My Reading List

Eric Miles Williamson

I'm known as a construction worker who became a novelist and college professor, and because of this, I regularly get e-mails from people who are not in a position to leave careers and go back to college, but who want to read great books.

During finals week my last semester of undergraduate school I did one of the few smart things I've ever done. I roamed the university, walking into the various buildings, finding the offices of the professors. Anthropology professors, Math professors, Engineering professors, History, Philosophy, Geology, Physics, Music—scores of professors in dozens of fields of inquiry. I had two yellow-papered legal pads with me, and I asked each professor to do me a favor: "Can you please write me down a list of 20 or 30 books anyone who studies your field must read?" They, of course, looked at me with shock. It's a rare thing indeed for a college student to want to know more than he's required to know.

They all happily sat right down and made me the lists. And I've kept them to this day. Each year I pick a different subject and study it thoroughly, not in the haphazard and oft interrupted fashion of an undergraduate, who studies wildly various subjects for an hour a pop, but concentrated, interrelated, focused study. This past year, for instance, I studied British history. I have five college degrees in English, and was never once required to study the history of the people who created the English language and English literature. How can anyone responsibly teach the literature of a nation without knowing its history? How can someone teach Tolstoy without knowing anything about Russia? How can someone teach Jack London without knowing about the Socialist movement of the early 20^th century in America?

I've been studying like this for nearly three decades now, and I still have a lot of lists to go through. I'll never be bored.

Workers who read are for the most part autodidacts, as I was before going to college, reading books on the recommendation of friends or simply because they've somehow heard of the authors or the books. This is all well and good, but it doesn't necessarily get the right books into the hands of workers trying to educate themselves. (I'm one of those people, by the way, who believes some books and authors are better than others, that authors are not special just because they're human beings.) With our educational system in rapid decline, with the increasing standardization of curriculi, with our general population becoming less literate, perhaps the only thing we can do as workers to protect ourselves from the ruling classes is to educate ourselves, because those who run the show ain't gonna do it for us. But in order to do so, sometimes we need to be pointed in the right direction.

Every semester I distribute a reading list to my students just in case they wish to read more than they're required to read. I've had students ask for my list decades after I gave it to them because they lost it. It's a good list.

But it's not the only list, and I certainly haven't read all the great books. I've never read War and Peace, and I've only read a few novels by Zola. As well, the list reflects my personal tastes to a ridiculous degree. I've made no effort to equal-opportunize my list, done no gender or ethnicity tally. I also tell them never to trust lists of living writers, and certainly not mine. As often as not the living writers included on lists are friends of the person compiling the list. What I tell my students to do is get lists from other people and then cross-reference the lists. Books that are only on one person's list are probably not worth one's time. But books that show up on multiple lists, well, they just may be important ones.

(The IWW Book Review web page has just posted a PDF of my list. I hope some people find it to be of use. A splendid reading list that can be found online is Harold Bloom's list in his wonderful book, The Western Canon.)

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