By: Patty Demarco
There is a specific kind of reader who will feel, somewhere around the third chapter of Great Works and Me, that this book was written for them in a way that feels almost uncanny. They are the reader who has spent years meaning to engage more seriously with literature, music, or art and has never quite found the entry point that felt right. Not because the desire wasn’t real but because every resource they encountered seemed to assume either that they already knew everything or that they needed to start from zero in a way that felt more like remediation than discovery. Richard Fallquist’s book is the entry point that the reader has been waiting for, and it is all the more effective for having been written by someone who was that reader not very long ago.
The reading experience is one of sustained and genuine pleasure. Fallquist has a prose style that reflects his personality in a useful way: clear and organized, occasionally funny, and always fundamentally respectful of the reader’s intelligence and autonomy. He does not tell you what to think about the works he discusses. He tells you what he thought and felt and noticed, and he trusts you to have your own response, which turns out to be exactly the right approach for a guide to works that are designed to produce personal and irreducible responses.
What the book is really about, at the level beneath the curated lists and the helpful summaries, is the possibility of a fuller life. Fallquist believes genuinely and without sentimentality that sustained engagement with great creative works makes a person’s inner life richer and more capacious and more capable of meeting the world with something approaching wisdom. He believes it because it happened to him, and the evidence of that happening is present throughout the book in the quality of attention he brings to everything he discusses.
The structural genius of the book is its refusal to be prescriptive. The lists are organized to invite exploration rather than demand completion. The summaries are generous without being exhaustive. The resource guides point outward rather than closing things off. All of it creates the experience of a territory that is large and richly mapped but entirely open to individual navigation, which is how great cultural engagement actually works and how very few guides to it have ever been designed.
Great Works and Me is a book that will outlast the season in which you read it. It will sit on your shelf and continue to be useful as your own relationship with the works it covers deepens, changes, and surprises you. Fallquist has given readers something durable and something deeply generous, and that combination is worth celebrating in unreserved terms.
For the reader who has always wanted a fuller relationship with great art, literature, and music but never found the right guide, Great Works and Me by Richard Fallquist offers exactly that kind of companion. It rewards patience. The book opens a path of cultural exploration that keeps unfolding well beyond the first read.
