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About The Common Reader.
This is a duplicate of my About page, published here so I can “pin” it to the top of the homepage.
Contents
A nerdy literature newsletter
Welcome to The Common Reader, a Substack dedicated to reading the best that has been thought and said.
I mostly write about great literature from Chaucer to modern translated fiction, but I also cover AI, biography, and late bloomers, plus a few miscellaneous topics.
I do this because great literature matters a lot. But mostly I do it because I love literature.
Some of what follows is taken from my post “How to get started reading English Literature” and some of it is from “Why I Write The Common Reader”.
Great literature is the heart of a civilization.
When we think of the Greeks, we think of Homer and Sophocles, of the Romans, Virgil and Seneca. Dante was Italy’s greatest flourishing, and Shakespeare England’s. These works might be representative of a set of core beliefs or ideas, but they are also extraordinary aesthetic achievements. They record aspects of a society, but they also give them an intensity of expression that has lasting power in the world. Many versions of Romeo & Juliet were played in the London theatres before Shakespeare’s — but it was his words that remained with audiences so unforgettably.
This all points to several of the reasons why literature has been valued. First, is enjoyment. The heart asks pleasure first, as Emily Dickinson said. Second is beauty. Literature is not just story: it is the best that has been thought and said. It is the finest writing in the language. Finally there are ideas. Literature is a particular form of expression for thought, emotion, and experience that isn’t matched in any other discipline. In literature ideas are alive, they walk and talk amongst the mess of the real world, or they follow the cognitive flow of an individual writer. The image of the Western canon, as Harold Bloom said, is of the individual at thought.
Humans pay much more attention to stories than to data. The pictures of life that great artists can give us, as the novelist George Eliot said, provide the raw material for moral sentiment. It is in the imagination that we turn the disorganized data of the world into something structured, something understood.
Some people will tell you literature is more about some of these things than others—that it transmits moral values, expresses emotions, or is primarily about beauty. But the wonder of literature is that it is all these things and more. Literature is heightened life, as broad and deep and varied as human society. There is a poem for almost everything, even laundry day.
“You can never be wise until you learn to love reading.”
Samuel JohnsonGreat literature is among the peak human experiences you can have.
Like food, travel, or music, literature offers huge and fascinating pleasures. It is right there on the shelf, or the kindle, waiting for us. But we often ignore it
My message to you is simple.
Don’t die without reading the great works—Shakespeare, Dante, George Eliot, etc.
It’s not worth it.
Ezra Pound once said that we study literature like biologists, and we go outside to learn botany by looking not at engravings but at trees.
This blog is an encouragement that you can be a literary biologist, you can learn to see literature for what it really is, to understand it better. You can learn, though immersion and critical reading, to find the living language in dead old books. You can acquire the historical knowledge and critical acumen to see the techniques of writing, to see the skull beneath the skin.
In fact, I think it is important that you do so. Literature became a very academic enterprise in the twentieth century. And many scholars continue to do great work. Without them, we wouldn’t have so much of the knowledge I write about here.
But it is readers who keep literature alive.
Pound again,—
There is one quality which unites all great and perdurable writers, you don’t NEED schools and colleges to keep ’em alive. Put them out of the curriculum, lay them in the dust of libraries, and once in every so often a chance reader, unsubsidized and unbribed, will dig them up again, put them in the light again, without asking favours.
That is what this blog is all about, unbribed readers who want to put great works into the light and truly see them.
"One of my favourite Substacks... a nerdy literature newsletter."
Helen LewisAbout me
As well as writing The Common Reader, I have written a book. Second Act is a study of late-blooming talent, was released in 2024. Tyler Cowen called it “One of the very best books written on talent.” My other work has appeared in the Financial Times, Prospect, Liberties, the New Statesman, The Critic, and UnHerd. In 2022, I was awarded an Emergent Ventures grant. I won another such grant in 2024.
Please do email me. I always reply. You can find my personal website here.
Who do I read on Substack?
At the end of 2024, Substack asked me to make predictions about literature in 2025. I didn’t have any! But I did say this.
Literary criticism is supposed to be in a golden age, but it’s often disconnected from the common reader—Substack, of course, is very much connected with the common reader. I see many Substacks (like BDM, the Washington Review of Books, Joel J Miller, laura thompson, Naomi Kanakia, John Pistelli, Horace & friends, Julianne Werlin, Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal), Brad Skow, and Adam Roberts) offering a wide range of critical writing that covers everything from Latin poetry to Golden Age detective fiction to “the modern novel” to the Mahabharata to the state of the humanities and AI, and so on. I think this gathering of internet critics will continue to flourish on Substack and increasingly offer something different to the existing model from journals and magazines.
I also like the work of A.N. Wilson, Ian Leslie, Catherine Lacey, Rohit Krishnan, Helen Lewis, James Marriott, Alice Gribbin, and my wife Catherine Oliver.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases on some (really very few) of the old links on this website.
Henry - Listening to your conversation with Tyler Cowen was like slicing through a densely fruited fruit cake... it was a joy unto itself, but also so appetising, and a little intimidating, for anybody who hasn't yet read so many of the works mentioned. I was hooked, and look forward to reading more of your work.
Thank you… thank you … thank you.