Tuesday, August 13, 2019

A Reading Agenda

I always enjoy those "10 books everyone should read" type articles to be found here and there on the Internet. Intercollegiate Studies Institute has one called 10 Books You Need to Read Before You Graduate.

Since I "graduated" a long time ago, I read such lists as "10 books I should read before I die or go blind (whichever comes first)." Anyway, The ISI list includes a few I've read, and a few I still haven't got around to.

Haven't read:

  • Dante's Divine Comedy (I'll get to it one of these days.)
  • St. Augustine's Confessions (what's taking me so long?)
  • Milton's Paradise Lost (I've tried . . . I really have tried!)
  • Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (Not sure I'll ever find the time for that one!)
The rest of the books on this list I've read and I mostly agree with the assessments given. An exception might be Flannery O'Connor's Collected short stories, which I agree are a fine body of work, but I'm not sure I'd put it in the "must read" category. 

Books I really think I should read someday:
  • I really think I should finish Plato's Republic (I read the first half not long ago).
  • And after that, Aristotle's Politics (and I also should reread his Nichomachean Ethics, since I read it back in college and didn't get much out of it at the time).
  • John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (OK, I admit I'll probably never get around to this).
  • The Anti-Federalist Papers (to be read before re-reading The Federalist Papers).
  • Tom Sawyer. Nothing can explain why I haven't read this classic yet.
  • Everything I still haven't read by J.R.R. Tolkien.
  • At least one novel by Wendell Berry.
Finally, books I really should re-read:
  • Huckleberry Finn, for sure.
  • The Federalist Papers (see above).
  • The Lord of the Rings trilogy (actually, I've just begun it again).
  • C.S. Lewis's Abolition of Man, Screwtape Letters, just about everything else.

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