The idea
The phrase “great books” does not imply that all great books are alike. Not everyone has to admire the same works in the same way.
Rather, it suggests that some books reward repeated attention because
they illuminate permanent human questions: love, justice, freedom,
suffering, duty, courage, faith, ambition, memory, and death.
Perhaps the most persuasive definition of a great book is one that can be read at different stages of life
with different results. Put another way, a book that stays with you, and that you find yourself thinking about at odd moments years after reading it.
How we use the term
Our group uses the term in a broad and hospitable sense. It includes
classical texts, major novels, history, philosophy, drama, poetry and
modern works that have already shown unusual depth and durability - from all across the globe, and at all levels of popularity.
There is some overlap with the term "canon", but we're not very prescriptive.
We are less interested in reverence than in serious engagement.
The point is not merely to praise books, but to read them attentively
and discuss them honestly. If you didn't like a book, that is an aesthetic fact about it which is worth discussing, no matter if it was .
A suggested reading list
On the Great Books Tradition
- Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (PublicAffairs, 2008)
- Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (Riverhead, 1994)
- David Denby, Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World, second edition (Simon & Schuster, 2005)
- Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952)
- Roosevelt Montás, Rescuing Socrates (Princeton University Press, 2021)
Guides for reading challenging books
- Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, How To Read A Book (Touchstone, 2014)
- Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (HarperCollins, 2000)
- Mark Edmundson, Why Read? (Bloomsbury, 2004)
Lists of Great Books
Of course, we recommend The Greatest Books as the single best list of great books, precisely because it's made up of so many lists, weighted by how good a list each one is. Below are lists that were published in book form.
- Peter Boxall, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (Cassells, 2012)
- Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 — A Personal Choice (Allison & Busby, 1984)
- Michiko Kakutani, Ex Libris (William Collins, 2020)
- Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major, The New Lifetime Reading Plan (HarperCollins, 1999)
- John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life (Macmillan, 1890)
- Martin Seymour-Smith, The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written (Barnes and Noble Books, 1998)
- John Sutherland, How To Be Well Read (Penguin, 2022)
How to approach the list
This is not a syllabus to be completed mechanically. It is better
understood as a set of invitations. A small number of books read well
is worth more than skimming a large number to up the Goodreads count.
Apart from coming along to our monthly sessions of course, we'd suggest the best way to explore great books is to find one that you like, and then work out from there: by author, by period, by genre, by theme, or any other connection that you feel drawn to.
