If you’re looking for a summer read and can’t seem to find anything interesting on the shelf, there’s a new book you should consider. Actually, it’s a book about other books you should read.
Hot off the press, “13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read)” is an excellent introduction to a collection of novels that engage with the conservative ideals through the art form of literature. In a conversation with The Daily Signal, author Christopher Scalia explained the inspiration for the book, its purpose for the conservative movement, and its appeal as a list of fictional works.
“If you talk to conservatives who like to read fiction, you can find them,” Scalia said. “But they tend to praise the same handful of books or authors. Those aren’t necessarily bad books or authors, and the purpose of this book is not to say stop reading those books—but it’s an attempt to expand the conservative bookshelf a little bit.”
The book reviews authors who deal with themes of interest to conservatives or depict conservative characters and their values in sympathetic ways. Scalia aims to broaden the conservative’s library to authors beyond Evelyn Waugh, J.R.R. Tolkien, or Fydor Dostoevsky.
Ordered chronologically, the book examines 13 more obscure novels by well-known authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and George Eliot but also introduces the reader to names like Leif Enger and Christopher Beha. It was the important, and often overlooked, tie between conservatism and fiction that helped Scalia curate the list, he said.
“Over the past couple of decades, conservatives have recognized how important culture is in shaping a people, shaping a nation,” said Scalia. “We’ve seen how conservatives have tried to act on that by forming production studios and the like, but I think fiction, and the novel in particular, is something we might overlook, in part because there might be the assumption that literature is necessarily a left-wing cultural concern.”
That’s a big mistake, said Scalia, and a very unconservative one.
“Closing yourself off from the novel is closing yourself off to some of the greatest cultural accomplishments of Western civilization in the past several 100 years. And that’s just not a very conservative thing to do.”
But apart from avoiding a mistake, why should conservatives, in particular, read these books?
“The primary reason anybody should read any book is because it’s enjoyable,” Scalia argued. “Nobody’s going to want to read a book because it’s the literary equivalent of eating your broccoli. My hope is that all of these novels are first and foremost great works of literature: They will entertain people, they will delight people.”
The importance of fiction for Scalia goes beyond the enjoyment of its art form, however.
“Conservatives will especially appreciate these works because they have important lessons,” he said. “Fiction gives us ways of understanding the world that you can’t get from nonfiction. One of the things that people always say about fiction is that it helps readers develop a sympathetic imagination—it helps us understand other people more deeply.”
“That doesn’t make us necessarily better people,” Scalia noted. “Stalin had a great library, and he was not a good person. [Reading fiction] doesn’t mean that we suddenly agree with ideas we didn’t agree with or we suddenly like evil people we’re reading about, but it means that we understand more deeply how people think, how people react to or could react to different situations.”
“Like all great art, fiction uses what is not literally true to understand what is literally true or what is possible,” he said before warning, “If we lose fiction, we’re losing an important way of understanding the world and the people around us.”
