The award for most borrowed book goes to ...

The most frequently borrowed book from my library is Good Reading, an annotated list of good books.

It’s not close. I can’t tell you how many copies of this little paperback have been lost to friends who had every intention of returning it. My policy is to buy every copy I see in used bookstores.

The book was compiled by the Committee on College Reading and edited by J. Sherwood Weber. The edition I have been able to hang onto is the 35th edition, copyright 1969.

Good Reading started as a pamphlet in 1932. It was to be a “modest guide to supplementary reading” for college students. Taken as a whole, the collection of recommendations is one view of what an educated person should know.

These lists or canons are out of fashion. The problem, of course, is that “one view” part. Who’s view? And who gets to decide? And why is the prevailing view always white, male, Protestant, privileged … and so on?

I was aware of the controversy when I went to college decades ago and tried to find other voices, other perspectives. Whatever its limits as a canon, Good Reading was a place to start.

All this comes to mind because, it seems to me, we don’t have quite enough reading materials that we hold in common. I’m thinking of things that might count as secular scriptures — texts that could start a conversation, if only people on two sides of an argument had read them.