Joseph Brodsky’s List of 83 Books You Should Read to Have an Intelligent Conversation

Clas­sic blind spot for Sovi­et writ­ers: Kaf­ka.

Typ­i­cal auto-didac­tic, anx­ious­ly hop­ing to get it right. There is noth­ing unique or insight­ful about this list; he may as well have gone to school.

Joseph B. gave me a per­son­al­ized read­ing list way back in his pre-Nobel days u2013 only sev­en books on it! I’ve blogged about the list (as well as Mon­i­ca Par­tridge’s more exhaus­tive one) here: http://stanford.io/1hgdiT5

No Thomas Aquinas?

Inter­est­ing. One can only pon­der how Pla­to could have ever strung togeth­er a cou­ple of intel­li­gent thoughts hav­ing nev­er had the lux­u­ry of read­ing The Sagas of Ice­landers. Thank good­ness we mod­ern folk have the ben­e­fit of hav­ing so many oth­er trains to jump.

I sus­pect one might need a broad­er per­spec­tive than just the white patri­ar­chal male per­spec­tive, to have a tru­ly intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tion.

Great read­ing list if you want to have a riv­et­ing con­ver­sa­tion with old dead white men.

Maybe that isn’t fair. It’s a sol­id list of good reads. I’ve read some of these, but not even close to all of them. The arti­cle implies the list is dat­ed; I’d like to think if he were to come up with a list today there would be a bit more diver­si­ty in authors.

But wait, is a con­tem­po­rary read­ing list for ‘intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tion’ even pos­si­ble? What if the days of a col­lec­tive lit­er­ary back­bone are over?

This list is root­ed in the clas­sics. This arti­cle is under attack in the com­ments sec­tion part­ly because of that. How­ev­er, a gen­er­a­tion (or two) ago there was a decent chance that edu­cat­ed peo­ple had actu­al­ly read these books. (Back then, Net­flix did­n’t exist)

Diver­si­ty, while good, may have cre­at­ed ‘over choice’ in lit­er­a­ture. ‘Read this!’ ‘No, read that!’ ‘Okay fine. I’ll read them… ALL! … Lat­er! Sounds like too big a task right now.’ **Turns on TV**

“But, (you might say) a col­lec­tive read­ing list isn’t cru­cial for an intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tion. Read what­ev­er floats your fan­cy. Gath­er knowl­edge. Share it with oth­ers. They’ll lay­er on their thoughts and expe­ri­ences and we’ll all be rich­er for it.”

Okay. But have you ever been to a book club where every­one read a dif­fer­ent book? I haven’t. Because it would prob­a­bly go like this:
GLEN: “In my book, the author sug­gests A.”
MARY: “Is there a chance they real­ly did­n’t mean A? Maybe they were try­ing to express… B?”
GLEN: “Oh I’m sor­ry, did you read the book?”
MARY: “Well… no…”
GLEN: “Then shut your !#$*ing mouth!”

Glen is a jerk, obvi­ous­ly, **Shakes fist at Glen** but the point is: hav­ing com­mon knowl­edge makes intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tion eas­i­er.

Unfor­tu­ate­ly, once you leave an aca­d­e­m­ic set­ting, com­mon knowl­edge is hard­er to come by. Out­side of the weath­er. Oh the nuanced com­plex­i­ties of the weath… **throws up in paper bag**

Side Thought: If I could go back in time, I’d go back to col­lege. Not for a par­ty; I’d only stay for about five min­utes. I’d go back to the first time I decid­ed not to do the assigned read­ing for a class. I’d grab myself by the shoul­ders and shout, “Do you have any idea how valu­able this is!? To have a group of peo­ple all read­ing the same thing at the same time? And, to have an EXPERT lead­ing the dis­cus­sion? You have no idea how rare that is in the real world. You think you’ll have MORE time to read after you grad­u­ate? HA!”
End Side Thought. So, if the days of hav­ing Cul­ture’s Col­lec­tive Read­ing List are over, what’s the secret to intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tion in our brave new world?

It’s safe to say that read­ing will always play an inte­gral part in pro­vid­ing the fuel for con­ver­sa­tion, so let’s revis­it the ‘read what­ev­er you like’ approach. How do you turn what you’ve read into a con­ver­sa­tion with­out turn­ing the con­ver­sa­tion into a one sided infor­ma­tion dump?

For some rea­son my mind goes to the way Ford came up with the idea to cre­ate the assem­bly line for the Mod­el T. Hen­ry Ford noticed the way meat pack­ers in Chica­go would turn a cow into nom-noms*. Each butch­er would deal with a dif­fer­ent cut of beef from of the same cow and send the rest down the line to the next butch­er. In turn, each butch­er got extreme­ly effi­cient at their task, and the process became much smoother and more prof­itable. Ford repli­cat­ed that mod­el to make cars.

Ford applied learn­ing from one sit­u­a­tion to a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tion and it was a huge suc­cess. I think that’s a real­ly impor­tant skill to devel­op: to be able to think that way. It may be a key to hav­ing great con­ver­sa­tions in this ‘post col­lec­tive read­ing list’ world. It’s the abil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy unlike­ly asso­ci­a­tions in order to find com­mon ground between seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed pieces of infor­ma­tion. The result can be a bit of an ‘ah ha!’ moment, and a new, fun con­ver­sa­tion. Dra­mat­ic exam­ple!

WILLIAM: Hitler’s down­fall real­ly start­ed when he waged a war with Rus­sia. He should have nev­er tried to fight a war on two fronts.
Egads! Thinks Emi­ly. I don’t like World War II, I don’t love vio­lence and I know next to noth­ing about it. How can I help shape this con­ver­sa­tion with my knowl­edge so I can par­tic­i­pate?
EMILY: I don’t know if you’ve read EndGame, it was a Biog­ra­phy about Bob­by Fis­ch­er; but his down­fall real­ly start­ed when he start­ed blam­ing the world for his per­son­al prob­lems. He start­ed mak­ing trea­so­nous state­ments, and in the end Ice­land was the only coun­try will­ing to give him asy­lum. Do you think Hitler behaved the same way? Did he take respon­si­bil­i­ty or did he blame his fail­ures on the peo­ple around him?

Now Emi­ly and William are talk­ing about, “why do peo­ple rise and fall?” instead of just talk­ing about World War II. Jamie can still apply his WWII knowl­edge to the con­ver­sa­tion, but this way it’s eas­i­er for both to par­tic­i­pate. Also, through the lens of ‘why do promi­nent peo­ple rise and fall’ Emi­ly may find hear­ing about Hitler a bit more inter­est­ing. This new lens may also pull in Jason, who is pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned with why Anne Hathaway’s pop­u­lar­i­ty is dwin­dling, while Jen­nifer Lawrence is unstop­pable right now. (Soo tempt­ed to go on anoth­er tan­gent…!)

Did you notice the oth­er thing Emi­ly did to help keep the con­ver­sa­tion going? It’s sub­tle, but it can make a big dif­fer­ence if you want to keep some­one engaged and with you when you bring new and seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed infor­ma­tion into a con­ver­sa­tion. Jamie said the word, ‘down­fall’, and so did Emi­ly. This was Emily’s way of prov­ing to William that she was lis­ten­ing; she respects his com­ment and input and she thinks he’s smart, so she’s using his con­tri­bu­tion to spring­board into the next lev­el of the con­ver­sa­tion. I use a phrase to sim­i­lar effect that peo­ple make fun of me for: I’ll say, “to your point about ___, (some­thing relat­ed to that).” I get some grief when I say it some­times, because my mind tends to take leaps and the sec­ond point may not be as close­ly tied to the first point as I thought it would when I first start­ed talk­ing.

But real­ly, can you blame me? Here we are try­ing to strike up intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tion with­out a uni­ver­sal read­ing list! They don’t teach rhetoric in schools any­more either, so we’re all just mak­ing it up as we go. It’s worth try­ing. If all else fails, you can always chat about how we’re hav­ing an unsea­son­ably cold… **Grabs Paper Bag**

*Nom-nom – the sound your mouth makes when you eat some­thing you real­ly like. Nom-noms refers to the food itself which in this case is beef, which is deli­cious. See also, ‘real yum­my food’.

Addi­tions missed–Presocratic Greeks, Niet­zsche and Wittgen­stein might be impor­tant.

I also agree, some east­ern philoso­phers Con­fu­cius, Bud­dhism, Tao­ism and Zen would round it out.

For STEM would you could add Can­tor, Ein­stein, Planck, etc, maybe throw in a Wittgen­stein of the Trac­ta­tus and Rus­sell with the Log­i­cal Pos­i­tives.

To under­stand Amer­i­ca more: Whit­man, Thore­au, Twain

Women: There­sa of Aval­on, Hilde­gard of Bing­ham, Steinem

Dear Luke

Beware of the auto-cor­rect.

There­sa of Aval­on: hilar­i­ous.

As is Hilde­gard of Bing­ham.

Brod­sky would have you killed on the spot

Your com­ment was excel­lent and fun­ny, good read!