I started to write last
week about how I decided the books that made their way to my list, and
then I spent most of the time explaining the reason for books that didn’t make the
list: a lot of books thought of as foundational to western civilization,
I’d already read.
On the other hand, I included many books on my list that don’t show up on any list
of western Great Books. In short, the specific contents of my list shouldn’t serve as a model for
anyone else trying to acquire a classical education or to read the
classics.
But some of my sources
could help you put together your own list. As I said last week, my first
guide was the contents of the Britannica Great Books set. I wanted to
complete many of the works or sets of works only touched upon in the
ten-year plan that
came with the set. Two other sources went a long way to filling out the
picture: the curriculum of St. John’s College and the appendix of Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. I don’t remember exactly what all I got from
those two sources, but I know that Adler highly recommended Dedekind’s
Theory of Numbers, which I’ll finally get to in just a few weeks.
But several other
notions contributed heavily to the final form of my list. First, both
Adler and St. John’s skimped on their attention to poetry, but how was I
supposed to think I had read the classics without reading Shelley or
Tennyson? Second, while
Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, and Charles Dickens might — might! —
find one book apiece on someone’s idea of a western canon, I love them
all and wanted to read all I could. Third, wanting this project to have
substantial Christian content, I included readings
in the Church Fathers and in later Christian writers such as John of
the Cross, Bonaventure, Calvin, Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams. Fourth, I
wanted to read more about the American Civil War and the Presidents;
maybe Catton and McCullough don’t write Great
Books with a capital GB, but they pen lower-cased great books on great
themes. Finally, I just love Patrick O’Brian and wanted to read all of
his Aubrey-Maturin series.
I know I got ideas from
more places; I worked on the list for years and tweaked it often. But
it’s been a decade, and I just don’t remember now where I got all the
ideas. I know that I’ve rarely been disappointed in the works I selected.
Every once in a great
while, a friend tells me he or she has decided to follow my lead and
plan out a schedule of stimulating reading for the next few years. As it
happens, one wrote to me between the time I wrote the previous post and
now. She’s long
been staring at a set of classics she ordered years ago, and she’s
decided to get started. It hardly matters exactly what her set includes.
It will get her started on a path that will naturally branch and take
her in unexpected directions. "It does not matter at what point you first break into the system of European poetry," Lewis says. "Only keep your ears open and your mouth shut and everything will lead you to everything else. Ogni parte ad ogni parte splende." And I promise her,
the first time she comes across a reference to one of the books she’s
read on her new adventure and knows what to make of it, she won’t want
to stop.
So why are you still reading my blog? Get started!
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