'I Hopped All Over the Canon'

“There was no pattern to my reading. It was all hand-to-mouth.” When young I was indiscriminate, reading anything I fancied and that chance put in front of me, from Julius Caesar to Philip K. Dick. If one’s critical sense is to amount to more than mere snobbery, I don’t know any other way to develop respectable tastes later in life. I’m almost saying, “Junk is good for you,” at least in moderation and in the narrow sense of giving you something against which to contrast good writing. Any book, potentially, can teach you something, even if it’s only never to read it again. In passing on Thursday I mentioned reading while in high school Jews, God and History by Max I. Dimont. A reader wrote to ask if I was Jewish and, if not, “Why did you read it? It seems like an unusual choice for a high-school student.” No question, I was an unusual high-school student. And not Jewish. I had always been interested in Judaism and Jewish history, I had Jewish friends and the Six-Day War likely had…