Gateway Books: The lessons of a defunct canon

For Bob Cox It has to start somewhere, this business of being an intellectual. Chances are, it doesn’t start well. Your early efforts are bound be misdirected, a source of subsequent embarrassment. Maybe Dead Poets Society made you want to be a writer or a professor. Maybe you read Lolita because of the Police song. Maybe you wrote poems about walking alone through dark valleys or drew pictures of your reflection in cracked mirrors. Maybe you quoted T.S. Eliot at Starbucks, hoping to be overheard. But of course you hadn’t measured out your life in coffee spoons, since you were still in the middle of puberty, had never encountered the utensils in question, and had only drunk your first real cup of coffee the week before. As a teenager, I lined the cinderblock shelves in my bedroom with novels by Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, Hermann Hesse, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus and George Orwell. These were my gateway books, my entry into the heady life of the intellectu ... Read full article.