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

When I Grow Up...

Sunday....while showering the dirt off Youngest Son after a long weekend camping at Detroit Lake....a conversation occured.

Mama: Someday you will be a Papa.

Youngest Son: I don't want to be a Papa when I grow up.

Mama: What? Why not?

Youngest Son: Papa's have to work everyday. I don't want to work everyday. I want to play.

Mama: Oh....

Youngest Son: Play everyday. (With emphasis and arms folded.)

Back with Gratitude

Hello. It has been a while. Since then and now. Much has happened. Perhaps one day I will tell of it...but for now I am simply grateful to be back. (Even if back is not what it once was.) I will start with some Gratitude. Gratitude Monday on a Thursday.



92. My very own little viking. (Complete with sticky Red Lollipop face and hands.)




93. Oldest Son and his Rainbow Lollipop. It was a must have that turned into a should not have. (I recall they did not taste well when I was a child as well. I am thinking Disneyland.)




94. Brothers. They truly melt my heart.

95. Sisters and a niece. (Truly a blessing to have sisters.)

96. The way the sky reflects off the wet sand.

97. The little footprints that walk upon it.

98. The wild ocean. (The way it makes me feel.)

99. Oldest Son and his BEAUTIFUL eyes. (I know I say this often. True. There is great love here.)

100. Boy Cousins. (I enjoy the differences in hair. Makes me smile.)

101. The photo contest loser. (It was tragic, but I could not pick my own son. He will get over it. It was only a LIFESAVER after all.)

102. Youngest Son. (This photo tells the truth about this boy.) He is unique. He is sweet. He is silly. He is clever. He is a handful. He is pure boy MAGIC and I love him so.

And so it begins...

You see that boy with his arms in the air? The one most excited about the goal? That is my boy. That is Oldest Son at his first soccer game. My heart swells with pride at this photo. No...he did not score the goal. One of the other boys did. That did not stop his joy. Simple. Pure. Joy.

He had joy when he had the ball. (Note the grin on his face.)

He had joy as he lined up the dreaded "Soccer Triangle." (Love that sweet look on his face.)

More joy as he kicked that ball down the field...the wrong way. (He had the ball! Who is he to care what way it goes? I don't think he even heard all the shouting that he was going the wrong direction.)

And the ball...the soccer ball. I never wanted to do this. I never wanted to spend my weekends at games and my weekdays at practice. And I ask myself...why do I do it? And the only answer I can come up with is for the joy. The joy Oldest Son has when he plays. Simple joy. How can a Mama ask for more?

So...go the wrong way if you like. You never have to make a goal for me. You don't have to be the biggest or the best. You just have to be you...and keep your joy. (And when I cheer and shout...just know that is the competitive side of Mama. I always enjoy a good game and taking sides.)

Yes...that is me at a soccer game. (I guess Husband had to document this.) And sweet Youngest Son. Poor boy. It is rough being the little brother at a soccer game. Especially when they break out the treat bags! Hang in there little one. You will grow up all too soon for this Mamas liking!

Keep smiling Oldest Son. Keep running and playing with all your heart. I sure do love it!

And while all your teammates are focused on getting warmed up...you just turn that little head and smile. The smile that melts me every time I see it. The smile that came when I least expected it. One of the best smiles to enter my life. The joy in your spirit is unique and rare and wonderful. Smile on Oldest Son...and Hello Soccer.

Gratitude Monday...Crescent Bar Style

80. Sometimes the best things in life are the little things in your life. (This is all the kids on the last day of our "Friendcation.") I sure do love all the little things in my life. They are pretty sweet most of the time and a little sour some of the time!

81. The joy of watching Husband and Friends Husbands as they work on Project Sandbar Waterslide 2010. Just good, albeit gritty, fun!

82. Pulling Husband in the early morning sun behind the boat he loves!

83. Oldest Son and his sweet smile.

84. The simple happiness that is having both Oldest Son and Youngest Son looking at the camera at the same time! (This happens only once or twice a year at best!) (They love the boat too! Like Papa Like Sons.)

85. Sweet Youngest Son and his love of the "Pool."

86. His too cute for words goggles.

87. The way he says "Look at me Mama!" (Said just before diving under the water and popping his head up to quickly look and make sure I was looking!)

88. Youngest Son and his sweet soul. I am afraid he is getting older.

89. Two of my three sisters.

90. How we all wore black swimsuits on the same day...without planning.

91. The help those two girls give me on vacation. They are truly a blessing.

The Rose Parade

Oldest Son and Youngest Son watch the Portland Rose Parade. The fact that they are both in the photo and that it is not blurry is a small miracle.

Youngest Son looks onward with one of his Cousins in the background as well. It makes you wonder just what a parade looks like through the eyes of a two year old boy?

Loved this float. Love Portland Town. Such a great place to call home.

My sweet little Niece. It was her birthday this day. I bet she thought the parade was just for her! Happy Birthday to Me!

Oldest Son loved his free red balloons. I let him pick a chocolate from Moonstuck. We had come with Grandma Grape. There were too many fun things to count!

"Time Is of the Essence" by Irene Foster

Now is the time to get things done...

wade in the water,

sit in the sun,

squish my toes,

in the mud by the door,

explore the world in a boy just four.

Now is the time to study books,

flowers,

snails,

how a cloud looks,

to ponder "up,"

where God sleeps nights,

why mosquitoes take such big bites.

Later there'll be time

to sew and clean,

paint the hall

that soft new green,

to make new drapes,

refinish the floor -

Later on...when he's not just four.