A bucket for what the oldest books can lend Grunt Force. It starts with one long video from The Second Story, whose host argues that “classic” now gets stuck on any good old novel, when it used to mean something narrower: the books a civilization was founded on. I’ve kept her definition and her advice on reading, and left out her account of who’s to blame. The thread I’m pulling for the novel is hers too: a society writes down what it learned while trying to make good people, and what it found dangerous.
What counts as a classic
By her rule, the classics are the founding record of the West: Greek and Roman history, epic poetry, drama, philosophy and myth, then the medieval books that built on them. Being good and old isn’t enough. Laurus, a novel from 2012, is beautiful and nobody calls it a classic; Jane Eyre was only 51 years old when C. S. Lewis was born, so it can’t be one of his “old books” either.
The test of time she means is measured in empires, not decades. So Austen, Dostoevsky and Tolkien are masterpieces, maybe classics in six or seven hundred years, and not yet. That’s where I’d argue with her a little: I’ll keep reading Tolkien like scripture. But it’s a useful rule for a writer, because it says which shelf your own book is really competing with.
Standing on the shoulders
She pictures literature as a tower. The Greeks built the foundation, the Romans studied it and built the next floor (revering Greek work even after beating Greece), and the Middle Ages kept adding floors with respect for every one below. In France’s quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, Charles Perrault’s side called Homer overrated, and Boileau’s side said only time decides what lasts and that old and new work can share a shelf. Her point is that the writers who built on the old are the ones still read, Racine and La Fontaine among them, and Perrault’s fairy tales lean on older stories too.
For Grunt Force: that’s close to the book’s own engine. Every policy on the base is a clever modern fix that ignores something people already learned the hard way about work, freedom and being watched.
Healthy and sickly
Goethe, quoted near the end of that argument, said he called the classical healthy and the romantic sickly, and that the line has nothing to do with age: new work is weak when it’s weak, old work strong when it’s strong. He knew from experience. The Sorrows of Young Werther, written at 25, was a runaway bestseller with fans copying the hero, and he came to regret it. What lasted was Faust, finished just before he died at 82.
The Frenchman Sainte-Beuve, in an 1850 essay, said a classic restores order and beauty; she adds truth as their sister, and points to Aristotle’s Poetics treating all three as essential. For Grunt Force: write the long game. A trend ages faster than the problem underneath it.
How to read them
It matters how you read an old book, not just that you did. The translation matters, and so do the history and culture it came from. Read the Iliad only to judge it by today’s values and you might as well not have read it. Her line on translations is to bring the reader up rather than the book down, so pick a careful translation with notes over the simplest one. Her best image: read these books as doors, not mirrors.
My Grunt Force list
The books I’m reading for the novel, and why each one is on the pile. The pairings are mine.
| Book | Why it’s on my list |
|---|---|
| Plato, The Republic | A city where everyone is assigned the work they’re suited to, designed by people sure they’re helping. The base’s algorithm, with better prose. |
| Xenophon, Anabasis | Ten thousand stranded soldiers who elect their own leaders and walk home: what the Grunts are trained out of. |
| Homer, The Iliad | What war costs the ordinary men in it, for the Beautification zone chapters. |
| Homer, The Odyssey | A long way home with everything in the way, for Andre and his kid. |
| Virgil, The Aeneid | Duty over want, and a new nation built on it. |
| Marcus Aurelius, Meditations | Someone with all the power reminding himself to use it well, for the Sergeants. |
| Seneca, Letters on Ethics | How to stay free when you’re comfortable, which is Kevin’s whole problem. |
| Aristotle, Poetics | The oldest craft book there is: plot, reversal and recognition. |
| Aesop’s Fables | The other shelf I write for. |
| Dante, The Divine Comedy | A guided tour of a system built to sort people, one level at a time. |
The ones I’d read for fun as well are on my Impossible List with a little temple on the cover.
Sources
One video, watched October 2026. Everything above is my synthesis of her argument. The Lewis, Goethe and Sainte-Beuve lines are as she gives them; I haven’t checked them against the originals, or her date arithmetic on Jane Eyre.
Most of the video traces how “classic” came to cover modern novels, through publishers’ classics lines, the Great Books courses and mid-century literary magazines, and presents it as a deliberate project to reshape Western culture. I left that out. It rests on claims about particular people’s motives, backgrounds and private lives that I can’t check, and the novel doesn’t need it. Her history of the quarrel also differs from Britannica’s: she has the Académie française censoring the Ancients for the Moderns, while Britannica has the Académie itself split between the camps, with Perrault’s 1687 poem as his main shot. So I’ve kept only the two attitudes.
The cover is Thomas Cole’s The Consummation of Empire (1836), the third painting in The Course of Empire, in the public domain.
"The Classics" Are a Plot to Destroy Western Culture
The old definition of a classic, the tower, Goethe and Sainte-Beuve, and how to read old books. Her account of who changed the definition is left out.
Ancients and Moderns
Who stood in each camp of the quarrel: Perrault for the Moderns, Boileau and La Fontaine for the Ancients.
Charles Perrault
The Académie split by the quarrel, and Perrault's 1687 poem, where they differ from the video.
Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire, 1836
The cover painting.