A like mind

I was joyed today when I came across the Touchstone magazine article, "Top Twenty Books Nobody Reads." Why? Because number one was dead on:

1. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene. C. S. Lewis: "I never met a man who said he used to like The Faerie Queene." It's the longest poem in English (26,000 lines), possibly the greatest (Paradise Lost and The Canterbury Tales are the only competitors), and by no means an easy read for us nowadays. Hawthorne used to read it to his daughters by the fireside, but that was back in the day when people enjoyed poetry. The poem is about -- what is it not about? Love, sex, the body, the soul, the nation, the Christian faith, matter and spirit, justice, courtesy, time and eternity. It has the greatest ending of any poem I have ever read -- almost an ending fit for all poetry, the end of ends.

I can't wait to get to the end now, though I'm surprised that it's so good. After all, Spenser only completed six cantos of an intended twelve.