Nick's Catholic Classics Reading List: History and Rationale

About three years ago I got fed up with wasting my time reading mediocre books. As the Michael Card song goes, “So many books, so little time.” I became determined to only read books that would have a life-changing effect on me. But first I had to find a way to know which books those were. So, I accumulated about thirteen lists of the greatest or most influential books ever written and counted which books appeared on the most lists, and then I ranked them. The logic behind this method is that by using many lists I can reduce the bias of individual critics or organizations, and come up with a more objective and comprehensive list. This process would have been a lot more time consuming without Robert Teeter’s fantastic great books page. Not long after that, I found Fr. Hardon’s The Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan and I decided to put together a list of great Catholic literature, based on the same logic. I found two more lists of Catholic/Christian classics and added them to my initial thirteen. Here, then, are my sources for my Catholic Classics Reading List: Catholic/Christian Reading Lists: Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. – The Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan Fr. John McCloskey – A Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan Eugene Peterson – Take and Read: Spiritual Reading: An Annotated List My Original Thirteen Lists: Mortimer Adler - from How to Read a Book Thomas Aquinas College Reading List Harold Bloom - The Western Canon Columbia Reading List Cilfton Fadiman - The New Lifetime Reading Plan Martin Seymour-Smith - 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written St. John's College Reading List De Bary and Bloom - Approaches to the Asian Classics Barbara Stoler Miller - Masterworks of Asian Literature Kenneth Rexroth - Classics Revisited Philip Ward - A Lifetime's Reading: The World's 500 Greatest Books Anthony Burgess - 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 Kenneth Funsten - 100 Books for the Modern Person My next post will contain part one of Nick's Catholic Classics Reading List.