a well-educated mind

In 2006 I accepted a teaching job with a small Classical Christian Education school. I had no idea what classical education was so it was time for me to get researching. I read Dorothy Sayers (you know the lady who translated  Dante’s Divine Comedy), The Lost Tools of Learning and fell in love with classical education and Dorothy Sayers. (If you haven’t read any of her nonfiction, now is the time!  Start with Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine) I also read The Well-Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. Another great lady. Her history curriculum is also fantastic. I only taught for two years before we moved on to graduate school in DC. About two years ago I came across The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. My husband went to a Classical Christian high school and loved every minute of being there. I went to a public high school. I too loved my school, but the history and literacy program was not as comprehensive as Patrick’s. I wanted to read all he had read and I wanted to know all that he knew about history. So, I thought this book would be my perfect way of learning.

Here is an excerpt from Amazon about the book:

In The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer provides a welcome and encouraging antidote to the distractions of our age, electronic and otherwise. In her previous book, The Well-Trained Mind, the author provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to home-school their children, and that book is now the premier resource for home-schoolers. In this new book, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them to the use of adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading.

The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres—fiction, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry—accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the end of each chapter—ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich—preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing.The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there’s no reason you can’t read and enjoy Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the “Great Books” without a guide and a plan. Susan Wise Bauer will show you how to allocate time to your reading on a regular basis; how to master a difficult argument; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre—what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary?—and also between genres. Followed carefully, the advice in The Well-Educated Mind will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.

So the idea is that you would read through these books in chronological order so that you get a good sense of the history of the world through your readings. I love this idea.  I  start right away but have been  stuck in the fiction section… I really need to read some of the others. There are one or two that I’ve read while in school, so those are also out of order, but that’s ok with me.

Through this page I will type out a few notes on the books I read.

Here is her list of books. I’ve underlined the ones I’ve already read:

Fiction:

1. Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes
2. The Pilgrim’s Progress -John Bunyan
3. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
4. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
5. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (I chose to read A Tale of Two Cities instead, I thought it would be more interesting.)
6. Les Miserables (This one is not on the list but I really wanted to read it and this is where it would fit)
7. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
8. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
9. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
10. Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
11. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
12. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
13. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy  (I read this out of order because the movie was coming out…)
14. The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
15. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
16. Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
17. The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
18. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
19. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
20. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (I read this in high school)
21. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Wolfe
22. The Trial – Franz Kafka
23. Native Son – Richard Wright
24. The Stranger – Albert Camus
25. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
26. Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
27. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
28. If on a winter’s night a traveler – Italo Calvino
29. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
30. White Noise – Don DeLillo
31. Possession – A.S. Byatt

 Autobiography

1. Augustine – The Confessions
2. Margery Kempe – The Book of Margery Kempe
3. Michele De Montaigne – Essays
4. Teresa Of Avila – The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself
5. Rene Descartes – Meditations
6. John Bunyan – Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners
7. Mary Rowlandson – The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration
8. Jean Jacques Rousseau – Confessions
9. Benjamin Franklin – The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
10. Henry David Thoreau – Walden
11. Harriet Jacobs – Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
12. Frederick Douglass – Life and Times of Frederick Douglas
13. Booker T. Washington – Up from Slavery
14. Friedrich Nietzsche – Ecce Homo
15. Adolf Hitler – Mein Kampf
16. Mohandas Gandhi – An Autobiography: The Story of my Experiments with Truth
17. Gertrude Stein – Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
18. Thomas Merton  – Seven Storey Mountain
19. C.S. Lewis – Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life
20.  Malcolm X – The Autobiography of Malcolm X
21. May Sarton – Journal of a Solitude
22. Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn – The Gulag Archipelago
23. Charles W. Colson – Born Again
24. Richard Rodriquez – Hunger of Memory: Education of Richard Rodriquez
25. Jill Ker Conway – The Road from Coorain
26. Elie Wiesel – All Rivers Run to the Sea

History/Politics

1. Herodotus – The Histories
2. Thucydides – The Peloponnesian War
3. Plato – The Republic
4. Plutarch – Lives
5. Augustine – The City of God
6. Bede – The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
7. Niccolo Machiavelli – The Prince
8. Sir Thomas More – Utopia
9. John Locke – The True End of Civil Government
10. David Hume – The History of England, Volume V
11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – The Social Contract
12. Thomas Paine – Common Sense
13. Edward Gibbon – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
14. Mary Wollstonecraft – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
15. Alexis De Tocqueville – Democracy in America
16. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Communist Manifesto
17. Jacob Burckhardt – Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
18. W.E.B. Du Bois – The Souls of Black Folk
19. Max Weber – The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism
20. Lytton Strachey – Queen Victoria
21. George Orwell – The Road to Wigan Pier
22. Perry Miller – The New England Mind
23. John Kenneth Galbraith – The Great Crash
24. Cornelius Ryan – The Longest Day
25. Betty Friedan – The Feminine Mystique
26. Eugene D. Genovese – Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
27. Barbara Tuchman – A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
28. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – All the President’s Men
29. James McPherson – Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
30. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich – A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard
31. Francis Fukuyama – End of History and the last Man

Drama

1. Aeschylus – Agamemnon
2. Sophocles – Oedipus the King
3. Euripides – Medea
4. Aristophanes – The Birds
5. Aristotle – Poetics
6. Everyman (14th Century)
7. Christopher Marlowe – Doctor Faustus
8. William Shakespeare – Richard III
9. William Shakespeare – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
10. William Shakespeare – Hamlet
11. Moliere – Tartuffe
12. William Congreve – The Way of the World
13. Oliver Goldsmith – She Stoops to Conquer
14. Richard Brinsley Sheridan – The School for Scandal
15. Henrik Ibsen – A Doll’s House
16. Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being Ernest
17. Anton Chekhov – The Cherry Orchard
18. George Bernard Shaw – Saint Joan
19. T.S. Eliot – Murder in the Cathedral
20. Thornton Wilder – Our Town
21. Eugene O’Neill – Long Day’s Journey into Night
22. Jean Paul Sartre – No Exit
23. Tennessee Williams – A Streetcar Named Desire
24. Arthur Miller – Death of a Salesman
25. Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot
26. Robert Bolt – A Man for All Seasons
27. Tom Stoppard – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
28. Peter Shaffer – Equus

Poetry

1. The Epic of Gilgamesh
2. Homer – The Iliad and the Odyssey
3. Greek Lyricists
4. Horace – The Odes
5. Beowolf
6. Dante Alighieri – Inferno
7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
8. Geoffrey Chaucer – The Canterbury Tales
9. William Shakespeare – Sonnets
10. John Donne
11. King James Bible – Psalms
12. John Milton – Paradise Lost
13. William Blake – Songs of Innocence and of Experience
14. Williams Wordsworth
15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
16. John Keats
17.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
18. Alfred, Lord Tennyson
19. Walt Whitman
20. Emily Dickinson
21. Christina Rossetti
22. Gerald Manley Hopkins
23. William Butler Yeats
24. Paul Laurence Dunbar
25. Robert Frost
26. Carl Sandburg
27. William Carlos Williams
28. Ezra Pounds
29. T.S. Eliot
30. Langston Hughes
31. W.H. Auden