While most of life’s pleasures can be shared, reading is lonely. It’s more than possible for six friends to enjoy an exquisite meal, a bottle of wine and then settle down for a four- or five-hour orgy. Food, drink, sex: these things are better shared. But if, as dawn approached, someone cracked open Chaucer’s ‘Parliament of Fowls’ and intimated that it was time to really get down to brass tacks, it could only spoil the mood.
Reading is lonely because so much of the reading that matters is hard. The books that change the world and shake the culture are rarely pure pleasure. The heaven sections of Paradise Lost. The war bits of War and Peace. The history bits embedded within the war bits of War and Peace. These are not pleasurable to read but we read them anyway, partly because they help us understand the intellectual scope of the author’s vision, and partly because we are inured to the truth that life is suffering.
Still, we try to share the things we love. Some literary people join book clubs, some attend festivals and some start podcasts. The Canon Ball is an attempt to read all the books listed by Harold Bloom in his critical tract The Western Canon (of which more in a second). The hosts describe themselves as two well-read autodidacts, though at least one of them has a PhD. The episodes, meanwhile, have titles like ‘Faust Part 2 (Part 1)’ and blurbs that read, ‘Finally! The last of our three-part series on the works of Samuel Johnson!’ With no orgies on the horizon, I decided to wade in from the beginning.
The Western Canon was Harold Bloom’s attempt to argue for a set of texts that he believed were the greatest and most foundational in western literature.
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