Inspired by a similar tradition in David Brooks’ New York Times column (but with fewer pretensions to comprehensiveness—I am calling them favorites, not the most important or influential), here is a list of five essays or reviews that I have read, on the internet, which I think are worth printing out to read and ponder as if they had been published in a book. The standard here is permanence: these essays deserve more than the quick perusal that online stuff is wont to receive.

Many people prophesied the demise of the publishing house system in our country this year, and the fact that this depresses more writers than readers is a sign that perhaps the volume of readership isn’t where it should be. Or where it could be, according to Lawrence Osborne in his comment, “A Writer And Reader On Why Book Publishers Fail,” in Forbes. Having surveyed the journalism on the current crisis, Osborne appears to have some original opinions, including:

Here, then, is my memo to publishers. Why are you not venturing out to connect with the vast market of recent college graduates who are thirsting for serious writing and who have been grappling with difficult and often sterile texts for years and want something different? My son and his friends, who are in their early twenties, read Houllebecq [sic] and Bolaño and Sebald and Coetzee without any problem at all. Those writers speak easily to their anxieties and concerns. And yet none of these writers would have found American publishers if they hadn’t first succeeded in their countries of origin.

Another writer who addressed the publishing scene was the critic and professor Camille Paglia, whose book, Break Blow Burn: Camille Paglia Reads 43 of the World’s Best Poems, a collection of her commentary on great poems from Shakespeare to Joni Mitchell, showed that poetry can still sell. Her recent essay in the humanities journal Arion, “The Final Cut: The Selection Process for Break Blow Burn,” contains a critique of American poetry. Paglia goes to the core of what it is we look for in poetry, and how we can get more of it. Here is the opening riff:

For decades, poetry has been a losing proposition for major trade publishers. I was convinced that there was still a potentially large audience for poetry who had drifted away for unclear reasons. That such an audience does in fact exist seemed proved by the success of Break, Blow, Burn, which may be the only book of poetry criticism that has ever reached the national bestseller list in the United States.

I already wrote about Adam Kirsch’s unsettling essay in Poetry, “Literary Fame in a Time of Flame Wars,” and I don’t have anything more to say about it, so I will reproduce most unsettling portion of the essay:

If the scarcity of recognition is a symptom of the world’s fallenness, then literary ambition is a form of complicity with fallenness. In other words, it is a sin. Because there is not enough money in the world, people steal; because there is not enough power, people do violence; because there is not enough recognition, they make art.

Since his much-publicized move to the New Yorker, James Wood hasn’t written anything as ecstatic as the long essays in the back pages of the New Republic that made him famous. But he did write something tight, argumentative, and moving this year: a small statement on the tragedy of David Foster Wallace’s death. The statement was reproduced by the New York Observer, and can be found here.

Finally, the most incisive and original essay I read online all year was Dr. Mark Edmundson’s “Dwelling in Possibilities,” found in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

For students now, life is elsewhere. Classes matter to them, but classes are just part of an ever-enlarging web of activities and diversions. Students now seek to master their work—not to be taken over by it and consumed. They want to dispatch it, do it well and quickly, then get on to the many other things that interest them. For my students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success and pleasure. They dwell in possibility.

I wrote a rather thin post on this essay when it first came out. A more interesting thought is a comment that Edmundson makes about On the Road being the only work of literature which his students can truly relate to—because its characters are in constant motion.

(As an honorable mention, theologian R. R. Reno’s interesting essay on the same novel, “The End of the Road,” published in First Things, makes an interesting complement to Edmundson’s essay.)

Edmundson is writing about more than literary speculation; he is delving into a sort of spiritual psychology. For that reason all undergraduates, graduate students, and professors should read Edmundson’s essay.

And so we return to the core reason for making this list: the essays linked here are worth your time and reflection; they have lasting value. Happy New Year.