Theologian Fred Sanders, who teaches a great books program at Biola ‘s Torrey Honors Institute , lists eight qualities that make a book a “great book” :
7. A great book is weird. It’s got angles, edges, textures, and stuff sticking out that you wouldn’t have predicted. Any editor would have smoothed those things out and made the book more normal. But if great books had editors, they were in on the conspiracy of oddity. Great books have idiosyncrasies; textbooks don’t. That’s why you learn from textbooks, but you don’t love them or quote them. In some fields, the most comprehensive textbooks are by entire teams of scholars, and are intentionally normed and edited to sound exactly like the way everybody talks. That kind of educational discourse has its place, but don’t try to run a Socratic discussion from it.
