What Happens When a Numbers Man Falls in Love with Shakespeare and Decides to Write About It
By: Victoria Smith
Most guides to the Western Canon are written by people who have spent their entire professional lives inside it, and that immersion, for all its advantages, tends to produce a particular kind of writing that feels simultaneously authoritative and slightly airless. Richard Fallquist did not spend his career inside the humanities. He spent it inside actuarial science, building models and managing data and developing the particular discipline of mind that comes from fifty years of making complexity intelligible. And then he took that discipline and turned it toward the question of how a genuinely curious person with no formal training in the humanities navigates the greatest body of human creative achievement ever assembled. The result is Great Works and Me, and it is unlike anything else in the genre to which it nominally belongs.
What reading this book feels like is a long and surprisingly personal conversation with someone who came to these works the way most of us wish we had, slowly, deliberately, with genuine wonder rather than academic obligation. Fallquist doesn’t express enthusiasm for Shakespeare, Mozart, or Michelangelo. He describes what actually happened to him when he encountered their work, what it opened up, and what it made him think about and why he kept going back. That quality of honest personal witness is what separates this book from the cultural guides that tell you what to think about great works rather than how to find your own way into them.
The book explores something that most cultural education never quite gets around to addressing directly: the relationship between a specific human life and the works deemed great enough to outlast the civilization that produced them. Fallquist is interested in that relationship not as an abstract proposition but as a lived experience, and he shares his own experience of it with enough honesty and humor that you start thinking about your own relationship with the works you have encountered and those you have been meaning to encounter for years. That kind of self-reflection, prompted gently rather than demanded directly, is the mark of a book that does more than provide information.
His actuarial background shows up in the structure in the best possible way. The curated lists, organized by century and topic, the summaries designed to give you enough context to decide where your curiosity is actually pointing, the resource guides that tell you where to go next once a particular work has caught your interest, all of it reflects a mind that genuinely understands how to make a large and complex territory navigable without flattening it. You never feel like the lists are limiting your options. You feel like they are opening them.
Great Works and Me is the book that a lot of people have been carrying the need for without knowing it existed. The people who always meant to read more widely, to understand music more deeply, to know what they are actually looking at when they stand in front of a painting that everyone else seems to understand. Fallquist meets those people exactly where they are and walks with them from there, which is all any great guide was ever supposed to do.
If the idea of finally engaging seriously with the classics has been sitting in the back of your mind without a clear path forward, Great Works and Me by Richard Fallquist is the practical, warm, and genuinely personal guide that changes that. Pick up your copy on Amazon and discover that the Western Canon was never as far out of reach as it seemed.
