On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books by Karen Swallow Prior

On Reading Well: 

Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

Karen Swallow Prior  

Published 2018

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This book I read for pleasure but thought I would share it with others who may have seen it or heard about it and were curious. It is the kind of book that a reader who reads with intent would be interested in. It is the kind of book that investment readers would write about, as Karen did. She took her own personal experiences and illuminated the moral lessons, or virtues, extracted from the books she read. 

I struggled with how to review this book without going too long; instead I will expound upon the Foreward by Leland Ryken. 

This book makes the argument that: 

• literature makes moral statements;
• these statements strengthen the moral life of the reader;
• and literary criticism should explore the moral dimension of literary texts.

This was commonplace in the classical Christian tradition until the Enlightenment made us more enlightened. Moral standards? What are those? 

Ryken notes Hemingway who suggested that "what is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after." Look where that has gotten us.

Prior takes us back to the Great Tradition, where great literature portrays the moral life, and we, as essential readers, have a responsibility to explore those ideas. The author extracts from literature examples of virtue and vice to examine deeper with a moral magnifying glass. The purpose is that 

our understanding of virtue is increased and our desire to practice it enhanced.

According to Ryken (and obviously anyone paying attention), the modern secular lit guild is continuously rejecting Christian morality. Prior just takes us back to the original great traditions of literary analysis. 

Every chapter, which covers one specific virtue from one book, is supported with ample evidence and resources, as Prior seeks to help readers to dig deeply into the text and draw out a virtue, particularly from the character's behavior, so that we may seek to learn a moral lesson from our reading. 

Following are the virtues and their books:

Prudence: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding

Temperance: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Justice: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Courage: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Faith: Silence by Shusaku Endo

Hope: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Love: The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

Chastity: Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Diligence: Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

Patience: Persuasion by Jane Austen

Kindness: "Tenth of December" by George Saunders

Humility: "Revelation" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge" by Flannery O'Connor

Of these, I have only read six books, but Prior wrote in such a way that I desire to revisit them soon; and of those I have not read, I immediately found them interesting and look forward to adding them to my long list of hope-to-read-someday.