The Well-Educated Mind

As you know, I read and loved The Well-Trained Mind. As I mentioned in my post discussing it, I'd recommend it as reading to anyone interested in educational techniques and philosophies, or anyone who has kids and is interested in learning how children learn. It was compelling, to me anyway, and seemed to make a lot of sense.

One of The Well-Trained Mind's co-authors, Susan Wise Bauer, who teaches American literature at the College of William and Mary, also wrote another book, geared for adults, called The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had. I don't know if this is a good book or not because I haven't read it (it mostly pertains to how to read a book and how to critically analyze the book), but I did want to see which books she highlighted as "must reads" and thought I'd offer them up for discussion. Keep in mind that the whole premise of a classical education is the integration of all subjects so the books you'd be reading for grammar, spelling and reading would mesh nicely with the period of history you were studying. That said, Bauer tries to recommend books from many different time periods so that the classical model is able to be followed.

She divides her recommendations into five categories: novels, autobiographies and memoirs, tales of historians and politicians, drama and poetry and, as I mentioned, not only makes recommendations on what to read, but how to best to critically analyze it.

Here's the list of novels she recommends. I've read some, but not most. I'll confess that a few I have little interest in, but many I do. Never mind that I forgot my pen and paper the other night at Barnes and Noble, right?

1) Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (she recommends the translation by John Rutherford)

2) The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

3) Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

4) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (I knew there was a reason I liked Bauer!)

5) Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

6) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

7) The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

8) Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

9) Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

10) Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

11) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (she recommends the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

12) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (she recommends the translation by Constance Garnett, revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova)

13) The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

14) The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

15) Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

16) The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

17) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

18) The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

19) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

20) Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

21) The Trial by Franz Kafka (she recommends the translation by Breon Mitchell)

22) Native Son by Richard Wright

23) The Stranger by Albert Camus (she recommends the translation by Matthew Ward)

24) 1984 by George Orwell

25) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

26) Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

27) One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (she recommends the translation by Gregory Rabassa)

28) If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino (she recommends the translation by William Weaver)

29) Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

30) White Noise by Don Delillo

31) Possession by A.S. Byatt

What do you think of her recommendations? I feel there are some surprising omissions but, for the most part agreed with her list though I also realize another scholar might put together a very different list. And since I haven't read most of them, nor am I a great academic, who am I to judge the quality of the list?

I'm looking at the list from a less scholarly angle: I just want to find books to read that I'll enjoy and although Oprah Book Club-ish fiction is, well, fun, I prefer to mix books that are a little weightier into what I read more often than not. Bauer said something in The Well-Trained Mind that really stuck with me, and what she said, basically, was that if you only feed your child Twinkies and McDonalds don't be surprised if they grow accustomed to that food and become overweight and develop health troubles. It's the same with with books. If your child consistently reads books with unchallenging vocabulary and simple sentence structure, don't be surprised if it's more difficult for them to tackle good books when they're adults.

What books on this list did you, my readers, enjoy? Or which ones are you interested in? Why?