By Frank Baraldini
Something about the phrase Western Canon has always functioned as a mild deterrent. It sounds like a commitment you need to have been building since childhood, like a club that stopped accepting new members sometime around your junior year of high school, when everyone else was apparently reading Dante, and you were doing something else entirely. Richard Fallquist felt that deterrent too, and rather than accepting it as a permanent condition, he decided to do something about it in the characteristically methodical way possible: he built a list. And then another list. And then a framework for thinking about all of those lists together that turned into a guide that turns into this book, which is effectively welcoming cultural resources currently available to the adult reader who wants to begin or deepen their engagement with the works that have shaped the civilization they live in.
Reading Great Works and Me produces something you do not always expect from a book with as much organizational structure as this one: genuine emotional warmth. Fallquist writes like someone who has been genuinely changed by what he found and who finds it slightly hard to believe that he waited as long as he did to go looking. That quality of recovered wonder, the sense of someone who found something extraordinary later than he might have and is now incapable of not sharing it, gives the book an energy that carries you through even the more reference-heavy sections without any loss of momentum.
Underneath the practical architecture of lists and summaries and resource guides, the book is exploring something genuinely meaningful about the relationship between individual human lives and the cultural inheritance that surrounds them. Fallquist takes seriously the idea that great works are not decorative achievements to be admired from a respectful distance but active resources that can do real things for a real person navigating a real life. He makes that case through his own experience rather than through argument, and his experience is compelling enough to make the case powerfully.
The structure he built from his actuarial background is, in practice, one of the thoughtful organizational achievements in the genre. It is genuinely designed around how a curious adult actually engages with unfamiliar cultural territory, which is not in a straight line from Homer to the present but in a series of personal discoveries that branch and double back and accelerate in unexpected directions. The book accommodates that reality rather than imposing an artificial order on it, which makes it useful in a way that more rigidly sequential guides simply are not.
This is the book for anyone who has ever stood in front of a great painting or sat through a symphony or started a novel by someone widely considered a genius and felt the uncomfortable suspicion that they were missing something essential. Fallquist removes that suspicion by removing the distance, and the world that opens up on the other side of that removal is one worth every page it takes to get there.
For any reader who has long felt that the Western Canon was more of a wall than a door, Great Works and Me by Richard Fallquist offers a way through. The book is available on Amazon, and it reframes the works readers have meant to encounter as patient companions rather than intimidating obstacles.
