By: KC Cronin
There is a particular kind of intelligence that doesn’t get enough credit in conversations about culture: the intelligence of the genuinely curious non-specialist. The person who comes to great works of art not with a thesis to prove or a career to build but with a simple and sincere desire to understand what all the fuss is about and to find out whether these things can actually do something for a real life being lived in the present. Richard Fallquist is that person, and the fact that he spent his career as a consulting actuary rather than a literature professor turns out to be not a limitation but a genuine advantage. He reads these works the way many of their intended readers approach them, with fresh eyes and no particular obligation to the academic conversation surrounding them, and Great Works and Me is the record of what he found.
The reading experience this book provides is one of the more pleasurable I have had with a nonfiction guide in recent memory. Fallquist writes with a lightness that never tips into superficiality, moving through centuries of human creative achievement with enough personal reflection attached to each work or tradition he addresses that you always feel his presence in the material rather than just his organizational hand. He tells you what these things did to him and why he kept going, and the honesty of that account is what keeps the book from ever feeling like a catalog.
What Fallquist is really writing about, if you follow the thread underneath the practical content, is the relationship between a single human life and the enormous accumulated project of human self-expression that we call culture. He is interested in what happens to a person who takes that relationship seriously, who decides that the examined life Socrates described is worth pursuing and that the great works are among the useful tools available for that pursuit. That interest is communicated not through philosophical argument but through personal testimony, which turns out to be considerably more persuasive.
The organizational structure he built from his actuarial background is, genuinely, one of the strongest parts of the book. The curated lists are not daunting. They are exciting. Each one represents a set of discoveries waiting to be made, and the summaries and resource guides attached to them give you exactly enough to get started without overwhelming you with the sense that you have to master everything before you are allowed to enjoy anything.
Great Works and Me is the book that proves cultural literacy is not a credential you earn in school. It is a practice you build throughout your life, one work at a time, one moment of genuine connection at a time, and it is available to anyone willing to show up for it. Fallquist shows up for it on every page and makes it very easy to want to do the same.
If you want a guide to the Western Canon that treats you like a curious and capable adult rather than a student who needs to be corrected, Great Works and Me by Richard Fallquist is the one you have been looking for. You can find Great Works and Me on Amazon and begin building the kind of relationship with great art, literature, and music that actually sticks.
