'A Mission to the University Extension Scheme'

I have a typically human taste for taxonomy, classifying things, sorting them into categories. There’s comfort in order. A friend in Los Angeles shares my bent and proposes three classes of books: 1. Books to read. 2. Books to reread 3. Books not to read at all Makes sense. Most of us probably follow a similar scheme without having formalized it. Here are my friend’s entries in the first category: Cicero’s Letters, Suetonius, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, the Duc de Saint-Simon’s Memoirs, Theodor Mommsen and, “till we get a better one,” Grote’s History of Greece. Little to argue with here, though I’ve not read Mandeville, Marco Polo and Grote. Here is the second category, the books to reread: Plato and Keats. “In the sphere of poetry,” he writes, “the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not the savants.” That’s a little vague but leaves plenty of room for nominations. I have an…