The Great Books Foundation

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If you truly like to read, or even if you just THINK that you like to read, there is a website that is very much worth your time to investigate. It's not the easiest site to navigate, but it has many pages to view, and many links to follow (a number of which will take you to other fairly big websites). And everything connected with this original site is all about READING the very BEST books that have ever been written; and, also, about how to get the most out of reading them!

So, if you profess to love books, this is THE website for you! This foundation not only publishes numerous anthologies of both whole works and partial selections from the greatest examples in all of literature, but they also offer reading and study guides (many of which can be downloaded for free from their website) to help readers better understand these "greatest books" of all time. Their recommendations of specific book titles range from as long ago as approximately 3,000 years to as recently as just a very few years ago!

Additionally, this website and the foundation behind it are intricately involved with, through helping to facilitate, many small, private reading and study groups all across America. These reading groups are open to any serious readers who wish to enjoy the best that's available in the world of reading and thought. You can easily start up such a group in your own community, or at your school, or at your local library simply by following the directions available on this website.

If you so choose, the members of your reading and discussion group may then buy materials directly from this website for use in their reading and discussion activities. However, it is not necessary to buy anything at all from this website. Many of the Great Books they recommend are available in inexpensive editions from your local bookstore, and the reading and study guides for them may be downloaded for free directly from the site.

There are a number of college and universities in the U.S.A. which have come to employ various modified reading list formats, based upon the reading and discussion group programs promoted by The Great Books Foundation, as the primary curriculum for their students during the full span of their four year undergraduate education. Some of these institutions of higher learning have interesting website that may be accessed through the links offered on the original Great Books website. Those college websites (and their reading lists) are also very much worth browsing through.

Here, below, is the introductory paragraph from the Home Page of The Great Book Foundation. I encourage you to read it here, and then visit the website to discover everything they have to offer:

"More than fifty years ago two educators at the University of Chicago launched the Great Books movement. Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the university, and professor Mortimer Adler, a prolific author and "public intellectual" long before the phrase had been coined, shared a vision of book discussion groups in which passionate readers could meet and talk about enduring issues and ideas. The Foundation was established in 1947, and the movement grew. Today it comprises upward of 850 groups meeting in homes and libraries across the country, with thousands of adult participants."

http://www.greatbooks.org/typ/indexgb.0.html

Listed below is a representative sample of the sort of books that are either available directly through The Great Books Foundation website, or that are recommended by them as priority choices for readers. There are about 100 titles listed below, but the foundation offers and recommends many other titles not included here. This list is merely intended to give an idea of the types of books, plays, and other literary works that are mentioned or listed somewhere in connection with The Great Books Foundation website. This is a list I've compiled as I read through all the various pages and links connected with the site I'm urging people to visit. The list below is not copied from any specific page on that site.

The best way to learn to love reading is to read The Great Books that have been loved and treasured by, and that have informed and inspired other readers down through the ages! But, as anyone can easily see from the list below, this does NOT mean that, in order to read the BEST literature ever written, a reader must be strapped with a lot of exhausting, boring, dull stuff! Far from it!

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain

Agamemnon
by Aeschylus

The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton

Age of Iron
by J.M. Coetzee

Amongst Women
by John McGahern

Anna Karennina
by Leo Tolstoy

Antigone
by Sophocles

As You Like It
by William shakespeare

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
by James Weldon Johnson

The Bell
by Iris Murdoch

Billiards at Half-Past Nine
by Heinrich Böll

The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoyevski

Carpenter's Gothic
by William Gaddis

Catch-22
by Joseph Heller

Clouds
by Aristophanes

Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer
by Andreï Makine

Le Coup de Grâce
by Marguerite Yourcenar

Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoyevski

The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon

Darkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler

Death of a Salesman
by Arthur Miller

Democracy in America
by Alexis de Tocqueville

The Divine Comedy Volume I: Inferno
by Dante

Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes

Dubliners
by James Joyce

Eichmann in Jerusalem
by Hannah Arendt

Emma
by Jane Austen

The Eumenides
by Aeschylus

Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley

The Good Apprentice
by Iris Murdoch

The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck

Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon

The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift

Hamlet
by William shakespeare

The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood

Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad

Herzog
by Saul Bellow

Howard's End
by E. M. Forster

Humbolt's Gift
by Saul Bellow

The Iliad
by Homer

An Imaginary Life
by David Malouf

Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison

Ironweed
by William Kennedy

Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë

Justine
by Lawrence Durrell

King Lear
by William shakespeare

The Little Disturbances of Man
by Grace Paley

Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman

The Libation Bearers
by Aeschylus

Libra
by Don DeLillo

Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov

Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel García Márquez

Macbeth
by William shakespeare

The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov

Middlemarch
by George Eliot

Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie

The Misanthrope
by Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Molière)

Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville

My Ántonia
by Willa Cather

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
by Frederick Douglass

Notes from the Underground
by Fyodor Dostoyevski

The Odyssey
by Homer

Oedipus at Colonus
by Sophocles

Oedipus Rex
by Sophocles

Of Human Bondage
by W. Somerset Maugham

Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck

On the Black Hill
by Bruce Chatwin

One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez

Othello
by William shakespeare

Paradise Lost
by John Milton

Paradise of the Blind
by Duong Thu Huong

A Passage to India
by E. M. Forster

The Pearl
by John Steinbeck

Persuasion
by Jane Austen

Phèdre
by Jean Racine

Philadelphia Fire
by John Edgar Wideman

The Pickup
by Nadine Gordimer

Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen

The Prince
by Niccolò Machiavelli

The Procedure
by Harry Mulisch

Prometheus Bound
by Aeschylus

The Red and the Black
by Stendhal

The Red Badge of Courage
by Stephen Crane

The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Sea, the Sea
by Iris Murdoch

Seize the Day
by Saul Bellow

Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse

Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison

The Stranger
by Albert Camus

The Street of Crocodiles
by Bruno Schulz

Swann's Way
by Marcel Proust

The Tempest
by William shakespeare

Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe

Thinks
by David Lodge

To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf

Two Lives
by William Trevor

War and Peace
by Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

When the Elephants Dance
by Tess Holthe

Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys

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--Spencer