As mentioned elsewhere, I (fosco) am in the middle of a reading project which should take me through nearly all of the Western Canon, or at least that portion of it discussed by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren in their most excellent How To Read A Book. I keep track of my progress on a spreadsheet, part of which is reproduced below (the books remaining on the list are not displayed). I’m following their outline in rough order, though have occasionally left the path for considerable periods.
Our periodicals are not listed, but at the moment we’re reading The Atlantic Monthly, Scientific American, Red Herring, Touchstone, First Things, Our Big Back Yard, National Geographic for Kids.
And, I hasten to add, the children have their own books and whatnot. Some of the books below are/were bedtime reading for them.
| 2005 | |
| The Brothers Karamazov | Dostoevsky, Fyodor |
| The Histories | Herodotus |
| The Peloponnesian War | Thucydides |
| Lives of the Famous Grecians and Romans, V1 | Plutarch |
| The Dark Tower, Vol. 5 | King, Steven |
| State of Fear | Crichton, Michael |
| The End of the Affair | Greene, Graham |
| Brideshead Revisited | Waugh, Evelyn |
| Last Days of Socrates | Plato |
| Philosophy 101 with Socrates | Kreeft, Peter |
| Master and Commander | O’Brian, Patrick |
| Post Captain | O’Brian, Patrick |
| Our Mutual Friend | Dickens, Charles |
| How to Read a Book | Adler, Mortimer |
| To The Lighthouse | Woolf, Virginia |
| The Life of Greece | Durant, Wil |
| Caesar and Christ | Durant, Wil |
| Cadillac Beach | Dorsey, Tim |
| Rise, Let Us Be On Our Way | Pope John Paul II |
| The Spirit of the Liturgy | Ratzinger, Joseph |
| Brunelleschi’s Dome | King, Ross |
| Handy as I Wanna Be | Rause, Vince |
| Ivanhoe | Scott, Sir Walter |
| The Faerie Queen | Spenser, Edmund |
| Civil Disobedience | Thoreau, Henry |
| Kubla Khan, Rime of the Ancient Mariner | Coleridge, Samuel |
| The Age of Faith | Durant, Wil |
| Prothalamion, Epithalamion, Sonnets | Spenser, Edmund |
| The Prelude (selections) | Wordsworth, William |
| The Rubaiyat | Khayyam, Omar (trans. Fitzgerald) |
| Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince | Rowling, JK |
| Inferno | Dante (trans. Esolen) |
| The Medea, Hippolytus, Alcestis | Euripides |
| Elements | Euclid |
| Works | Archimedes |
| On Conic Sections | Apollonius of Perga |
| Introduction to Arithmetic | Nicomachus of Gerasa |
| The Odyssey | Homer (trans. Chapman) |
| On Looking into Chapman’s Homer | Keats, John |
| The Hobbit | Tolkien, J.R.R. |
| Amores, Metamorphoses, et al | Ovid |
| The Meditations | Marcus Aurelius |
| The Aeneid | Virgil (trans. Fitzgerald) |
| The Iliad | Homer (trans. Lattimore) |
| Theogeny, Works & Days, The Shield | Hesiod |
| Lives of the Famous Grecians and Romans, V2 | Plutarch |
| Dark Night of the Soul | St. John of the Cross (trans. Alison) |
| Titus Groan | Peake, Mervyn |
| The Devil in the White City | Larson, Erik |
| The Life of Samuel Johnson (abridged) | Boswell, James |
| 1776 | McCullough, David |
| Arguing About Slavery | Miller, William Lee |
| London: A Poem,Vanity of Human Wishes | Johnson, Samuel |
| Third Satire | Juvenal |
| Mere Christianity | Lewis, C.S. |
| The Magician’s Nephew | Lewis, C.S. |
| Final Harvest | Dickinson, Emily (T.Johnson, ed) |
| De Rerum Natura | Lucretius |
| The Rape of the Lock | Pope, Alexander |
| The Screwtape Letters | Lewis, C.S. |
| The Enneads | Plotinus |
| Minor poems (Lycidas, Nativity, etc) | Milton, John |
| The Discourses | Epictetus |
| Purgatory | Dante (trans. Esolen) |
| Georgics, Eclogues | Virgil |
| Rhetoric, On Poetics | Aristotle |
| The Annals | Tacitus |
| Letter to Herodotus, Letter to Menoeceus | Epicurus |
| Agamemnon | Aeschylus |
| Prometheus Bound | Aeschylus |
| Oedipus The King | Sophocles |
| Antigone | Sophocles |
| Lysistrata | Aristophanes |
| The Libation Bearers | Aeschylus |
| Iphigenia in Tauris | Euripides |
| Electra | Sophocles |
| Medical Writings | Hippocrates |
| On the Natural Faculties | Galen |
| Pride and Prejudice | Austen, Jane |
| Prince Caspian | Lewis, C.S. |
| 2006 | |
| The Song of Roland | (trans. Dorothy Sayers) |
| Beowulf | (trans. Seamus Haney) |
| Paradise | Dante (trans. Esolen) |
| Icelandic Sagas (Erik the Red, Hen-Thorir, etc) | Various (trans. Gwyn Jones) |
| Voyage of the Dawn Treader | Lewis, C.S. |
| Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | (trans. Tolkien) |
| Pearl | (trans. Tolkien) |
| Sir Orfeo | (trans. Tolkien) |
| The Case for Democracy | Sharansky, Natan |
| Various | Bede |
| Various | Caedmon |
| Canterbury Tales | Chaucer |
| Crito | Plato |
| Art of Love, Book 1 | Ovid |
| Phaedo | Plato |
| Metamorphoses | Ovid (trans. Mandelbaum) |
| Works (Sonnets and other poetry) | Spenser, Edmund |
| The Silver Chair | Lewis, C.S. |
| Republic (selections) | Plato |
| Raving Fans | Blanchard, Bowles |
| Eats, Shoots and Leaves | Truss, Lynne |
| How to Really Love Your Child | Campbell, Ross |
| Peopleware | Demarco, Tom and Lister, Tim |
| Fab | Gershenfeld, Neil |
| Treasure Island | Stevenson, Robert Louis |
| Troilus and Cresidye | Chaucer |
| Treatise on the use of the Astrolabe | Chaucer |
| Symposium | Plato |
| The Story of King Arthur and his Knights | Pyle, Howard |
| Various short stories | Kipling, Rudyard |
| The Prince | Machiavelli, Niccolo |
| Praise of Folly | Erasmus, Desiderius |
| HMS Surprise | O’Brian, Patrick |
| Utopia | More, St. Thomas |
| The Mauritius Command | O’Brian, Patrick |
| Portuguese Irregular Verbs (audio) | Smith, Alexander McCall |
| No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency | Smith, Alexander McCall |
| The Spirit to Serve | Marriott, Bill |
| The Last Battle | Lewis, C.S. |
| The Wind In The Willows | Grahame, Kenneth |
| 2007 | |
| Three Treatises | Luther, Martin |
| Institutes of the Christian Religion | Calvin, John |
| Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence | Saint-Jure, Jean Baptiste |
| The Jungle Book | Kipling, Rudyard |
| Don Quixote | Cervantes, Miguel (trans. Putnam) |
| The Kalevala | (trans. Keith Bosley) |
| Adventures of Robin Hood | Pyle, Howard |
| Essays, New Atlantis | Bacon, Francis |
| The Fellowship of the Ring | Tolkien, J.R.R. |
| Dune | Herbert, Frank |
| Essays | De Montaigne, Michel (trans. Cohen) |
| Dr. Zhivago | Pasternak, Boris |
| The Faerie Queen | Spenser, Edmund |
| “Inventing the Essay” | Boorstin, Daniel |
| “Montaigne” | Barzun, Jacques |
| The Two Towers | Tolkien, J.R.R. |
| The Silmarillion | Tolkien, J.R.R. |
| The Unfinished Tales | Tolkien, J.R.R. |
| Beowulf (again) | (trans Seamus Heaney) |
| The Golden Bough (selections) | Frazier, James |
| The Return of the King | Tolkien, J.R.R. |
| The Swiss Family Robinson | Wyss, Johann |
| Gormenghast | Peake, Mervyn |
| Titus Alone | Peake, Mervyn |
| Tales of H.P. Lovecraft | Lovecraft, H.P. (Joyce Oates, ed) |
| A Wrinkle In Time | L’Engle, Madeleine |
| A Journey To The Center Of The Earth | Verne, Jules |
| Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell | Clarke, Susanna |
| Mansfield Park | Austen, Jane |
| Uncle Wiggly Stories | Garis, Howard |
| Children of Men | James, P.D. |
| The Adventures of Tom Sawyer | Twain, Mark |
| 2008 | |
| Tears of the Giraffe | Smith, Alexander |
| Decline of the West (abridged) | Spengler, Oswald |
| Reflections on the Psalms | Lewis, C.S. |
| Morality For Beautiful Girls | Smith, Alexander |
| The Kalahari Typing School for Men | Smith, Alexander |
| The Full Cupboard of Life | Smith, Alexander |
| * Oxford History of English Literature: 16th Century Poetry and Prose | Lewis, C.S. |
| * The Annotated Alice | Carroll, Lewis (ed. Martin Gardner) |
| Blue Shoes and Happiness | Smith, Alexander |
| Pillars of the Earth | Follet, Ken |
| The Good Husband of Zebra Drive | Smith, Alexander |
| * The Story of the Champions of the Round Table | Pyle, Howard |
* - In progress
Did you aactually read all of these books so far? If so I am mucho impressed! If not, I am still mucho impressed.
Yes. I started this project a couple of years ago, right about the time we stopped watching television. I made considerable progress that first year because I had switched to transit for a few months and suddenly found myself with 3 hours/day that I could dedicate to reading. Some of those are also books that I’ve read to the oldest kids for bedtime, so they’re going on in parallel with whatever I happen to be reading at the same time.
I’ve actually derailed considerably from the original plan - I’m supposed to be reading Shakespeare right now, but only got past the first couple of plays before losing interest. I’ll probably swing back to the Adler/Van Doren list here before too much longer.
Excellent. I have a list of 100 of The Greatest Books Ever Written that I am working through albeit at a much slower pace than you. What made you choose this plan? How did you go about picking the books for your list?
Also, when you say Van Doren, are you referring to the poet Mark Van Doren? If so, where have you found his books, they are all out of print and I would love to pick up some copies as I love his work.
Thanks.
The list comes from a book called How To Read A Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. It’s a short how-to guide to attacking the Western Canon, and it was published around 30 years ago. There’s a list in the back of the book of the books that they considered essential reading, but you can also find the list online here. These lists must have been popular some time ago, and I keep coming across volumes in the used bookstores that look to have been part of some “Own The Great Books” series, probably sold as a book-of-the-month sort of thing. Once in a while, I come across a complete set for sale, and the contents almost always match this list (or ones like it).
As for choosing, I started in (rough) chronological order with occasional side-trips into biographies or histories if I need some historical context. I’ve also been known to consult Cliff’s notes and whatnot.
THANKS!