Philip Weinstein is a professor emeritus of Swarthmore College and also one of the country’s preeminent Faulkner scholars, along with his twin brother that is.

But that is not important right now.

Nor is it important right now that every fall Mr. Weinstein leads a Vineyard Haven Library series helping to unpack the work of literary heavyweights, from Tolstoy’s War and Peace to Melville’s Moby Dick. This fall Proust is on the schedule.

What is important right now is that Mr. Weinstein is currently on his own literary journey, following a path first laid out by Montaigne with the personal essay. Mr. Weinstein recently completed a collection of essays, which he will read from at the Vineyard Haven library on Tuesday, July 17. The essay collection is called Soul-Error, in homage to Montaigne.

“It speaks to our remarkable penchant for getting things wrong,” Mr. Weinstein said by phone from his home in Aquinnah. “It explores how our takes on the world (on objects and others, as well as on ourselves) often turn out to be mistakes.”

One of these mistakes, he said, is the penchant for undervaluing what we have, and overvaluing what everyone else has.

Mr. Weinstein has published several books of literary criticism over the years, but he said writing personal essays was an enjoyable change of pace.

“I vowed never to write another footnote,” he said. “I wanted to come out of the niche.”

And yet Mr. Weinstein’s background is evident in the essays as many of the pieces look at life from the perspective of one who has always loved literature. But by no means are the essays academic treatises. For example, on August 2 at the Aquinnah Town Hall, Mr. Weinstein will give another reading from the book, this time an essay about childhood entitled Do That, the name for a ritual he and his twin brother performed each night to soothe themselves to go to sleep, while growing up in Memphis, Tenn.

“We would tap our heads on the pillow, first the left side, then the right, and continue doing this until one of us would drop off, and then the other would follow. We called it, Do That.”

Mr. Weinstein’s reading and discussion at the Vineyard Haven Library on July 17 begins at 7 p.m.