A Year of Reading Virtuously

A Book Review of Karen Swallow Prior’s On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

I was predisposed to enjoy Karen Swallow Prior’s new book On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through the Great Books. How could I not be? In it Prior advocates reading the great books as a means to enhance one’s moral life. This is precisely the type of reading I champion in my own book A Year of War and Peace. The aim of A Year of War and Peace is to learn to maintain mental tranquility and to live well with arete in a hostile, chaotic, and often violent world. It hopes to achieve this by reading and thinking deeply about the characters of Leo Tolstoy’s great book War and Peace for, as Prior writes in On Reading Well, “literary characters have a lot to teach us about character.” A Year of War and Peace is formatted as a yearlong reading experience with individually tailored daily meditations on each of the 361 chapters in the Tolstoy. In On Reading Well Karen Swallow Prior presents twelve virtues, each explored through a guided tour of a great work of literature. As such it offers book clubs and individuals, at one book per month, another high-quality, yearlong reading experience. Reading one of Prior’s suggested works each month along with the relevant chapter in her own book as a starting point is probably the best way to read…