Friday, July 27, 2012

The Well Educated Mind of Susan Wise Bauer

I had been wanting to read Susan Wise Bauer's book "The Well Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had" for quite some time. So...imagine my excitement when I stumbled across a copy at the library this last week. (I eagerly snatched it up. Thoroughly excited of course!) Though it was not an easy read, it did contain some interesting book lists, which I have included here, that are meant to be read in order. (I must admit that I have a certain weakness for lists such as these. They make my heart feel lovely. The books themselves have a similar effect.) Happy reading.

The Novel List

Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
The Return of the Native – Henry James
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
The Trial – Franz Kafka
Native Son – Richard Wright
The Stranger – Albert Camus
1984 – George Orwell
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
If on a winter’s night a traveler – Italo Calvino
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
White Noise – Don Delillo
Possession – A.S. Byatt

The Autobiography List

The Confessions – Augustine
The Book of Margery Kempe - Margery Kemp
Essays – Michel de Montaigne
The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself – Teresa of Ávila
Meditations – René Descartes
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners – John Bunyan
The Narrative of the Captivity of Restoration – Mary Rowlandson
Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
An Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin – Benjamin Franklin
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself – Harriet Jacobs
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass – Frederick Douglass
Up from Slavery – Booker T. Washington
Ecce Homo – Friedrich Nietzsche
Mein Kampf – Adolf Hitler
An Autobiography:  The Story of My Experiments with Truth – Mohandas Gandhi
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
The Seven Storey Mountain – Thomas Merton
Surprised by Joy:  The Shape of My Early Life – C.S. Lewis
The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcolm X
Journal of a Solitude – May Sarton
The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Born Again – Charles W. Colson
Hunger of Memory:  The Education of Richard Rodriguez – Richard Rodriguez
The Road from Coorain – Jill Ker Conway
All Rivers Run to the Sea:  Memoirs – Elie Wiesel

The History List

The Histories – Herodotus
The Peloponnesian War – Thucydides
The Republic – Plato
Lives – Plutarch
The City of God – Augustine
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People – Bede
The Prince – Niccolò Machiavelli
Utopia – Thomas More
The True End of Civil Government – John Locke
The History of England, Volume V – David Hume
The Social Contract – Jean-Jasques Rousseau
Common Sense – Thomas Paine
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Edward Gibbon
A Vindication of the Rights of Women – Mary Wollstonecraft
Democracy in America – Alexis de Tocqueville
The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy – Jacob Burckhardt
The Souls of Black Folk – W.E.B. Du Bois
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – Max Weber
Queen Victoria – Lytton Strachey
The Road to Wigan Pier – George Orwell
The New England Mind – Perry Miller
The Great Crash – John Kenneth Galbraith
The Longest Day – Cornelius Ryan
The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan
Roll, Jordan, Roll:  The World the Slaves Made – Eugene D. Genovese
The Distant Mirror:  The Calamitous Fourteenth Century – Barbara Tuchman
All the President’s Men – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
Battle Cry of Freedom:  The Civil War Era – James M. McPherson
A Midwife’s Tale:  The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 – Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
The End of History and the Last Man – Francis Fukuyama

The Drama List

Agamemnon – Aeschylus
Oedipus the King – Sophocles
Medea – Euripides
The Birds – Aristophanes
Poetics – Aristotle
Everyman
Doctor Faustus – Christopher Marlowe
Richard III – William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – William Shakespeare
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Tartuffe – Moliere
The Way of the World – William Congreve
She Stoops to Conquer – Oliver Goldsmith
The School for Scandal – Richard Brinsley Sheridan
A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen
The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
The Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekhov
Saint Joan – George Bernard Shaw
Murder in the Cathedral – T. S. Elliot
Our Town – Thornton Wilder
Long Day’s Journey Into Nght – Eugene O’Neill
No Exit – Jean Paul Sartre
A Streetcar Named Desire – Tennessee Williams
Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
A Man for All Seasons – Robert Bolt
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – Tom Stoppard
Equus – Peter Shaffer

The Poetry List

The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Iliad and the Odyssey – Homer
Greek Lyricists
Odes – Horace
Beowulf
Inferno – Dante Alighieri
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
Sonnets – William Shakespeare
John Donne
Psalms – King James Bible
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Songs of Innocence and of Experience – William Blake
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
John Keats
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Christina Rossetti
Gerard Manley Hopkins
William Butler Yeats
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Robert Frost
Carl Sandburg
William Carlos Williams
Ezra Pound
T. S. Eliot
Langston Hughes
W.H. Auden