"How could anyone not justify taking time to read Great Expectations I wondered? Or Homer's Odyssey and many other indispensable, life-changing books? What accounts for the difference between [other's] attitude and mine? Most obviously, I have acquired a taste for literary classics and they have not. To me they are treasures that I cannot live without." (ix)
Leland Ryken offers in this little work (1991) a brief defense of Christians reading and evaluating the "classics" of literature, using eight examples: The Odyssey, Canterbury Tales, Macbeth, Paradise Lost, The Scarlet Letter, Great Expectations, The Death of Ivan Illych, The Stranger, and a bonus chapter on poetry. He frames each as coming from a different genre, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each and how he believes Christians should approach them. The best stuff in here was the introduction and overview--there are definitely some points I'll be raising with my students the next time they question my curriculum choices. His chapter on Canterbury Tales was noticeably weak; Chaucer winds up sounding far more like a proto-late-20th C author than a medieval.
