I'm delighted to say that I've been awarded a second Emergent Ventures grant, to write a book about reading great literature.

My working title is: The Common Reader's Quest

Here are some early thoughts.

Some guides like The Western Canon that describe the books and writers, and some like How to Read Literature Like a Professor  gives a simple overview of some critical ideas (like irony and symbolism). My aim is different.

I want to introduce the authors and works while explicating some key critical ideas such as the role of influence. But it's really about reading for wisdom. This is a book about the lifelong quest to read great books and to learn from them.

The quest is one of the central story types from Sir Gawain to Lord of the Rings, from Chaucer to Murdoch. The idea of the quest is also crucial to why the humanities matter.

Modern arguments that the humanities teach critical thinking skills and impart empathy are, in my view, misguided. Instead, literature, and reading, is a quest for meaning.

And what do we see in modern culture from immigration to space exploration to people travelling to "find themselves" if not the central role of the quest in our lives?

Reading literature can make you see the world differently. It expands your imagination. As Samuel Johnson said, “You can never be wise unless you love reading.”

But this isn't easy or inevitable. This book is not going to try and convince you to read Dante or Jane Austen because they will work upon you like intellectual magic or moral vegetables.

Instead, literature gives us what George Eliot calls "the raw material of moral sentiment." We choose whether we pay attention to that material, work on it, let it work upon us. Finding that meaning is not a simple case of turning pages, but of being on a reader's quest.

Reading literature can provide you with a perspective on the world that you cannot get any other way. It is a part of the quest to see, experience, and understand life that cannot be replicated, summarised, or replaced.

As W.H. Auden said, “human 'nature' is a nature continually in quest of itself.” The more we read the better equipped we are to go on the quest for meaning.