The Written World’s Rewards

Before it is anything else, the reading and writing of literature is a work of freedom. In a cultural moment that seems to have forgotten this timeless reality, Christopher Scalia’s eminently reasonable new book, 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read), will serve as a needed corrective.

By taking a healthy step back from the simplistic empty signals and false analogies that continue to churn online, Scalia implicitly resists attempts to associate conservatism with either rough-and-ready philistinism on the one hand or socioeconomic snobbery on the other. His book speaks to that endangered species, the “general reader” and even reads as an effort to speak the species out of endangerment and back into being.