Well Educated Mind

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Well Educated Mind

Susan Wise Bauer wrote the book “Well Educated Mind” as a guide to the Classical Education you never had.  

Part two is all about the books and her suggestions of great books to read from 5 genres: Fiction, Autobiography, History/Politics, Drama and Poetry. The books are listed chronologically and she suggests reading them in order. The genres are broken down into 5 sections with a detailed explanation how to read them and a synopsis is included on each title with the best edition to read.

added movie versions of the plays, more poets after the Modernists for Poetry as well as a new Science section. I read the revised version and received a much-needed refresher in active reading

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.  


Using structure reading it will give broad education.

Having broad education is good Einstein would have endorsed courses of study suited to the particular aptitudes of the student. Rather, he seemed to support a broad education for the sake of general intellectual development. In an address he gave in 1936, for example, Einstein declared:

“I want to oppose the idea that the school has to teach directly that special knowledge and those accomplishments which one has to use later directly in life. The demands of life are much too manifold to let such a specialized training in school appear possible […] The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgement should always be placed foremost.”

This syllabus is structure that you start 1. Book which oldest from there you get to see how ideas are build you see how William Shakespeare influenced modern plays. Don Quixote (1605) help to start the modern novel. Read from oldest to newest is great when come to science is great because you get to see how science theories are developed. If you decided to read this syllabus you don’t have to read from very start it is better but myself in depend on what book I could get on my hand. 

Here is great quote meaning of Liberal education (Broad education) “education that enlarges and disciplines the mind and makes it master of its own powers, irrespective of the particular business or profession one may follow”.

Benefits of structure reading

  • Less planning as books are already picked. This stops paralysis by analysis
  • Exposed you new ideas, you wouldn’t be already get because read books that you would never choose. This allow the mind think freer.
  • You get choose the lesson you learn from book
  • Each book will make 1% better
  • You get see how ideas evolve and are build upon one another.
  • You get broad education
  • You read some most important books history and see how ideas still influenced
  • You get see famous books wrong which shows making mistake part of learning process
  • You get to see the world as really is
  • You get to see people have same hopes and fear
  • You get see ancient romans and greeks were just as smart of us
  • You see how language has evolved from old English to modern English
  • You see lot of ideas and concepts we take for granted only relativity modern ideas and lot of ideas we would think as crazy and silly people took for granted.
  • You get see people who change the world struggle that part of learning process
  • You see power of planning and plan reading

Novels

  1. Cervantes, Miguel: Don Quixote
  2. Bunyan, John: The Pilgrim’s Progress
  3. Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels
  4. Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
  5. Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist
  6. Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre
  7. Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter
  8. Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick
  9. Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
  10. Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary
  11. Dostoevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment
  12. Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina 
  13. Hardy, Thomas: The Return of the Native
  14. James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady
  15. Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  16. Crane, Stephen: The Red Badge of Courage
  17. Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness
  18. Wharton, Edith: The House of Mirth
  19. Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby
  20. Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
  21. Kafka, Franz: The Trial
  22. Wright, Richard: Native Son
  23. Camus, Albert: The Stranger
  24. Orwell, George: 1984
  25. Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man
  26. Bellow, Saul: Seize the Day
  27. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia: One Hundred Years of Solitude
  28. Calvino, Italo: If on a winter’s night a traveler
  29. Morrison, Toni: Song of Solomon (did not finish)
  30. DeLillo, Don: White Noise
  31. Byatt, A.S.: Possession

Autobiographies and Memoirs

  1. Augustine: The Confessions
  2. Kempe, Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe
  3. De Montaigne, Michel: Essays
  4. Teresa of Avila: The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself
  5. Descartes, Rene: Meditations
  6. Bunyan, John: Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
  7. Rowlandson, Mary: The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration
  8. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Confessions
  9. Franklin, Benjamin: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
  10. Thoreau, Henry David: Walden
  11. Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
  12. Douglas, Frederick: Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
  13. Washington, Booker T.: Up from Slavery
  14. Nietzsche, Friedrich: Ecce Homo
  15. Hitler, Adolf: Mein Kampf
  16. Gandhi, Mohandas: An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
  17. Stein, Gertude: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
  18. Merton, Thomas: The Seven Storey Mountain
  19. Lewis, C.S.: Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
  20. Malcolm X: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
  21. Sarton, May: Journal of a Solitude
  22. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I.: The Gulag Archipelago
  23. Colson, Charles W.: Born Again
  24. Rodriguez, Richard: Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
  25. Conway, Jill Ker: The Road from Coorain
  26. Wiesel, Elie: All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs

Histories

  1. Herodotus: The Histories
  2. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War
  3. Plato: The Republic (read 100 pages, and took a break)
  4. Plutarch: Lives
  5. Augustine: The City of God: Part One, Part Two
  6. Bede: The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
  7. Machiavelli, Niccolo: The Prince
  8. More, Sir Thomas: Utopia
  9. Locke, John: The True End of Civil Government
  10. Hume, David: The History of England, Vol. V (did not finish)
  11. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: The Social Contract
  12. Paine, Thomas: Common Sense
  13. Gibbon, Edward: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
  14. Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
  15. De Tocqueville, Alexis: Democracy in America
  16. Marx, Karl & Engels, Friedrich: The Communist Manifesto
  17. Burckhardt, Jacob: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
  18. Du Bois, W.E.B.: The Souls of Black Folk
  19. Weber, Max: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
  20. Strachey, Lytton: Queen Victoria
  21. Orwell, George: The Road to Wigan Pier
  22. Miller, Perry: The New England Mind
  23. Galbraith, John Kenneth: The Great Crash 1929
  24. Ryan, Cornelius: The Longest Day
  25. Friedan, Betty: The Feminine Mystique
  26. Genovese, Eugene D.: Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
  27. Tuchman, Barbara: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
  28. Woodward, Bob & Bernstein, Carl: All the President’s Men
  29. McPherson, James M.: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
  30. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher: A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary
  31. Fukuyama, Francis: The End of History and the Last Man

Plays

  1. Aeschylus: Agamemnon
  2. Sophocles: Oedipus the King
  3. Euripides: Medea
  4. Aristophanes: The Birds
  5. Aristotle: Poetics
  6. Everyman
  7. Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus
  8. Shakespeare: Richard III
  9. Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  10. Shakespeare: Hamlet
  11. Moliere: Tartuffe
  12. Congreve, William: The Way of the World
  13. Goldsmith, Oliver: She Stoops to Conquer
  14. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley: The School for Scandal
  15. Ibsen, Henrik: A Doll’s House
  16. Wilde, Oscar: The Importance of Being Earnest
  17. Chekhov, Anton: The Cherry Orchard
  18. Shaw, George Bernard: Saint Joan
  19. Eliot, T.S.: Murder in the Cathedral
  20. Wilder, Thornton: Our Town
  21. O’Neill, Eugene: Long Day’s Journey Into Night
  22. Sartre, Jean Paul: No Exit
  23. Williams, Tennessee: A Streetcar Named Desire
  24. Miller, Arthur: Death of a Salesman
  25. Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot
  26. Bolt, Robert: A Man For All Seasons
  27. Stoppard, Tom: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
  28. Shaffer, Peter: Equus

Poetry

  1. The Epic of Gilgamesh
  2. Homer: Iliad and the Odyssey
  3. Greek Lyricists
  4. Horace: Odes
  5. Beowulf
  6. Alighieri, Dante: Inferno
  7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
  8. Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Can’terbury Tales
  9. Shakespeare: Sonnets
  10. Donne, John
  11. Bible: Psalms (King James Version)
  12. Milton, John: Paradise Lost
  13. Blake, William: Songs of Innocence and of Experience
  14. Wordsworth, William
  15. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
  16. Keats, John
  17. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
  18. Lord Tennyson, Alfred
  19. Whitman, Walt
  20. Dickinson, Emily
  21. Rossetti, Christina
  22. Hopkins, Gerard Manley
  23. Yeates, William Butler
  24. Dunbar, Paul Laurence
  25. Frost, Robert
  26. Sandburg, Carl
  27. Williams, William Carlos
  28. Pound, Ezra
  29. Eliot, T.S.
  30. Hughes, Landston
  31. Auden, W.H.

Science

  1. Hippocrates: On Airs, Waters, and Place
  2. Aristotle: Physics
  3. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
  4. Copernicus: Commentarioulus
  5. Bacon: Novum Organum
  6. Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
  7. Hooke: Micrographia
  8. Newton: “Rules” and “General Scholium from Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
  9. Cuvier: “Preliminary Discourse in Fossil bones, and Geological Catasrophes
  10. Lyell: Principles of Geology
  11. Darwin: On the Origin of Species
  12. Mendel: Experiments in Plant Hybridization
  13. Wegener: The Origin of Continents and Oceans
  14. Einstein: The General Theory of Relativity
  15. Planck: The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory
  16. Huxley: Evolution: The Modern Synthesis
  17. Schrödinger: What is Life?
  18. Carson: Silent Spring
  19. Morris: The Naked Ape
  20. Watson: The Double Helix
  21. Dawkins: The Selfish Gene
  22. Weinberg: The First Three Minutes
  23. Wilson: On Human Nature
  24. Lovelock: Gaia
  25. Gould: The Mismeasure of Man
  26. Gleick: Chaos: Makiing a New Science
  27. Hawking: A Brief History of Time
  28. Alvarez: T. Rex and the Crater of Doom
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