John’s College, a college which is essentially a four year program of reading the great books, is another excellent list of the essential readings of Western civilization (with a few non-Western works recently added). They are also available for downloading for the Kindle from the Mobileread forum, though they are a bit difficult to find sometimes. Charles Eliot that “the elements of a liberal education could be obtained by spending 15 minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf.” The Harvard Classics are available on line, in full, at the Bartleby Classics site: The Harvard Classics was based on the assertion of Dr. This is its meaning for mankind." You can read the contents of the two series in this article. The Great Books of the Western World series, issued in a first edition in 1952 and a second, somewhat modified and expanded edition in 1990, was an attempt to collect in one uniform series, as Hutchins put it, “the sources of our being.
But there are a number of sources that one can look to. There is no definitive list of “the” great books. But we in this group are here to correct this travesty! But the revolt against the “dead white males” and the – call it what you will, modernization or dumbing down – of the college curriculum so that it is possible to graduate from some colleges without having read a single word of Shakespeare has made this no longer true. or England would be expected to know these books. Up to about fifty years ago, any person going through a liberal arts education in the U.S. There is pretty general agreement on a set of core books which are almost universally (by mainstream scholars, at least) accepted as part of the Western Canon. This concept makes sense to me: classics are those books which have become part of that Great Conversation. This is the concept of the Western Canon – the group of books that educated readers need to be familiar with in order to fully understand and appreciate the works that follow and build on them. Robert Hutchins spoke of the Great Conversation over the ages – that Western thought is a building process, and the there are certain ideas and books that literature and thought today are building on.
They are books that have mattered to multiple generations. After more than fifty years of reading classics, I still haven’t come across a really good definition fo a classic.
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