How to Be a Serious Reader

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.

Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Henry Oliver.

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Henry Oliver is the literary critic behind The Common Reader, a newsletter helping you make the most of your reading. He’s also a Research Fellow and Emerging Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. I sat down with Henry to talk about literature, poetry, the relationship between reading and empathy, and how to develop your taste.

Below is an extract of our conversation. For the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page.

A CONVERSATION WITH HENRY OLIVER

Jared: Henry Oliver, thank you for joining me.

Henry: Thank you for having me.

Jared: So I want to ask you about Philistines and how Philistines have taken over the culture. I think the phrase you used is ‘Philistine supremacy’?

Henry: That's right. A lot of the time, when we talk about Philistines, we mean, oh, that awful person I know who doesn't appreciate the high arts. And it's a kind of snob thing. I'm not interested in that. Everyone's a Philistine, right? I'm a Philistine. You're a Philistine.

The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem. And there are just so many examples like that—that sort of suggest that the elite tier has kind of given up on being elites in a way.

I think part of it is we had what was called prestige TV, and people wanted to write about that and talk about that.