A correspondent writes: “I am a recent college graduate, and, as you might expect, I’ve come to find my liberal arts education somewhat lacking. I was hoping you could persuade Mr. Teachout to suggest a few interesting reads on a range of topics: history, art, music, architecture, interesting biographies, natural history, conservative classics (not including Goldberg’s Canon), etc. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.”

Talk about catnip! K-Lo agrees that other Cornerites should be encouraged to wade in, so I shall limit myself to three suggestions, with the caveat that this list would have been different had I drawn it up ten minutes later:

BIOGRAPHY: Resisting all temptations to cite myself, I will instead recommend a book that I have read at leat a dozen times, always with the utmost pleasure and profit: W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson.

Dr. Johnson is one of the very few writers whose inner life can rightly be called heroic and inspiring, and Bate tells his story superlatively well. If you haven’t read Boswell, this book will make you want to do so immediately; if you have, it’ll tell you everything Boswell doesn’t. It’s a model of the biographer’s art.

MUSIC – Lewis Lockwood’s Beethoven: The Music and the Life does the impossible–it sheds fresh light on the most written-about of all classical composers. It’s not so much a biography as a guide to the music that places it in the context of Beethoven’s tempestuous life, and it’s written in such a way as to be completely accessible to the attentive layman.

ART — Karen Wilkin’s Giorgio Morandi is a profusely illustrated monograph about a great Italian artist most Americans don’t know. Morandi specialized in still lifes of the most severe kind, arranging and rearranging a dozen bottles, boxes, pitchers and vases on a table top and painting them over and over again. His work is endlessly subtle and refreshing to the eye, and Wilkin writes about it with a clarity and elegance befitting one of our best art critics. Chances are you’ve never heard of Morandi. Read this book and you’ll wonder why you hadn’t.

Over to you, dear colleagues.