Here’s my attempt to get in touch with my literary feelings. I like all of these books and am grateful to their authors for having gone to the trouble of writing them. At the moment, I can’t imagine moving any of these books to a different category, but I may as I keep re-reading them.
Great but Too Long
Paradise Lost, by John Milton (Majestic organ tones numb the ear after a while.)
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon
A La Recherche du Temps Perdus, by Marcel Proust
Great, Except for the Ending
Kim, by Rudyard Kipling (In the end, the little Irish kid goes to work for British intelligence in Afghanistan, thereby forsaking not only his Holy Man, but also siding with the historic oppressors of his own people.)
Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (Huck sees through conventional society, it hypocrisies, its cruelty, but instead of staying to do something about it, turns his back to it and lights out for the territories.)
Paradise Lost, by John Milton (Our grandparents the orchard thieves had to go and get kicked out of a good thing.)
Great, but Marred by an Eccentricity of Manner
Travels in Arabia Deserta, by Charles Doughty
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
The American Scene, by Henry James
(Let me rethink this. The eccentricities of these wonderful books are what makes them wonderful.)
Kept Rooting for It to Be Good
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck.
Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott
Almost Too Painful to Read
Othello, by William Shakespeare
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
Perfect!
\Walden, by Henry David Thoreau (Proust wanted to learn Englisb well enough to translate Walden in French, but then learned that someone was already doing it.)
The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett
The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan
The Memory of Old Jack, by Wendell Berry
My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Graham
Plays by Moliere, translated by Richard Wilbur
Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain (Not a great book like Huckleberry Finn but not marred by an ending that you want to tear out of the book, either.)
History of the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, by Henry Adams
Nero Wolfe Mysteries, by Rex Stout
Bertie Wooster Stories, by P. G. Woodhouse
The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James
Too Much Like Life Itself to Characterize
Don Quixote, by Cervantes
Plays, by Shakespeare
The Iliad and the Odyssey, by Homer (William Cullen Bryant trans.)
Essays by Montaigne
Books Matter 
This is a great method to reconsider the greatest-value reading I’ve done. “Paradise Lost” is tremendous, but it is too long, for example. And I have to say that your appraisal of “Othello” is, in my opinion, of much greater value than that of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Getting through the play emotionally is excruciating, not only due to the feelings of pity and terror evoked, but also due to the recognition that the crystalline malevolence is utterly, entirely human.
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Bill, John Keats and Samuel Johnson have said that the play by Shakespeare that they find almost unbearable to read or watch is King Lear. l agree that it’s a tough read, but Othello is worse — I’ve been wanting to reread it for some time but keep putting it off, out of dread.
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