What I Read in May

I read fewer books this month...let me explain.
First of all, I spent a great deal of time researching curriculum changes for next year. That's now complete and I'm happy with my choices. Second we've been pushing to finish our studies this month because it's getting harder and harder for the boys to focus when they (actually we all) would rather be outside playing, gardening, exploring, etc. So we're almost done! Yay!

Finally, I mentioned last month that I would be reading:

So after reading 1/2 of The Well Educated Mind, I slowed things down. The Author Susan Wise Bauer encourages you to read the classics and to really digest what you are reading...it also says reading a whole lot of books really fast is symptomatic of our society of fast food, TV and the world wide web. (gulp)That we are dumbing ourselves down by not diving into books that require serious contemplation (including FICTION and a different approach to reading scripture). It is one heck of a book with very good arguments...so I've decided to challenge myself to the reading list in the book (which they suggest would take YEARS to complete) Ha!

As a personal note: the below list kind of terrifies me, but many of the books I've always wanted to read, and now I find  so much of our home school curriculum refers to them too. So as terrifying as it is, I'm also oddly excited. PS. I'll still be reading other smaller books as I've always done, but not as many, because I really do want to increase my intelligence and educate my kids in the same way. 


Included in the book are her suggestions of 30 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 chapters with an detail explanation how to read them and a synopsis is included on each title with the best edition to read.

The goal of the mini challenge is to read at least 3 books in each category.  Any book read can be applied to the 12 classics in 12 months challenge.  Listed are the first 15 suggestions in each category, however you may choose from any title listed in the Well Educated Mind.

(Those written in Blue, I already own, and some I've read...so should start there - those written in Purple, I'd like to try next) By the way, this is not a complete list. :) Wish me luck.

Fiction:

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 Woolf
The Trial - Franz Kafka
1984 - George Orwell

 Autobiography

Augustine - The Confessions

Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe

Michele 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

Henry David Thoreau - Walden 

Harriet Jacobs - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself 

Frederick Douglass - Life and Times of Frederick Douglass 

Booker T. Washington - Up from Slavery 

Friedrich Nietzsche - Ecce Homo

Adolf Hitler - Mein Kampf 

History/Politics

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

Drama

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 

Poetry 

The Epic of Gilgamesh 

Homer - The Iliad and the Odyssey

Greek Lyricists 

Horace - The Odes 

Beowolf 

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