"Breaking Bread With The Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind" by Alan Jacobs

The writing of Alan Jacobs has proven useful to me over time. In 2011, when I was recovering from multiple surgeries -- and the brain fog that made sustained reading nearly impossible for me -- "The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction" was both the kind of encouragement I needed, and the first book of any real substance that I was able to complete. A few years ago, when I'd just about abandoned any hope or motivations of bridging ideological divides, his more recent book "How to Think" caused me to reconsider. It's a book, in fact, that I need to revisit -- but his latest, "Breaking Bread With the Dead" is a fine companion to both those earlier books, a guide not on how to think but how to ground your thinking by careful consideration of words written in the far-ago past.

One of Jacobs' central beliefs here is that reading old books -- not just books, but old books -- can remove us from the constant flow of information that washes over us through our social media feeds, that they can take us out of the concerns of the moment so that we can take both a broader view but also a more nuanced view of the times before us. Those old books can also help us encounter diverse and strange ideas in -- to use modern parlance (mine, not Jacobs') a safe space.

"Reading old books is an education in reckoning with otherness; its hope is not to make the other identical with me but rather, in a sense, my neighbor," he writes, adding on the next page: "We do not have the same intensity of involvement in the past that we do in the present, and it's precisely that which makes the past most useful to us."

Jacobs worries about a modern tendency to dispose of old books because their authors -- or the times their authors lived in -- held different morals than our own, about race, about gender relations. He doesn't ask us to suspend our judgments, though. Instead, Jacobs suggests we bring our judgments with us in an informed way -- to find the nuggets of beauty and/or truth that might reside in a work -- and provides some examples of how this might be done. And he cautions against an opposite impulse, as well: "To say 'This text offends me, I will read no further' may be shortsighted; but to read a 'great book' from the past with such reverence that you can't see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is no better."

In "How to Think" Jacobs urges readers to be able to articulate views we disagree with in such a fashion that the persons holding those views would understand and express them, instead of how we might cariacature them. A similar thread flows through this book, a nudge to read stuff that doesn't share our precise viewpoints anyway. And to be generous toward the people who wrote those words. They built the world we inherited; some other people will inherit the world we build on top of that. We may hope they are generous to us, as well.

"When we own our kinship to those people," he writes of old books," they may come alive for us not just as exemplars of narrowness and wickedness that we have overcome, but as neighbors and even teachers. When we acknowledge that even when they go far astray they do so in ways that we surely would have, had we been formed as they were, we extend them not just attention but love, the very love that we hope our descendants will extend to us."

In offering us ideas about to read and wrestle with old and difficult books, then, Jacobs also points a way toward a way we can live and think morally in a world that often seems immoral, as well. He uses the word "love" -- I might offer the word "generous." Call it a literary Golden Rule: "Read unto others as you would have them read unto you."