Why Johnny Won't Read

Matt Yglesias thinks, if you want to call it that, that not reading "great books" that are "terribly written" is a good idea because, inter alia

now thanks to the glories of the Internet, I’ve gotten Brad DeLong’s explanation of the Keynesian account of the Great Depression which was much, much clearer to me than trying to read Keynes.

Why no links?  If the DeLong piece or pieces is/are so good and so much clearer than Keynes why not send a host of readers there? Here, by the way, is Keynes "General Theory," so you can judge for yourself the difficulties reading it might entail; here's a bunch of DeLong's posts on economics and the depression, so you can compare and contrast.

He does, however, allow that

it’s worth wrestling with some major works on your own for character-building reasons. And a few great thinkers are also really good prose stylists. But in many ways, I think the “poorly written great book” is the rule rather than the exception. 

The puzzling thing here is that this guy, who is supposed to be some kind of serious public intellectual, just claimed that great books he never read aren't worth reading because someone else explained what the great books' authors argued better than the great books' authors could, or more precisely better than Yglesias could have figured out on his own because great books are badly written, which is to say: he can't read very well. It seems to me that it's worth reading great books to figure out for yourself if what the secondary sources argued the primary sources argued is, in fact, what the primary source argued. It's not just the obvious dopiness that rankles, it's the lack of intellectual curiosity that baffles.