In Remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Nick's Summary of Great Books Lists, Part II

Here is part two of Nick’s Summary of Great Books Lists. See this page for a further explanation of where this list came from. [Note: An L indicates that this title is available as a free, unabridged audio download from Librivox.org.] Books that showed up on 7 of 13 lists: Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice - L1; L2 Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales - L Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy - L Edward Gibbon - Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Plato - Symposium Plutarch - Lives William Shakespeare - Complete Works Murasaki Shikibu - The Tale of Genji Vyasa - Mahabharata Books that showed up on 6 of 13 lists Jane Austen - Emma - L James Boswell - The Life of Samuel Johnson Charles Darwin - The Origin of Species Daniel DeFoe - Robinson Crusoe - L Fyodor Dostoyevski - Crime and Punishment George Eliot - Middlemarch Euripides - Bacchae, Hippolytus Hamilton, Madison, Jay - The Federalist Papers William James - Pragmatism Franz Kafka - The Trial John Locke - Second Treatise on Government Karl Marx and Frederick Engels - The Communist Manifesto - L Herman Melville - Moby Dick Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - Thus Spake Zarathustra George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-four Plato - Crito Jean Jacques Rousseau - Confessions Sai Shonagon - The Pillow Book Baruch Spinoza - Ethics Stendhal - The Red and the Black Laurence Sterne - Tristram Shandy Valmiki - The Ramayana Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse Cao Xeugin - The Story of the Stone Books that showed up on 5 of 13 lists Aristophanes - The Clouds Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot John Bunyan - Pilgrim's Progress - L Albert Camus - The Stranger Anton Chekhov - Uncle Vanya Confucius - The Analects Charles Dickens - Pickwick Papers Desiderius Erasmus - In Praise of Folly Euclid - Elements William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams James Joyce - Ulysses Franz Kafka - The Castle Kalidasa - Sakuntala Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason Lao-Tzu (Laozi) - Tao te Ching (Daodejing) - L Mencius - The Book of Mencius John Milton - Areopagitica Moliere - Tartuffe Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil - L Plato - Meno Plotinus - Enneads Marcel Proust - Remembrance of Things Past Sima Qian - Records of the Grand Historian Sophocles - Oedipus at Colonnus Ivan Turgenev - Fathers and Sons Adam Smith - Wealth of Nations Tacitus - Annals St. Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica Henry David Thoreau - Walden - L Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America

What I'm Reading Now

I know I have that little area to the left of this page where I post what I'm currently reading, but my reading life is much more complicated than that. I am reading Adler's How to Think About the Great Ideas, but I got sidetracked by an organization bug and read David Allen's Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and Neil Fiore's The Now Habit. Allen's book is fantastic and using his ideas has worked wonders on my desks at school. I haven't really found Fiore's book to be that helpful. Fortunately, Adler's book lends itself to being read in small chunks. The book is basically a transcription of some TV shows Adler made in the '50s on the Great Ideas. It's great stuff, and reading it gives me the opportunity to think about something other than "Has the dog been fed today?" I'm also re-"reading" The Lord of the Rings, in a sense. I own the unabridged audio recording of the entire trilogy on CD, and two weeks ago I converted all 46 discs into mp3 format so I could listen to them in the car. It's the first time I've listened this far into the trilogy, and the first time I've "read" it since the Peter Jackson movies came out. Rob Inglis is a superb narrator, though narrator is too mild a word for what he has done. His different voices are perfect, and his narration does not impose a particular interpretation on the listener. I'm currently at "The Bridge of Khazad-dum" and I can't wait for my morning commute tomorrow to listen again.

Nick's Summary of Great Books, Part I

Here is part one of Nick’s Summary of Great Books. See this page for a further explanation of where this list came from. [Note: An L indicates that this title is available as a free, unabridged audio download from Librivox.org.] Books that showed up on 13 of 13 lists: Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War - L Books that showed up on 12 of 13 lists Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote Herodotus - The Histories Homer - The Iliad Michel de Montaigne - Complete Essays Books that showed up on 11 of 13 lists Lucretius - Of the Nature of the Universe Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel Virgil - The Aeneid Books that showed up on 10 of 13 lists St. Augustine — Confessions Homer - The Odyssey Machiavelli - The Prince - L Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels Books that showed up on 9 of 13 lists: Aeschylus - The Oresteia Aristotle - Nichomachean Ethics Rene Descartes - Discourse on Method - L Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Faust Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace Voltaire - Candide Books that showed up on 8 of 13 lists: Aristotle - Poetics - L Marcus Aurelius - Meditations Fyodor Dostoyevski - The Brothers Karamazov Henry Fielding - Tom Jones Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan John Stuart Mill - On Liberty John Milton - Paradise Lost Blaise Pascal - Pensees Plato - Republic Sophocles - Oedipus Rex, Antigone Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - L

Nick's Summary of Great Books Lists - Introduction

What I intend to do now is post the original list of great books I compiled from thirteen "greatest books" lists. You can read some of the background to this list in this post, which introduces my Catholic Classics list. Here are the thirteen lists used in the summary: 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 I hope this list is helpful for those of you who are looking for great books to read. The next post will consist of part one of this list.

Classic Literature on Audio from Librivox

Now this is what the Internet is all about...common folks uniting in a noble cause, aided by modern technology. Librivox is a community of volunteers who record public domain books and make them available on the Librivox.org website. All of the texts are out of copyright, and every recording is free to download. As the Librivox website states: "Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project." If you've never visited Librivox.org, click there immediately and browse to your heart's content. Here is a sampling of some of the available titles (note: files are quite large): Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales: The Miller's Tale Jane Austen's Emma: Chapter 1 Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray: Chapter 1 G.K. Chesterton's The Wisdom of Father Brown: Chapter 1