BORN INTO THE MAGIC REALM

My father was Joseph Roy Flynn, born in 1885,one of seven children who survived to maturity.Like most Irish-American families of the day,he and his four brothers all went into factory work betweenthe ages of eleven and fourteen, so none of them got ahigh-school education. My grandfather was too proud toput his daughters into Anglo-Saxon homes as servants, soAunt Marie and Aunt Lucy did finish high school.

My father's first job was in the Rumsey-SycamoreBed Spring Factory. In 1900, when he was fifteen, the bossput up a sign that said, "If this county goes for WilliamJennings Bryan [the more liberal candidate for President],there will be no work for two weeks." They voted for Bryanand were locked out for two weeks.

In their youth, all seven siblings worked as wanderingactors in a troupe that offered plays—The Trials of theWorking Girl, Ingomar, the Barbarian, The Hunchback ofNotre Dame—around small-town Missouri. This was about1910. However, they advanced to the professions becausein those days credentialing was absent, and you couldactually better yourself without an irrelevant college degree.

My father and two of his brothers became especiallywell-educated because, despite lack of formal education,they loved to read. My Uncle Ed read at night on a navalship in World War I. Family legend has it that he used atorch, or flashlight. These were available by 1911 but it ispossible he used a ship's lantern. As a result of his reading,he was one of six enlisted men who passed an exam to qualifyfor officer's training. Later he left the navy to becomeone of the most distinguished real estate entrepreneurs inWashington, D.C. He handled the famous Watergate Apartmentswhere the break-in occurred that eventually led tothe downfall of President Richard Nixon. He was the onlyone of the boys who did not have an alcohol problem, adisease prominent among Irish-American males (readEugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night). UncleHenry was a distinguished journalist whose life and careerwere ruined by alcoholism. Uncle Jack became a naval commanderwho drank himself to death on Guam. I do notknow whether Uncle Paul liked to read, although he didwork at the Library of Congress.

My own generation, with one exception, has beenlargely exempt, so alcoholism is not in our genes. (Maybereading is.) I suspect that since we were all college graduatesthe struggle to reach our potential was less grim.Perhaps it was just our professions because in the past themilitary and journalism were staffed by hard-drinkingmen (there were no women). Journalism was on the fringeof social respectability. The police were corrupt and didnot like reporters saying so, which meant there were risks.My father's teeth on one side of his lower jaw weredamaged when a policeman hit him with a blackjack.

My father was a drunk but not an alcoholic. He gotdrunk most evenings but was always sober the next day forwork and was never jailed for public drunkenness. He oftenwent to the police station to bail out his brothers. He wasan excellent journalist but was out of work for about sixyears during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Like somany others, he was rescued by the onset of World War II,when he entered public service as a press-relations expert.Of all the family, he loved reading the most. He becamehighly educated, with a vocabulary larger than my own.To show off, he would do The New York Times' crosswordpuzzle in ink, just to advertise that he never made mistakes.He loved reading aloud, and when I was four read me allthe novels of Charles Dickens. So I was born to reading.It simply never occurred to me not to read for pleasure.

TEENAGERS AND UNIVERSITIES

I have been a university lecturer for fifty-four years, andhave taught at the University of Otago for the last forty-four.I have enjoyed my teaching more than I can say. Butone thing has troubled me greatly. At universities in bothAmerica and New Zealand, universities such as WisconsinState, Maryland, Cornell, Canterbury and Otago, I havenoticed a trend: fewer and fewer students read great worksof literature.

This is true even of my brightest students. It was trueat Cornell, a university so élite that everyone was a brightstudent. Ask students what novelist they like the best andyou get a blank, or some reference to the author of airporttrash. And it is not just students: many of the universityprofessors who are my colleagues no longer read outsidethe professional literature. Thus, if you read great books,as my Uncle Ed did by torchlight, you will know morethan many university professors.

What has happened to young people from my timeto this time? In 2008 and 2009 I was at the Russell SageFoundation in New York City and studied test trendson vocabulary in America. The tests did not includespecialized vocabulary, but sampled the vocabulary usedin everyday life. Between 1948 and 2006, adults had madehuge gains but schoolchildren, including those in theirteens, had made very marginal gains. If we assume thatthe two age groups were similar in 1948, teenagers havefallen far behind: today fewer than nineteen percent ofthem have a non-specialized vocabulary that overlaps withthat of the top fifty percent of their parents. I refer to theiractive vocabulary, the words they can use when they initiatea conversation. Passive vocabulary refers to the words youcan understand when someone else uses them. Here thegulf between teenager and adult has grown very little, ifat all.

In sum, in 1948 teenagers could both understand anduse the vocabularies of their parents. In 2006 they couldunderstand their parents but, to a surprising degree,could not initiate a conversation using adult language.The damage is not permanent: they make up some of thegap if they go to university, and a few years after theyhave entered the world of work they make up the rest.

I have spoken of teenagers. As late as 1950, the term"teenager" did not exist. Those aged thirteen to nineteenwanted to become adults and enjoy the privileges of adults,such as lack of supervision and an income of their own.I never had money in my pocket except that given meby my parents for a specific purpose, say to do an errandor see a film. Today there is something called teenage subculture,and its members have the prerogatives of adulthoodwithout the responsibilities. They have enormouspurchasing power and, thanks to the automobile, a privacythat relieves them of close supervision. This subculture isso attractive that some young adults want to remain in itthrough their twenties and even their thirties, as parentswho wish their aging children would get a job and moveaway from home are well aware.

Teenage subculture has developed its own Englishdialect. However, I had never realized that it had becomeso insulated that its members were not being socializedinto their society's speech community.

It is an audio culture with a constant surround ofpopular music. It is a visual culture with leisure spent onthe web and watching TV and films. Computer gamesare mesmerizing. Recently a sixteen-year-old killed hiseighteen-year-old brother over access to PlayStation. Noteenager in recent years has killed another in an argumentover who was to get to read Tolstoy's War and Peace.Their subculture does not put a high priority on readingliterature that requires concentration and wide generalknowledge. After all, you are unlikely to enjoy War andPeace if the vocabulary is unfamiliar and you do not knowwho Napoleon was or where Russia is. The book runs tofive volumes and 640 pages. If you love reading, you likelong books because you never want a good book to end.If you read only as a last resort, when you cannot useelectronic devices on an airplane, you will prefer to read amagazine about Paris Hilton.

I suggest that teenage culture not only gives youngpeople a vocabulary gap, but also creates a love-of-readingdeficit. While the former is closed with age, all too oftenthe latter persists throughout life. Going to university doesnot do much good. Each university department assignsspecialized reading within its field, and the more readingassigned the less time students have for leisure reading.If neither teenage nor university subcultures inculcate alove of reading, conveyancing in a law office is not goingto step into the breach.

THE MAGIC REALM

This book will take you into a world far more wonderfulthan the world of work and entertainment. At universityI try to make converts by assigning works of literature thatshed light on human psychology, history or philosophy.Some students respond by asking me to give them listsof books. Well, here is your list. But I also want to makeconverts of those who have not yet gone or will never go touniversity.

The educational establishment may ignore you but Iwill not. I remember my own family and how they educatedthemselves. Many in my running club have never been touniversity. Some of them are among the most intelligentand intellectually curious people I know. Some of them arebetter informed than university students about almosteverything, except the narrow knowledge a graduate getsfrom majoring in physics or commerce or engineering.Some of my running companions know who Hitler was.As for my students, I once set an exam question abouttyranny in the twentieth century. Only a few students couldvolunteer Hitler's name. The history of Germany from 1918to 1945 is the story of how this man helped change whatwas perhaps the most civilized nation in Europe into anengine of cruelty almost beyond comprehension. Fortunately,a great novelist has charted the period for you: ErichMaria Remarque.

Let me convince you that you can make time to read.Read for forty minutes before bed each night to clear yourmind of the day's concerns. Start with five great novels:Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Slave; Thornton Wilder, TheBridge of San Luis Rey; E Scott Fitzgerald, The GreatGatsby; Erich Maria Remarque, Spark of Life; and CalderWillingham, End as a Man. I will make a bet: at least twoof these will move you to tears and awaken emotionsbeyond anything pop culture can do.

LEARNING TO BE FREE

In a book in press, I try to give people the concepts theyneed to comprehend the complexities of the modernworld. I want them to be free. I want them to be ableto understand the world, rather than just be swept alongby the river of time with no real comprehension of whatis happening to them. But I stress that a full toolkit ofconcepts is not enough. You need to know somethingabout science, and nations other than your own and theirhistories, and the human condition.

I am going to try to convince you that learning aboutthe world can be delightful, because it can be done byreading for pleasure: novels, histories so well-written thatthey read like novels, poetry, and plays. In addition, thereare some films you should try to see. I have chosen booksnot only for artistic merit but also for their power toeducate. This means I have excluded some of the greatestnovels ever written: their content would not acquaint youwith a particular time or place. And I have included somebooks that are merely entertaining (only a few) becausethey are informative. The numbered works, those thatwill at least entertain, come to 200. Does that sound likea lot? Don't think of it that way. Education is a lifelongquest. Select out the ones you think you would enjoy,read them one by one, and luxuriate in the pleasure. Thelot would take you only about five years if you read anhour or so a night.

They will help you to liberate yourself. You can knowenough accounting to help a corporation evade theirtaxes, own a large house and drive an expensive car, andyet be no freer than a medieval serf, buffeted about bysocial forces he could not comprehend. Or you can entera magic realm in which people are more interesting,informed, amusing and intelligent than anyone youencounter in everyday life. You can learn about our past,its wars and triumphs, you can learn about our time, itssins and joys, about America, Britain, the Russian soul,and why we will all have to settle for less if our planet isto survive.

SCIENCE AND EARLY CIVILIZATION

I will recommend some books that are not aboutmainstream science but are too good to miss. One ofthese is C.L. Barber, The Story of Language (1). Barber'sviews on the origins of language are interesting, but themain theme is how one small cluster of closely interrelateddialects—called Proto-Indo-European—that were spokensome seven thousand years ago in the vicinity of theCaspian Sea is the ancestor of most of the major languagesof Europe, Iran and India, languages that are today thenative tongues of approximately three billion people. Inthe process of discussing how these languages originated,Barber will introduce you to the prehistory of Europe.

The ancient Greeks invented the mathematics andscience that led to Newton and Einstein: see the relevantchapters of Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Greek World (2). Theywill awaken in you an admiration of Archimedes as agenius perhaps unsurpassed in our civilization: "so greata mathematician it seems impertinent to praise him." Hesolved geometrical problems that involve leaps of theimagination so breathtaking that he may have had at hisdisposal mathematical techniques not "discovered" untilthe seventeenth century. I suspect that you will not beable to resist reading the whole book and will thus learnabout classical Greece in general.

A wonderful book in its own right and a window onpre-classical Greece is John Chadwick's The Deciphermentof Linear B (3). It tells the tragic story of Michael Ventris,who died in a car crash in 1956 at the age of thirty-four.Before his death, he translated—with Chadwick's help—tabletsfrom Knossos, an ancient city on the island of Crete.Ventris had a remarkable gift for languages; he spoke sixEuropean languages and read Latin and classical Greek.The brilliant deductions that led him to discover that LinearB was in fact pre-Homeric Greek read like a detective story.He established that the great civilization of ancient Cretewas part of the mainland Mycenaean Greek civilizationthat preceded the dark ages of Greece and Homer.

To get the full story of how mathematics evolvedfrom its earliest beginnings to the discovery of calculusby Newton and Leibnitz, read Alfred Hooper, Makers ofMathematics (4). Appropriately, there is a picture of anabacus on the cover. It is thought some such computationaldevice led the Arabs to the crucial concept of zeroas a number, rather than as the absence of anything.

This book will make you appreciate how much theprogress of mathematics has depended on the developmentof mathematical notation. Originally problems werestated in prose. Imagine you had to solve a problem suchas this: There is a number such that if the whole of it isadded to one-seventh of it, the result will be nineteen.The Egyptian solution to this problem consists of a complexseries of steps developed in a long essay leading tothe conclusion that, if 16 and 17 were separated by eight"leaps", then the number would be at the fifth leap betweenthem. We would simply write: x+x/7= 19. Then thesolution is easy. Take both sides of the equation times 7.This gives 7x+1x=7x19 (or 133). Thus 8x=133, whichmeans x = 16 5/8.