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How to Be a Serious Reader

The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem.

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The Shock of the Old

The great minds of the Renaissance believed that such works represented timeless standards of artistic excellence that could not be erased by the passing centuries. In other words, evaluating art was like pursuing the good life. After you discovered the pathway to do that, you kept to the course.