
Hope - Len Deighton
Absolute Friends - John le Carré
Silverview - John le Carré
Bad Luck and Trouble - Lee Child
Un'indagine Fragrante - Raffaella Bossi
In Fragranza di Reato - Raffaella Bossi
A House for Mr Biswas - V S Naipaul
Dogs of Riga - Henning Mankell
Underground - Haruki Murakami
Poirot Investigates - Agatha Christie
Maigret Hesitates - George Simenon
When I was Old - George Simenon
The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
The King of Torts - John Grisham
The Man Who Fell to Earth - Walter Tevis
The Housekeeper and the Professor - Yoko Ogawa
The Brothers Karamazov - Feodor Dostoyevsky
I also read books in Hindi and Marathi but not listing those here because those will be unknown to most western readers.
What about authors who write YA fiction? Can we say the same thing about tastes of C S Lewis or Lewis Carroll?
On the other hand, I have left many a books after 50 pages (critically accliamed, prize winners etc.) because I felt that the author was just trying to be clever and was experimenting with the form. I am not fond of authors who write with the maxim "I am a genius. I will write whatever I want and it's the reader's fault if he cannot appreciate me."
We are living in an Orwellian cultural dystopia. Fine Art still exists, but you see less and less of it presented via the mainstream. Many have subsumed into an Idiocracy where infantilized and insipid music is consumed. Creative artists are still around but they are ignored by and forced into financial ruin by corporations. There are many reasons for cultural decay, but there will be a renaissance in the Arts as surely as day follows night.
The public at large will consume a greater amount of fine art, but only if they are curated into appreciation of it.