As you have begun to read this article, I will assume you are a reader. By this, I mean you regard reading creative works of literature as a good, sometimes delightful, and often beneficial way to spend your time. You know that reading delivers aesthetic and intellectual sustenance. You understand that it is not simply about achieving a minimum level of comprehension as one navigates modern life. Being that person, you will relish Good Bones: Glorious Relics from the Age of Reading, a collection of essays written over a span of a quarter century by literary critic Brooke Allen. They are elegant, erudite, and witty. They are also about good or very good writers whose work would be more valued if our civilization were not rapidly abandoning the best aspects of its traditional artistic culture. 

In her preface, Allen writes, “We are in the middle of a seismic cultural change, as transformative as that which followed the appearance of the printing press half a millennium ago. And just as that invention turned the Western world into a literary society, we are now transitioning into a post-literate one … The authors I’ve covered in this collection, though all were famous in the very recent past, are figures that will probably disappear in the post-literate society, if they have not done so already.”

With each essay, and by bringing them together in one jewel-laden volume, Allen is engaged in an act of literary preservation and respect. On her cover is a photograph of a beautiful 13th-century ivory reliquary casket carved with the figures of eight apostles and symbols of the four evangelists. It is a sadly apt choice, for the artists and the works contained are, as she writes, “beautiful relics, the sacred bones of a literary culture being ground into dust by technology.”

The essays differ sharply from one another, which is natural since they were written over many years and........

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