Where to Begin — Classic Literature for Every Reader

I am thirty-one. I have never read Wuthering Heights. I have heard about it my whole adult life. A man I once dated called it the greatest love story ever written. A song I love is named after it. The cover has watched me from bookstore tables for ten years. I have opened it three times. The Yorkshire moors and the strange names and the spectral cold of the prose turned me back each time. I told myself I would read it one day. One day kept moving. Last month I read its Wide Reads page on a long flight. I learned it was not a love story at all. It was something stranger and harder and more honest. For the first time, I wanted to read it. Not to finish it. Not to say I had. To meet it. The book is on my list now in a way it never was before.

I am forty-five. I have never read The Prince. I have never read The Art of War. I have been quoting both books for twenty years. Every time someone in a meeting says the ends justify the means, that is Machiavelli. Every time a leadership podcast quotes the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting, that is Sun Tzu. I have nodded. I have agreed. I have never opened either spine. I told myself I would get to them. Then I was lied to by a partner I trusted, and a colleague I respected destroyed his career out of spite, and the world started to feel like it had teeth. I read both Wide Reads pages in one weekend. Machiavelli was not a manual for sociopaths. He was a man who had watched his city fall, trying to teach survival. Sun Tzu was not a fortune cookie. He was a general who had seen what war does, trying to keep men out of it. I bought both books the next day. They are on my desk. They are next on the list.

I am sixty-three. I have never read Saint John of the Cross. I have heard the phrase the dark night of the soul my whole adult life. It comes up in sermons. It comes up in books I admire. Friends use it casually to describe a hard week. I have nodded as if I knew. I did not. And Proverbs, I had read four times in my life, the way you read a road sign, for direction, not for company. I did not know what to do with either book. Then last year I lost almost everything I had built. I could not pray. I could not stop crying. A friend mentioned the Wide Reads page on Saint John of the Cross. I read it on my phone in the parking lot of a hospital. I sat in the car for an hour after. The phrase I had used my whole life had a meaning I had never touched. The book is on my bedside table now. I have not opened it yet. I will. The same week I went back to Proverbs. For the first time in fifty-five years, I want to read it.