The "Well
Educated Mind" by Susan Wise Bauer is a guide to the Classical Education you never had.
Part one covers Training Your Own Mind, The Act of Reading, Keeping a
Journal, and Final Preparations for beginning to read. It outlines how to read
a book from the standpoint of the grammar, logic and rhetoric stages plus how
to read, think and formulate an opinion about what the story means to you.
It is recommended you keep a journal and outline the story as
you read, which I discovered is an excellent idea. Many times, a passage would
spark a thought or an epiphany, but I failed to write it down, either
using marginalia or
a notebook. When I returned to the same passage later, it wouldn't strike me the
same way. So, my advice to you is write it down as soon as the thought
crosses your mind or you will lose it forever.
Part two lists the great books to read and are in chronological order by genre: Fiction,
Autobiography, History/Politics, Drama and Poetry. Bauer recommends reading the titles in order. A synopsis is included with each title along
with recommendations for the best edition to read.
Updated 2016
A revised edition of Well Educated Mind has been released with expanded sections to include
books from the twenty first century, movie versions of the plays, more poets
after the Modernists for Poetry as well as a new Science section. I read the
revised version which provided me with a much needed refresher in active
reading. I heartily recommend the updated and expanded edition. Additional
recommended editions and
links to public domain texts are available.
Please join me in this perpetual challenge. The goal of the perpetual
challenge is to read at least 3 books in any category, each year.
Listed are the suggestions in each category.
- Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes
- The Pilgrim's Progress -John Bunyan
- Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
- Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
- Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
- The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Moby Dick - Herman Melville
- Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
- Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
- The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
- The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
- Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
- The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
- Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
- The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
- The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Wolfe
- The Trial - Franz Kafka
- Native Son - Richard Wright
- The Stranger - Albert Camus
- 1984 - George Orwell
- Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
- Seize the Day - Saul Bellow
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- If on a winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino
- Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
- White Noise - Don DeLillo
- Possession - A.S. Byatt
- The Road - Cormac McCarthy
- Augustine - The Confessions
- Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe
- Michel De Montaigne - Essays
- Teresa Of Avila - The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself
- Rene Descartes - Meditations
- John Bunyan - Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners
- Mary Rowlandson - The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration
- Jean Jacques Rousseau - Confessions
- Benjamin Franklin - The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
- Frederick Douglass - Life and Times of Frederick Douglas
- Henry David Thoreau - Walden
- Harriet Jacobs - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
- Booker T. Washington - Up from Slavery
- Friedrich Nietzsche - Ecce Homo
- Adolf Hitler - Mein Kampf
- Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of my Experiments with Truth
- Gertrude Stein - Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
- Thomas Merton - Seven Storey Mountain
- C.S. Lewis - Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life
- Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X
- Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- May Sarton - Journal of a Solitude
- Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago
- Charles W. Colson - Born Again
- Richard Rodriguez - Hunger of Memory: Education of Richard Rodriguez
- Jill Ker Conway - The Road from Coorain
- Elie Wiesel - All Rivers Run to the Sea
- Herodotus - The Histories
- Thucydides - The Peloponnesian War
- Plato - The Republic
- Plutarch - Lives
- Augustine - The City of God
- Bede - The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
- Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
- Sir Thomas More - Utopia
- John Locke - The True End of Civil Government
- David Hume - The History of England, Volume V
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract
- Thomas Paine - Common Sense
- Edward Gibbon - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
- Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- Alexis De Tocqueville - Democracy in America
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - Communist Manifesto
- Jacob Burckhardt - Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
- W.E.B. Du Bois - The Souls of Black Folk
- Max Weber - The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism
- Lytton Strachey - Queen Victoria
- George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier
- Perry Miller - The New England Mind
- John Kenneth Galbraith - The Great Crash
- Cornelius Ryan - The Longest Day
- Betty Friedan - The Feminine Mystique
- Eugene D. Genovese - Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
- Barbara Tuchman - A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein - All the President's Men
- James McPherson - Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich - A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard
- Francis Fukuyama - End of History and the last Man
- Aeschylus - Agamemnon
- Sophocles - Oedipus the King
- Euripides - Medea
- Aristophanes - The Birds
- Aristotle - Poetics
- Everyman (14th Century)
- Christopher Marlowe - Doctor Faustus
- William Shakespeare - Richard III
- William Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream
- William Shakespeare - Hamlet
- Moliere - Tartuffe
- William Congreve - The Way of the World
- Oliver Goldsmith - She Stoops to Conquer
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan - The School for Scandal
- Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House
- Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Ernest
- Anton Chekhov - The Cherry Orchard
- George Bernard Shaw - Saint Joan
- T.S. Eliot - Murder in the Cathedral
- Thornton Wilder - Our Town
- Eugene O'Neill - Long Day's Journey into Night
- Jean Paul Sartre - No Exit
- Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire
- Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman
- Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot
- Robert Bolt - A Man for All Seasons
- Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
- Peter Shaffer - Equus
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- Homer - The Iliad and the Odyssey
- Greek Lyricists
- Horace - The Odes
- Beowulf
- Dante Alighieri - Inferno
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
- William Shakespeare - Sonnets
- John Donne
- King James Bible - Psalms
- John Milton - Paradise Lost
- William Blake - Songs of Innocence and of Experience
- Williams Wordsworth
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- John Keats
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- Walt Whitman
- Emily Dickinson
- Christina Rossetti
- Gerald Manley Hopkins
- William Butler Yeats
- Paul Laurence Dunbar
- Robert Frost
- Carl Sandburg
- William Carlos Williams
- Ezra Pound
- T.S. Eliot
- Langston Hughes
- W.H. Auden
Science
- Hippocrates - On Airs, Waters and Places
- Aristotle - Physics
- Lucretius - On the Nature of Things
- Nicolaus Copernicus - Commentariolus
- Francis Bacon - Novum Organum
- Galileo Galilie - Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
- Robert Hooke - Micrographia
- Isaac Newton - excerpts from Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
- Georges Cuvier - Preliminary Discourse
- Charles Lyell - Principles of Geology
- Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species
- Gregor Mendel - Experiments in Plant Hybridization
- Alfred Wegener - The Origin of Continents and Oceans
- Albert Einstein - The General Theory of Relativity
- Max Planck - The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory
- Julian Huxley - Evolution: The Modern Synthesis
- Erwin Schrodinger - What is Life?
- Rachel Carson - Silent Spring
- Desmond Morris- The Naked Ape
- James D. Watson - The Double Helix
- Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
- Steven Weinberg - The First Three Minutes:
- A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe
- E. O. Wilson- On Human Nature
- James Lovelock - Gaia
- Stephen Jay Gould - The Mismeasure of Man
- James Gleick - Chaos: Making a New Science
- Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time
- Walter Alvarez - T. Rex and the Crater of Doom