Reading this gorgeous compendium on the written word in America should be required for gaining or maintaining U.S. citizenship. And even at more than 1,000 pages, it's a fun way to learn what we're all about.

Journalist and memoirist Ann Marlow's essay links the porn movie "Deep Throat" and the memoirs of its star, Linda Lovelace, to the Watergate hearings (their tone, not just the codename of the affair's key informant), the blandness of politicians, the smugness of op-ed writers, "Catch-22," Mad magazine, the early reality show "An American Family," the persistent idea that the moon landings were a hoax, and the ascendancy of the "memoir of abuse." Each connection may seem plausible, but the effect of coming across them one after another in a brief essay is like looking in on a series of parties you wish you had time to crash.

Some readers may register a similar complaint about the book as a whole, but at a vast scale the superabundance of ideas and voices fits more comfortably. "A New Literary History of America" gives us what amounts to a fractal geometry of American culture. You can focus on any one spot and get a sense of the whole or pull back and watch the larger patterns appear. What you see isn't the past so much as the present.

You could do a lot worse with the next 220 days of your life than to begin each one by reading an entry from the freshly published "A New Literary History of America" -- the way generations past used to study a Bible verse daily. You could do a lot worse, but I'm not sure you could do much better; this magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture.