An Introduction

Welcome!  As you probably guessed, my name is Lily and I am starting a challenging and rewarding journey through history's finest texts  While I had the extraordinary good fortune to attend and graduate from an Ivy League university, I took the path of least resistance at the time and did what I needed to get a degree.  I spent a few years wishing I had that time back, and the opportunity to learn.  And then it hit me: throughout history, people have learned through independent study of important books.  With websites, an e-reader and online courses at my disposal, there was no excuse for me not to do the same.

And so, my journey begins.  There are many great books lists to choose from, but I am going to start out with a very modified version of the St. John's College Reading List.  I will probably not follow it precisely, as I have read some of the works on the list, but it will be my starting point.  The purpose of this blog is to keep me motivated and to force me to work through the texts in a more purposeful way.  I will be writing about my thoughts on the readings as I go along, and I encourage feedback and dialogue!  The life of an autodidact can be isolating.

My goal list:

1)       The Iliad

2)     The Odyssey

3)     Agamemnon

4)     Libation Bearers

5)     Herodotus’ Histories (Selections)

6)     Plato’s Gorgias

7)      Plato’s Meno

8)     Sophocles’ Antigone

9)     Oedipus Rex

10)  Plato’s Republic

11)   Aristophanes’ Clouds

12)  Plato’s Apology, Crito

13)  Plato’s Phaedo

14)  Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War

15)  Plato’s Theaetetus

16)  Plato’s Sophist

17)   Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound

18)  Plato’s Phaedrus

19)  Plato’s Symposium

20) Aristotle’s Ethics

21)  Aristotle’s Politics

22) Sophocles’ Ajax

23) Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things

24) Aristotle’s Physics

25) Euripides’ Bacchae

26) Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus

27)  Aristotle’s Metaphysics

28) Aristophanes’ Frogs

29) Aristotle’s Poetics

30) Sophocles’ Philoctetes

31)  Livy’s Early History of Rome

32) Plutarch’s Lives (Selections)

33) Virgil’s Aeneid

34) Tacitus Annals

35) Epictetus’ Discourses

36) Aristotle On The Soul

37)  Plotinus’ Enneads

38) Augustine’s Confessions

39) Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed

40)Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae

41)  Dante’s Divine Comedy

42) Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

43) Thomas More’s Utopia

44)Nietsche’s Beyond Good and Evil

45) Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost

46)Machiavelli’s The Prince

47) Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

48)Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice

49)Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew

50) Shakespeare’s Winter Tale

51)  Shakespeare’s Richard III

52) Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

53) Shakespeare’s Sonnets

54) Montaigne’s Essays

55) Teresa of Avila

56) Shakespeare’s Richard II

57)  Shakespeare’s Henry IV

58) Descartes’ Discourse on Method

59) Shakespeare’s Othello

60)Shakespeare’s King Lear

61)  Shakespeare’s Tempest

62) Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor

63) Don Quixote

64)Confucius’ Analects

65) Tale of Genji

66)Common Sense

67) Paradise Lost

68)Northanger Abbey

69)Jane Eyre

70) Moby Dick

71)   Walden

72)  Hobbes’ Leviathan

73)  Locke’s Second Treatise on Government

74) Gulliver’s Travel

75)  Heart of Darkness

76) One Hundred Years of Solitude

77)  Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature

78) A Critique of Pure Reason

79) Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling

80)Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations

81)  Huckleberry Finn

82) Great Expectations

83) A Doll’s House

84)Brothers Kamarazov

85) Oliver Twist

86)Anna Karenina

87) Waiting for Godot

88)War and Peace

89)Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

90)Poe’s Collected Works and Stories

91)  Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

92) A Vindication of the Rights of Women

93) The Feminine Mystique

94)Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk

95) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

96)Animal Farm

97) 1984

98)The Communist Manifesto

99)Autobiography of Malcom X

100)  Mrs. Dalloway

I will be starting with Homer's Iliad.  Stay tuned for my thoughts on the first few books!

-Lily