What We’ve Read

Since beginning this project in January 2011, we have completed the following works:

Imaginative Literature

Epic Poems:

1. The Odyssey of Homer
2. The Iliad of Homer
3. The Aeneid of Virgil

Plays:

1. Euripides: Alcestis
2. Molière: The Doctor in Spite of Himself
3. O’Neill, Eugene: The Emperor Jones
4. Shakespeare, William: The Taming of the Shrew
5. Shakespeare, William: Julius Caesar
6. Shakespeare, William: The Tempest
7. Shakespeare, William: The Merchant of Venice
8. Shakespeare, William: Macbeth
9. Shaw, George Bernard: The Man of Destiny
10. Sophocles: Antigone
11. Synge, J.M.: Riders to the Sea

Short Stories:

1. Anderson, Sherwood: “I’m a Fool”
2. Crane, Stephen: “The Open Boat”
3. Dostoevsky, Fyodor: “White Nights”
4. Flaubert, Gustave: “The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller”
5. Hemingway, Ernest: “The Killers”
6. Kipling, Rudyard: “Mowgli’s Brothers”
7. Lawrence, D.H.: “The Rocking-Horse Winner”
8. Long, Haniel: “The Power Within Us”
9. Maupassant, Guy de: “Two Friends”
10. Poe, Edgar Allan: “The Tell-Tale Heart”
11. Poe, Edgar Allan: “The Masque of the Red Death”
12. Pushkin, Alexander: “The Queen of Spades”
13. Scott, Walter: “Two Drovers”
14. Tolstoy, Leo: “The Three Hermits”
15. Twain, Mark: “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg”
16. Voltaire: “Micromégas”
17. Wilde, Oscar: “The Happy Prince”

Novels and Novellas:

1. Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
2. Eliot, George: The Lifted Veil
3. Hugo, Victor: Ninety-Three (excerpt)
4. Melville, Herman: Billy Budd, Sailor
5. Melville, Herman: Moby Dick
6. Orwell, George: Animal Farm
7. Stevenson, Robert L.: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Literary and Critical Essays:

1. Arnold, Matthew: “Sweetness and Light”
2. Hazlitt, William: “Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen”
3. Hazlitt, William: “On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth”
4. Hazlitt, William: “My First Acquaintance with Poets”
5. Lamb, Charles: “My First Play”
6. Lamb, Charles: “Dream Children, a Reverie”
7. Lamb, Charles: “Sanity of True Genius”
8. De Quincey, Thomas: “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth“
9. Schopenhauer, Arthur: “On Some Forms of Literature”
10. Woolf, Virginia: “How Should One Read a Book?”

Man and Society

Histories and Treatises:

1. Adams, Henry: History of the United States in the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (excerpts)
2. Herodotus: The Histories
3. Jefferson, Thomas: Notes on the State of Virginia (excerpt)
4. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich: Manifesto of the Communist Party
5. Prescott, William: History of the Conquest of Mexico (excerpt)
6. Tacitus: Life of Julius Gnaeus Agricola
7. Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Twain, Mark: Life on the Mississippi (excerpt)
9. von Clausewitz, Karl: On War (excerpt)
10. Xenophon: Anabasis (excerpt)
11. Xenophon: Marginalia (excerpt)

Constitutional Documents:

1. The English Bill of Rights
2. The Virginia Declaration of Rights
3. The American Declaration of Independence
4. The Articles of Confederation
5. The Constitution of the United States of America
6. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen
7. The Charter of the United Nations

Letters:

1. Burke, Edmund: “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol”
2. Franklin, Benjamin: “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America”
3. Jefferson, Thomas: “Biographical Sketches of Washington and Franklin”
4. Lincoln, Abraham: “To Horace Greeley”
5. Pliny the Younger: “The Eruption of Vesuvius”
6. Washington, George: “Circular Letter to the Governors upon the Disbanding of the Army”
7. Washington, George: “Farewell Address”

Speeches:

1. Carlyle, Thomas: “The Hero as King”
2. Faraday, Michael: “Observations on Mental Education”
3. Jefferson, Thomas: “First Inaugural Address”
4. Lincoln, Abraham: “The Gettysburg Address”
5. Lincoln, Abraham: “Second Inaugural Address”
6. Lincoln, Abraham: “Last Public Address”
7. Lincoln, Abraham: “Address at Cooper Institute”
8. Lincoln, Abraham: “First Inaugural Address”

Essays:

1. St. Jean de Crèvecoeur: “The Making of Americans” from Letters From an American Farmer
2. Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “Thoreau”
3. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay: The Federalist
4. Hawthorne, Nathaniel: “Sketch of Abraham Lincoln” from “Chiefly About War Matters”
5. Hume, David: “Of the Study of History”
6. James, William: “The Energies of Men”
7. La Bruyère, Jean de: Characters (excerpts)
8. Lincoln, Abraham: “Meditation on the Divine Will”
9. Lucian: “The Way to Write History”
10. Paine, Thomas: “A Call to Patriots” from The Crisis
11. Plutarch: Of Bashfulness
12. Schopenhauer, Arthur:”On Education”
13. Swift, Jonathan: “Resolutions When I Come to Be Old”
14. Swift, Jonathan: “A Meditation Upon a Broomstick”
15. Swift, Jonathan: “A Modest Proposal”
16. Swift, Jonathan: “An Essay on Modern Education”
17. Thoreau, Henry David: “A Plea for Captain John Brown”
18. Whitman, Walt: “The Death of Abraham Lincoln”
19. Woolf, Virginia: “The Art of Biography”

Natural Sciences

Physical Sciences:

1. Archimedes: “The Sand-Reckoner”
2. Bacon, Francis: “The Sphinx”
3. Boeke, Kees: Cosmic View
4. Campanella, Tomasso: A Defense of Galileo (excerpt)
5. Carson, Rachel: The Sea Around Us (excerpt)
6. Curie, Eve: Madame Curie (excerpt)
7. Darwin, Charles: Autobiography
8. Eddington, Sir Arthur: The Nature of the Physical World (excerpt)
9. Eiseley, Loren: The Immense Journey (excerpt)
10. Fabre, Jean-Henri: The Sacred Beetle and Others (excerpts)
11. Faraday, Michael: “The Chemical History of a Candle”
12. Galilei, Galileo: “The Starry Messenger”
13. Galilei, Galileo: Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences
14. Galton, Sir Francis: Hereditary Genius (excerpt)
15. Gilbert, William: On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
16. Haldane, J.B.S.: “On Being the Right Size”
17. Harvey, William: Anatomical Disquisition on the Circulation of the Heart and Blood in Animals
18. Hippocrates: The Hippocratic Oath
19. Hippocrates: “On Ancient Medicine”
20. Hippocrates: “On Airs, Waters, and Places”
21. Huxley, Thomas: “On a Piece of Chalk”
22. Jeans, Sir James: The  Universe Around Us (excerpt)
23. Lyell, Sir Charles: Principles of Geology (excerpt)
24. Schrödinger, Erwin: What Is Life?
25. Tyndall, John: Faraday as a Discoverer (excerpts)
26. Wöhler, Friedrich: “On the Artificial Production of Urea”

Mathematics:

1. Campbell, Norman Robert: What Is Science? (excerpts)
2. Dantzig, Tobias: Number–The Language of Science (excerpts)
3. Euclid: Elements
4. Euler, Leonhard: “The Seven Bridges of Königsberg”
5. Forsyth, Andrew Russell: “Mathematics in Life and Thought”
6. Hogben, Lancelot: Mathematics for the Million (excerpt)
7. Kasner and Newman: Mathematics and the Imagination (excerpts)
8. de Laplace, Pierre Simon: A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (excerpt)
9. Poincaré, Henri: Science and Method (excerpts)
10. Russell, Bertrand: “The Study of Mathematics”
11. Whitehead, Alfred N.: An Introduction to Mathematics (excerpt)

Philosophy and Theology:

Treatises and Longer Works:

1. Adams, Henry: Mont St. Michel and Chartres (excerpt)
2. Aristotle: Politics
3. St. Augustine of Hippo: Confessions
4. Bacon, Francis: The New Atlantis
5. Descartes, René: Discourse on Method
6. Descartes, René: Rules for the Direction of the Mind
7. Dewey, John: How We Think (excerpts)
8. Hume, David: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
9. Locke, John: Second Treatise on Civil Government
10. Lucretius: The Way Things Are (AKA On the Nature of Things)
11. Plato: Republic
12. Voltaire: Philosophical Dictionary (excerpt)

Dialogues and Other Shorter Works:

1. Cicero: On Friendship
2. Cicero: On Old Age
3. Epictetus: Enchiridion
4. Plato: Meno
5. Plato: The Apology
6. Plato: Crito
7. Plato: Phaedo
8. Plato: Symposium
9. Plato: Protagoras
10. Plutarch: On Contentment
11. Plutarch: On Bashfulness

Essays, Lectures, and Letters:

1. Bacon, Francis: Essays (excerpts)
2. Browne, Sir Thomas: Urn-Burial (excerpt)
3. Clifford, William: “The Ethics of Belief”
4. Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “Self-Reliance”
5. Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “Montaigne”
6. Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “Nature”
7. Epicurus: “Letter to Menoeceus”
8. Epicurus: “Letter to Herodotus”
9. Erskine, John: “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent”
10. Hazlitt, William: “On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth”
11. James, William: “The Will to Believe”
12. James, William: “The Sentiment of Rationality”
13. Locke, John: “A Letter Concerning Toleration”
14. Mill, John Stuart: “On Nature”
15. Pater, Walter: “The Art of Life”
16. Santayana, George: “Lucretius” (from Three Philosophical Poets)
17. Santayana, George: “Goethe’s Faust” (from Three Philosophical Poets)

Works in Progress

1. Michel de Montaigne: Essays
2. Plutarch: Lives of the Ancient Greeks and Romans
3. St. Augustine: City of God
4. The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle