how to read, there remains the equally vexed question of what we should read. If the 21st century is notable for anything much at all when it comes to literature—and I use the term in its broadest sense, as will become clear—it’s the spiking of formerly big literary guns, and the dismantling of what used to be understood as the canon. In truth, the canon was both a comparatively recent phenomenon—if by this is meant a collection of texts the reading of which was deemed essential if you were to consider yourself cultured—and never by any means the overbearing and fortified phenomenon its detractors love to hate and besiege.