And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations. I'm very glad to be joined today by Paul

Cantor, Professor of English at the University of Virginia and a previous conversant.

Yes, it's right. Whatever the right term is there, right. Interlocutor.

Interlocutor, right. We've discussed Shakespeare, we've discussed popular culture.

People should go watch those conversations in my opinion.

They're very good ones.

But I thought today, I'm going to call you up on this, I asked,

why don't you tell someone like me who doesn't do nearly enough

reading of good books what I should read and tell everyone out there books they

should read maybe books they wouldn't automatically think of you you you changed the assignment a little bit?

Well, I was a little worried about just talking about books in general, because there'd be an awful long

list then.

But I thought I'd talked about works of literature, plays, novels, some sort stories,

that support liberty, that teaches something important about liberty and freedom.

And that's kind of a contrary, contrarian notion since I think people assume that much of literature,

you know, is the adversary culture hostile to liberty at least to economic liberty

and they get old-fashioned political liberty is not a yeah and there's some

true to that I have a certain ways of accounting for it.

One of them is that since the market economy developed a lot of authors are hostile to it.

Now they're very mistaken, they don't appreciate how much the

market economy has done for literature. In fact more people have been able to

earn livings, writing literature since the market economy develop but the problem is they are

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