Is there a literary canon of books everyone who considers himself educated or maybe civilized should read? I mean, everyone reads Pookie and the Moonlight Vularoo, but what about the stuff teachers put on assigned reading lists?

D.G. Myers talks about personal Best Of lists here, saying the idea of books everyone should read is a quaint throwback to the 20th century. “If literature is no longer a part of every civilized American’s cultural inheritance, you can thank your English teachers, who gladly coughed up their authority over it,” he writes.

Myers also culls together a list of top authors according to how much has been written about them by scholars. Henry James and William Faulkner top the list.

John Plotz describes what’s in a database called What Middletown Read, “the borrowing records of the Muncie Public Library between 1891 and 1902.”

When I was a boy, every school child knew about this, but I suspect they don’t teach it in schools anymore. In honor of Presidents Day, a snippet from Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years:

Having learned to read Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on. Dennis [Hanks], years later, tried to remember his cousin’s reading habits. “I never seen Abe after he was twelve ‘at he didn’t have a book some’ers ’round. He’d put a book inside his shirt an’ fill his pants pockets with corn dodgers, an’ go off to plow or hoe. When noon come he’d set down under a tree, an’ read an’ eat. In the house at night, he’d tilt a cheer by the chimbly, an’ set on his backbone an’ read. I’ve seen a feller come in an’ look at him, Abe not knowin’ anybody was round, an’ sneak out agin like a cat, an’ say, ‘Well, I’ll be darned.’ It didn’t seem natural, nohow, to see a feller read like that. Aunt Sairy’s never let the children pester him. She always said Abe was goin’ to be a great man some day. An’ she wasn’t goin’ to have him hendered.”

They heard Abe saying, “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll git me a book I ain’t read.”

Jonathan Gourlay stops reading books after being sucked into episodes of Star Trek: Voyager on his iPhone. It gets ugly. (via A Few More Pages)

Victor Davis Hanson writes on reading:

But you object that at least our current economy of expression cuts out wasted words and clauses, a sort of slimmed-down, electronic communication? Perhaps, but it also turns almost everything into instant bland hot cereal, as if we should gulp down oatmeal at every meal and survive well enough without the bother of salad, main course, and dessert. Each day our vocabulary shrinks, our thought patterns stagnate — if they are not renewed through fresh literature or intelligent conversation. Unfortunately these days, those who read are few and silent; those who don’t, numerous and heard. In this drought, Dante’s Inferno and William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico provide needed storms of new words, complex syntax, and fresh ideas.

(via Books, Inq.)

In response, D.G. Myers writes about reading fiction specifically, saying it makes a man full. Not his stomach, we’re talking about making the man himself full. Get a snack if you’re hungry. (via Dave Lull)

Sherry is compiling on long list of 2011 book lists which vary in focus, some being recommendations, some being what someone has read. Here is her second list. Here is her first list. And there’s more to come.