This may sound strange coming from someone who took the Western canon so seriously for so long, but at this point, I don't really believe that works of literature can teach any virtues beyond a love of ideas and language, and a certain amount of compassion for human life outside one's own experience. Which is more than enough, of course. But any other attempt to teach morals or virtues through stories is bound to fail, I think, because a moral or philosophical concept, no matter how beautifully presented, is a dead thing until you relearn it through your own life experience. The only thing art or literature can do in the meantime is prepare you for that moment of recognition. Which, again, is more than enough.

In other words, the books I'll choose for my kids are the ones that charged my imagination the most when I was young, which usually means books where a moral compass is notably absent. I guess my five-foot shelf of children's books would include: D'Aulaires' Greek Myths; The Annotated Sherlock Holmes; Through the Looking-Glass; The Chronicles of Narnia; a representative selection of Peanuts comic strips; World Tales; the complete works of Roald Dahl and Lloyd Alexander; the Mahabharata; and the Bible, more for its literary qualities than anything else. But if I had to choose one work of art to provide something of a moral compass for my kids, it would be Antigone, or maybe "Hey Jude."