THE FINEST READING LIST EVER
As a part-time student member of the Duquesne University Library, I enjoyed privileges that went far beyond ordinary borrowing rights. I could take out as many books as I wished and keep them for as long as I wanted. More enticing still, I had access to volumes once considered forbidden.
For centuries, the Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum et Expurgatorum (1559–1966) dictated what the faithful should not read. Duquesne, being run by the Holy Ghost Fathers, naturally kept such works carefully shelved, but not beyond reach.
Why do I recall this now? Because some of my students have asked me for a list of “good books to read.” I have never been able to compile such a list. Reading is too personal for prescriptive guidance. Yet it has often struck me that the Index itself, ironically, is one of the finest reading lists ever assembled.
Consider the company it keeps under the label of “danger”: Jean-Paul Sartre, Nabokov, Dante, Bergson, Edward Gibbon, Alberto Moravia, Simone de Beauvoir, Victor Hugo, Kant, Balzac, Pascal, Rousseau, Zola, the crème de la crème.
If you want a guide to enduring literature, here you have the best one. The Index may have been intended as a warning, but it remains, up to its final edition in 1966, a luminous catalogue of books and authors worth your time.
For centuries, the Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum et Expurgatorum (1559–1966) dictated what the faithful should not read. Duquesne, being run by the Holy Ghost Fathers, naturally kept such works carefully shelved, but not beyond reach.
Why do I recall this now? Because some of my students have asked me for a list of “good books to read.” I have never been able to compile such a list. Reading is too personal for prescriptive guidance. Yet it has often struck me that the Index itself, ironically, is one of the finest reading lists ever assembled.
Consider the company it keeps under the label of “danger”: Jean-Paul Sartre, Nabokov, Dante, Bergson, Edward Gibbon, Alberto Moravia, Simone de Beauvoir, Victor Hugo, Kant, Balzac, Pascal, Rousseau, Zola, the crème de la crème.
If you want a guide to enduring literature, here you have the best one. The Index may have been intended as a warning, but it remains, up to its final edition in 1966, a luminous catalogue of books and authors worth your time.
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