On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books

Karen Swallow Prior, an English professor at Liberty University in Virginia, believes that good readers learn the lessons of life through their reading exposures. Stories have the power to teach us about the virtues and vices of life. In this engrossing read of the virtues illustrated in some of past classics, the author invokes the opinions of past philosophers, writers, and quotes from the Bible to sustain her arguments in defense of the moral quality being examined. She divides the book into three parts, the cardinal, the theological, and the heavenly virtues, based on their source. Justice is dissected in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and courage is intimately examined in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The role of the virtue “love” is painstakingly reviewed in Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych. In compelling narrative, this writer engagingly challenges the reader to discover the content and the context of the moral qualities examined in treatises by Flanney O’Connor, Jane Austin, George Saunders, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other noted authors. It is easy to both agree and disagree with comments made, but all in all, this is a vibrantly stimulating read, one that will arouse the conscience of the reader.