Books: Randall Kennedy

5. "Four Quartets" by T. S. Eliot. Because it contains the poem "East Coker," in which one finds the lines: "For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."

A classic book that disappointed:W.E.B. DuBois's "The Souls of Black Folk" is one of the most lauded books in the African-American canon, but I found it disappointingly thin.

A classic you've never read:Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace." Why? Laziness.

© 2008