It’s been eons since I read any of “The Great Books” of Western Civilization.
On the college track in high school and an English major once I got to college, I had little choice but to sometimes struggle through Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets and John Milton’s poems. I’m glad I was “forced” to do it because I managed to glean valuable insights in the process.
Reading Shakespeare and Milton are also part of a “classical” education, which begins with the works of Greek and Roman poets like Homer and Virgil. These writings also mark the beginning of the western canon. The world’s great authors and philosophers have been influenced by what came before them in some way or another.
Contained in the great works are ideas we now take for granted, patterns that reveal the whole picture of civilization and provide glimpses into the human mind. They teach us who we are and how we came to be. From the Code of Hammurabi (the first written body of laws laid down by a Babylonian king), the Hebrew Bible (written and compiled by the hand of God through inspired men), the works of men like Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Blaise Pascal, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Alexis de Tocqueville, Leo Tolstoy, and women like Jane Austen, to the body of knowledge still accumulating through the efforts of people with a love for learning and creating, we are indeed blessed to have free access to these writings.
We all should study history more often because it reminds us that before we (individual you) arrived on the scene, there existed a wide range of events and people molding and shaping the world as we know it today. Each moment in history is like a link in a chain, connecting one event to another to form the whole, for better or for worse.
Imagine what all those accumulated events look like as a whole from the eyes of an omnipotent being outside time and space. Behind it all is a purpose that we can’t see or quite comprehend. Christians believe that one day, we’ll see and understand that purpose clearly.
In a nutshell, that’s what the hype of western civ is all about. Naysayers have always and will continue to dispute the significance of books that make up the western canon and the people who decided the canon (also known as “Dead White Males”). But the greatness of that vast body of knowledge cannot be convincingly disputed.
That’s my public service announcement and lecture for today, prompted by an article I read in the Washington Post called “Writing Off Reading” (free registration required).
Michael Skube, a journalism professor at Elon University in Elon, NC, reports that some of his students think that Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, is a great writer. Relatively speaking, the book is a good read. Brown does all the formulaic stuff that keeps you turning the pages. But a great writer compared to…William Faulkner? According to Skube, Brown “was the only writer they could think of.”
Yikes.
Skube says that words like impetus, ramshackle, lucid, advocate, derelict, satire (no English lit classes in high school?), and afflict stumped his private university students, the same ones who graduated from high school with grade point averages of 3.5 and higher.
You don’t need a study to determine what’s going on. These students either don’t read or don’t read widely enough. If A-students admitted to private schools don’t know the meaning of simple words and aren’t inclined to look them up, what hope do students in badly performing public schools have?
A love for learning seems largely absent these days. I was never the best student nor anywhere close to being the best, but I always respected learning. A passion for reading and writing was instilled in me very early. I want to share that passion with children, especially those who think they hate school or don’t do well in school or don’t believe they’re smart enough.
The human mind is a wondrous thing.
Update: Blogger Jared of Total Depravity writes in the comment section:
The simplest way to learn good writing is to read it, and that means reading the classics.
I also used to tell my students that, for all practical purposes, there are no new ideas. The chances are excellent that someone, somewhere, has struggled with the same thoughts roiling in your head, and have expressed them much more clearly than you ever will, and in ways you’ve never considered. And he probably wrote a book about it.
Emphasis added.
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La Shawn,
There’s no time to read, we’ve got to fight against Buuuuuusssssshhhhhh!
We can read all the classics once the writers are dead. Marx and Mao, Chomsky and Che can wait, we’ve got to rid the world of conservatives first. Yearggghhhh!
My English teacher mother instilled in me a love of reading and in our house we often read what she taught her students, such as Beowulf and much of Shakespeare. I must admit I don’t read the ‘classics’ much anymore but I will say that I’m thankful to my mom that I was ‘forced’ to read them as it does enable critical thinking and reasoning. I need it when I come up in here and battle you conservative folks…:)
Thanks Mom!
We don’t need no education.
We don’t need no thought control.
Akshually, books is guud. Pappy uzed one under the short laig of the kichin tabel to keep it from tippin. An’ a stak of em makes dandy boostir seets fer the young-uns too.
To get our minds off contemporary politics, we should start a “Return to the Classics” online campaign. We could read and discuss the great books while chaos swirls around us and offer politicians some insight gleaned from mistakes of the past and how they affect us now.
A lofty idea…
Spot on! When is the last time you noticed someone under the age of 35 doing a crossword puzzle?
Lashawn:
I would be a willing participant in such a campaign. I remember growing up in a house in which “classical” books were always on the bookshelf and available for my sister and I to read. Including Shakesphere. I took Latin for four years in high school, which almost 30 years later was the best preperation for critical thinking and writing that I have to do on the job today. We made frequent trips to the library to check out books. Now my daughter at 9 is doing the same thing. You are right, developing future generation’s minds will have more lasting benefits to society that following a corrupt political landscape that will really never change.
::cracking up at the comments::
seriously, I would love a “classics” campaign, or even a “club” of people willing to read them. (I say club to include non-bloggers)
I read Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo nearly three years ago and it inspired me to seek out others. It still remains one of my favorites. (I’m a bit of a romantic.)
Lately I’ve been seeking out some of our ‘Great American Novels’. Suggestions?
If he’s your cup of tea, Kim Du Toit has a section on his website forum that discusses culture and classic literature.
I studied Latin in college and there were quite a few students who had studied Latin for four years in high school and had no idea how to proceed at the higher level. What type of study does high school Latin entail? Didn’t seem like they were prepared at all for basic Latin in college.
By all means study and discuss classic literature. We need to stay educated and vigilant. What use is a boorish culture anyway?
Perhaps, given the times we’re in at the moment, a reading assignment of Churchill’s magnificent WWII memoirs. That might help some folks to understand the nature of conflict, and the need to squarely face and defeat our enemies.
Along the same lines, but more tragic, is Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac Civil War trilogy, also a must-read for anyone wanting a good understanding of that war.
Jewels,
Try: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Last of the Mohicans, House of the Seven Gables, Moby Dick, Autobiography of Ben Franklin, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Red Badge of Courage; Whitman, Frost, Poe, Sandburg; Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution; basically stay away from anything after 1930! Heh.
I’d love to join the LaShawn Barber return to the classics book club. Cool idea. I’ve got time on my hands, obviously, as I am reading this wonderful blog. I’m yearning for a time when catastrophic world events and hate and fear for me and mine didn’t occupy my thoughts. There was such a time when I’d just curl up with a good novel and let my imagination unfurl.
Wonderful, La Shawn. One of my favorite thinkers, Mortiner J. Adler, was a big proponent of reading the classics. It confirms in all men and women that we are human beings, not mere animals, as much of today’s secular, materialistic culture would have us and our children believe. Speaking of Mr. Adler, try reading his “The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes.”
Bless you for a wondeful start to my day!
Perhaps one day we’ll all be able to join a “classic bloggers” club and can sit around and discuss the great bloggers of western civ.
Or maybe great podcasters? Or the great MySpace sites of the world.
Only half-facetiously,
AC
P.S. to RedBeard: Amen on Churchill. But his books are weighty.
LaShawn; The first step in improving reading in youth today is to turn off the *&%$* TV and keep it off.
Reading nurtures creative thinking – the reader has to create and populate the scenes from the book in the imagination.
so the kids taught by the new generation of left-wing, hyper-political, dogma-spouting educrats have suspiciously rotten vocabularyness? and don’t/can’t read to save their lives?
how very….uh…..*ungood*.
Love how you put Machiavelli’s The Prince on your post. Always loved that book. I am just glad you didn’t add the Bronte sisters to your list. Those books are bloody depressing. I would love to join your online Return to Classics project.
Everything with them is ‘the influence of the environment’, and nothing else. Their favorite phrase! From which it follows that if society is normally organized, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, because it is not supposed to exist!
If there is no God, then there is no crime.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dosotyevsky
Reason 271 for home schoolin’!
I, too, am a college professor with concerns about young people and reading. Most of my students read only if they must and, while many are familiar with the classics, their insights are based on the movie versions of those classics – color not black and white. Today few of them read anything beyond the sports page and the text books they must buy and read (if they buy and read them!). The issue is painful to those of us who love to read. I don’t see it changing anytime soon however. The competition for the minds and hearts of our young people (TV, movies, gaming, Internet, IM …) is fierce. Taking away the TV might be a first step but you must also address their computer, cell phone, music, the mall and so on. The youth culture of today(?) doesn’t have much place for reading. For that matter, how many of us, parents and grandparents, read to ourselves and to our kids?
I don’t need a study to tell me that people aren’t reading. You need only look as far as your local op-ed piece. Even ignoring grammar and punctuation, it’s getting more and more difficult to find writers who can complete a coherent thought.
The simplest way to learn good writing is to read it, and that means reading the classics.
I also used to tell my students that, for all practical purposes, there are no new ideas. The chances are excellent that someone, somewhere, has struggled with the same thoughts roiling in your head, and have expressed them much more clearly than you ever will, and in ways you’ve never considered. And he probably wrote a book about it.
For light reading, I recommend Bulfinch’s Mythology. A “new” edition was published in the 70’s, which contains “The Age Of Fable,” “The Age Of Chivalry,” and “Legends Of Charlemagne.” It also has excerpts of poetry and prose literature illustrating the influence the classical Greek, Roman, early British and early French legends had on modern literature. It’s really a good read. I recommend it heartily, if you’re into legends and myths of the non-political variety.
Perhaps, to make things more interesting, we could directly relate literary classics to contemporary politics. For example, Moby Dick as an exposition of the Senior Senator from Massachusetts……..
No, no. Bad RedBeard. Bad. Sit down.
La Shawn, I credit much of any career success I’ve had to my lifelong love of reading. Not to mention the fact that reading has brought me so much pleasure.
I tried to instill that love in all three of my children, and I believe I succeeded.
It really makes me sad that a lot of young people read little more than the text messages on their cell phones.
There is so much good literature out there. There is little excuse not to read the works of authors such as:
James Baldwin,
Ama Bontemps
Gwendolyn Brooks
Countee Cullen
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Lorraine Hansberry
Langston Hughes
Main Locke
Ellen Tarry
Phillis Wheatley
Richard Wright
Frederick Douglass
Anthony William Amo
Booker T. Washington
We live in a post-literate society. Pictures mean and affect us more than words, at least that’s the current state of things. I love movies, but I also love books–as well I should being a former English major. Comparing reading to moviegoing is akin to the difference between watching a football game and actually doing real exercise. The workout builds muscle.
Just finished reading “Fire” by Sebastian Junger (globe-trotting journalist and author of “The Perfect Storm).
I have been reading a whole lot of conservative books and have been reading books from many conservative writters and while we remember DICK and JANE the kids of today get too much of DADDYS ROOMATE and HEATHER HAS TWO MOMMIES
My father taught me how to read before I made it to second grade and I’ve been a voracious and disciplined reader ever since. For light reading I like contemporary British fiction (McEwan, Lively, Byatt…) but I always make myself read at least one work of classic literature every season. This summer I read the Kristen Lavransdatter trilogy by Sigrid Undset (The Bridal Wreath, The Mistress of Husaby and The Cross). What a magnificent work! A rich tapestry of Medieval life in Norway, Undset created what is probably one of the most unknown and underrated female heroines in all of literature.
Jewels, it sounds like a cliche, but The Great Gatsby and the Scarlet Letter are excellent reads–or rereads if you only know them from high school. I’ve always liked Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, too. And there are so many great American short stories. Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Thurber, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, J.D. Salinger…
I’ve just recently read To Kill A Mockingbird (at age 44) and my daughter, age 13 just finished it yesterday. I wish I had read it earlier, and I hope she will re-read it later. Besides some Christian and political (current) books I am reading Plato’s The Republic and deTocqueville’s Democracy in America (although that is on hold for the moment).
We’re a homeschooling family and mean old mom that I am, I have given my older children summer reading lists (they can choose from a list of classic books). My older son who is not a great reader has finished Animal Farm, another one I can’t remember and is now working on A Tale of Two Cities. Next year for his “Language Arts” he will mainly be reading many of the “classics” and doing some writing. I would like my children to have read many more good books by age 18 than I did even though I was a good reader and the high school I went to was fairly good.
Other wonderful selections:
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Native Son and Black Boy by Richard Wright
The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck
Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck
I also enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Shade: I’m digging your list. Got a bit of ‘color’ to it.
Some of you folks on here might do good to broaden your horizons.
Tiffany, you’re assuming, and I know you don’t like it when people do it to you. Some commenters may have read those books. I know I’ve read some, but since I didn’t mention them, someone may “assume” I hadn’t.
Awwwwwww LaShawn, I was just trying to stir the pot a little…LOL!!!!!
Ed Hirsch wrote “Cultural Literacy” and other books and articles–see http://www.coreknowledge.org. I remember reading Cultural Literacy in my brainwashing Education program, and all the idiots around me were whining that it wasn’t diverse enough. They didn’t understand that our country is based on history, not neo-Marxist multicultural ideas that started being propagated in the 60’s.
I figured, Tiff.
Have you read anything by Toni Morrisson? Song of Solomon is one of my favorite books of all time, and it’s much better than her much-praised Beloved.
I love many of the classics. I also find some of them difficult to plow through, but what makes them “classics” is the pay-off at the end.
Still, for instilling a love of reading in young people, I recommend a MIX of classical and modern literature. For example, “Harry Potter” and “Lord of the Rings,” or “The Prince” and Terry Pratchett’s “Nightwatch,” or pretty much any of his Diskworld Novels. Show them the joy of a really good story, and the joy of a recycled story told with really delicious language. Terry Pratchet regularly recycles the classics in the most entertaining way. I can’t wait to turn the page to see what new linguistic tidbit he’ll give me.
Any of the McNally mysteries will certainly pump up your vocabulary, in a very fun way. (He actually challenges his readers to look the words up in a dictionary).
As for Shakespeare, I love it, but I must admit, I fell in love with it first on the stage, as it was meant to be experienced. Once you see it on the stage, reading it becomes a joy, not a chore. Kenneth Brannagh has made so many wonderful adaptations, why not show them to your children, before reading the play aloud, as a family, with everyone taking parts? Work up to the Sonnets later.
And when you’re in the mood for some slow, easy-going, chuckle-inducing but not laugh-so-hard-your-head-hurts reading, I highly recommend Jane Austen.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged. . .” is still my favorite line in all the many books I’ve ever read, classic and modern.
As a homeschooling mother of six eager readers, three of whom just scored 31 (at 16 years old), 33, and 33 (Praise the Lord!)on their ACTs, I say, “Get rid of the TV, computer games, and video games!” The most exciting days around here are when books come, and when we go to the library. We don’t expect young children to choose green beans over candy, and we shouldn’t expect them to choose reading over TV. It’s our job to choose for them, and to choose wisely.
To get our minds off contemporary politics, we should start a “Return to the Classics†online campaign.
That’s already begun in the homeschool community La Shawn. The study of the Classics has seen popular among homeschoolers for about the last 10 or more years. I am doing the Ancients Civiilizations with my children this year. I’m so looking forward to getting the education I never had.
Sorry about the bad spelling in the last post. I meant to hit check spelling not post it!
Thank you for this post, Ms. Barber. As this is one of my pet peeves.
My grandmother instilled a love of literature in me. She was a Tyndale, as in a direct descendent of William Tyndale, the first person to translate the New Testament into English and publisher of the Tyndale Bible. (He was burned at the stake by Henry VIII in the Year of Our Lord 1525.)
She was mean. She used to correct my letters in red ink and mail them back to me. And she always wanted to know what I was reading.
She steered me in the right direction though. And I thank God for it.
I credit my mother with my initial love of reading. She read the Bible to all of us as kids, then bought a children’s illustrated Bible for me, which read almost like a hard back comic book. Getting that caused my first reading, front to back, of the Bible. I was 8.
After that, I started to devour all kinds of reads, but in addition to the fiction I loved factual books. Natural history, mechanics, the dictionary… I enjoyed them all!
I really think though, that my reading comprehension developed as a result of a comic book.
X-Men! To read through an entire issue of the X-Men and get it, you had to develop depth in your comprehension, and many readers I spoke with never did. You could tell in conversation with them that they were missing out on half the “show”.
The best education is a Classical Christian course of study that includes at least 4 years of Latin, and/or Greek, started very early.
Most of us who went to public schools didn’t go down that road, and ended up having problems when it came to reading Shakespeare or the Greek dramas.
Barron’s has a Standard English translation of all the Shakespeare plays…….for those of us who have trouble with the thick English dialogue.
It’s a compromise, but I think it’s worth it. Just like how not everybody is comfortable with the King James version of the Bible, so you have different translations.
It’s the same with Shakespeare.
Again, kids that grow up studying Latin, Rhetoric, and Logic, in the Classical Christian Academies, have absolutely no trouble with the high English dialogue of Shakespeare.
Wonder if the public schools will ever catch up?
La Shawn,
I must take exception to one of your recommendations. William Faulkner makes me gag!
As a rule when I was younger, I avoided the Classics like the plague (I didn’t appreciate anyone telling me what I should read). I read science fiction and fantasy like nobody’s business, but some of the classics (or nearly so) snuck into my stacks of library books.
The Count of Monte Cristo, To Kill a Mockingbird, Aucassin et Nicolette
In high school Junior year English class, we were forced to read Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, and I was the only person in our class who loved it. Such beautiful writing!
And of course, Shakespeare. But that was mostly because my dad had inherited some of his great uncle’s books published in the late 1800s, with gilded page edges and tooled leather covers. One of them was the Complete Works of Shakespeare. I couldn’t resist.
So much of our culture has roots in the classics, that we do our children a disservice when we let them avoid these books (and some movies–I made my teenagers watch Dr. Strangelove, so they’d understand the cultural references).
I’m going to have to go through your post and the comments when I have more time, and make a list of what other books I need to read…
i’m with skypuppy. faulkner is wildly overrated: just a down south version of grandpa simpson telling a rambling story with no beginning, or end, or point to it. (”then, as i was walking to the store – things were a lot cheaper back then, and bigger, too – i saw a boy riding one of those newfangled skateboards, which, back then, we called rollyplanks…..”)
BS written in a southern accent and set in mississippi is still just BS. and faulkner is the KING! (pronounced “kang”)
The plan should be to start with Beowulf and read forward from there, skipping nothing until Jackie Collins was born.
Ls Shawn:
One of the “Great Books” of my youth was “Tales of Uncle Remus”, including “Tar Baby”.
These stories enhanced the image of a Slave as a wise old man.
Those who make political fodder of such stories are just missing out on something special.
I started reading at an absurd age and quickly began to motor through every book in the house on which I could lay my chubby little paws. When my mother found me reading “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” at age 5 – she decided the better course was to get me my own library card and take me to the library once or twice a week to keep my explorations age-appropriate. We lived on a farm and despite chores, etc., I still managed to read at least 4-5 books per week and I still manage 2-3 books per week. Not only does reading increase and refine verbal skills, it stimulates imagination. Reading can inform, enrage, illuminate and entertain. People who won’t or don’t read have my absolute pity because their lives are not enriched as they could be and they cannot take the wonderful worldwide journeys that I have enjoyed while sitting in my recliner in Columbus, Ohio!
Reading Shakespeare broke my lip.
First, I disagree with the folks who say, “turn off the tv, computer and video games.” I watch tv, play video games, and where are we right now? My husband and 11-year-old son (whom I just last week observed completing a crossword puzzle) do the same, but we are all voracious readers.
It was the humor of Richard Armour, with “Twisted Tales from Shakespeare” that really got me interested in Shakespeare. I think a lot of kids are turned off by the idea that reading the classics is something they HAVE to do (and to this day I hate “the Merchant of Venice” because of the shoddy way it was presented to me in English class. I THINK that’s why). The way classics–and other literature–are often taught means the student must parrot back the teacher’s viewpoint, when of course, as C.S.Lewis pointed out, the benefit isn’t in following the lesson plan, it’s in the actual reading.
Some so-called classical authors make me gag too. No one’s going to like everything. I think the best thing to do with your kids is expose them to everything–and show them that you read everything.
I’m working through Les Miserables (second time through, unabridged) at the moment, and after receiving an extensive education in French language, culture, and living in Paris for 3 months I have a new found appreciation of this masterpiece.
I must agree – respect for the classics has diminished, and people now shy away from wonderful litterature – the works of Mark Twain, for example – because it is racist or “too hard”. While I’ll admit that Hugo (my favorite author) unabridged is not for everyone,it is at least ART, not pulp to be thrown into the Goodwill pile.
I’m presently a college student, but I’m putting away money to buy a set of the Harvard Classics (check them out on eBay) to peruse through after graduation and work on gaining a more thorough understanding of the classics. For the price of one semester of books, I get 52 volumes of some of the greatest works ever written… it’s a bargain I’d recommend more people got in on. Not to mention how nice they look on your shelf…
(Forgive spelling/other errors, I’m typing without contacts…)
LaShawn, I just love your blog (and you too — blessings from Jerusalem!)
Anyway, I can’t believe that anyone would say Faulkner is overrated!!!!!!! He is probably the greatest novelist of the past century. Yeah, okay, I grew up in Texas and had ancestors from Alabama, Georgia and Oklahoma, so maybe I’m a bit biased. But, hmmm, still, a pox on your houses!
I would love to read all the classics and study Latin, though right now I have my hands full with trying to learn Hebrew since we moved recently to Israel. I am missing a mentor, and would really welcome an online group. If anyone knows such a thing, please mention it here. Thanks!
What a great idea! I’d LOVE to participate in an effort to read more classics.
I finally made it through *War & Peace* last summer and was completely engrossed this time. (In my previous attempts, I would put the novel down too long and completely forget who the characters were.) What a great novel that was! I read Don Quixote in the spring and really got a kick out of it. Sancho Panza’s little sayings were pretty funny. I do wish I’d read both books sooner. I think sometimes we put them off thinking they will be boring…but far from it!
However, my favorite by far is *The Brothers Karamozov.* For some reason, Dostoevsky’s writing always hits closest to home for me.
Went through a Mark Twain phase in high school and still LOL at *Roughing It* and *Innocents Abroad.* Love Jane Austen too! Took Milton and Chaucer the same semester at college and also joined choir, where we sang Haydn’s Creation; it was the most enjoyable semester of my entire college career.
National Review has a great couple of volumes of children’s stories out. I bought one for Christmas and read through it with my girls over a couple of months. Highly recommended! We are currently reading a volume of Thornton Burgess Animal Tales, also purchased from NR. Excellent stories that any child would enjoy having read aloud to them. Even my 4yo likes to listen in. Getting kids into reading is as simple as reading wonderful, engaging literature aloud to them regularly. Milne, Potter, Grahame, Wilder, Lewis…children’s literature is the best and I still enjoy it the most. Reading aloud is the greatest pleasure of my homeschooling experience. We also have several volumes of family stories compiled by great aunts or distant relatives. My girls were *fascinated* by a look back in time in our own family history. If you have those, make use of them!
(BTW, my dad read me Uncle Remus tales and I loved them. Uncle Remus was so kind to that little boy.)
To get our minds off contemporary politics, we should start a “Return to the Classics” online campaign. We could read and discuss the great books while chaos swirls around us and offer politicians some insight gleaned from mistakes of the past and how they affect us now.
La Shawn, let’s do it. This is a wonderful idea, and I would love to take part in something like this. If you have the time with the schedule that you keep, I know that I should definitely be able to find the time as well. (Even though I’m immersed in Book 5 of HP right now.)
I have loved reading almost literally all my life. When I was 4 years old I went to school with my father every day [he was the Principal at a very rural school] and closed myself in the ‘book room’ where unused textbooks were kept. By the time I started school, I had already read all the textbooks through 4th grade.
In addition to the classics, and in answer to the earlier question about modern American writers, I highly recommend Ernest Gaines [The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman; A Gathering of Old Men; etc.].
Also, though not “literature” in the strictest sense, any of Issac Asimov’s books of astronomy and/or astrophysics for the layman [Is Anybody Out There? and others] are excellent examples of how to present complex and difficult subject matter in a format that is both interesting and understandable for the non-expert.
I also enjoy Michael Crichton’s cautionary tales about modern scientific and engineering advances [Jurassic Park; Prey; etc]. Good stories combined with plausible extrapolations of scientific, engineering and mathematical concepts now in existence. How many people had ever heard of Chaos Theory before reading [or seeing at the theater] Jurassic Park?
Though not “official” classics, for conservatives and/or Christians the whole of the “Inklings” and their predecessors must be read. Almost all of them wrote both great fiction and non-fiction works.
George MacDonald:
fairy tales and novels
G. K. Chesterton
Hillaire Belloc
C. S. Lewis (wrote a lot more than Narnia!)
J.R.R. Tolkien
Charles Williams
Dorothy Sayers
The modern biographer Joseph Pearce has shed some amazing light on these figures and others in the same vein. Look up his works for more.
I still, to this day, recall the wonder of reading books as a boy.
Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, in particular), Albert Payson Terhune (the best dog stories ever told), Kent Curtis (Cruises in the Sun and The Last Wannigan, both largely forgotten) — I was mesmerized by those stories. Even the mass-produced Hardy Boys stories were good for the imagination.
In addition, my parents’ bookshelves were large and well stocked, providing me with a treasure trove of reading, even if a lot of it was way over my head at the time. There I discovered the Churchill memoirs that I mentioned earlier, as well as several bible translations, shelf after shelf of the classics, the ever-present Encyclopedia Britannica, incomprehensible business books, contemporary humor, and everything else imaginable.
One of the greatest gifts my parents gave me was this exposure to the written word.
La Shawn – several years ago, my step-dad called me up and with great drama, said “IT IS TIME.” He presented me with his collection of the Great Books of Western Civilization, which now has a prized place in my library. It has a 10-year reading plan which I actually intend to do some day.
The reading plan is designed to let the student absorb the themes of the Great Books in a logical, progressive manner, so that the student will learn from them. It will be a challenge, but I look forward to it. After all, how many other people in the world will be reading an obscure ancient comedy by Aeschylus at the same time as I am?
There were so many wonderful books and author’s listed.
I can also add that Lucy Maud Montgomery and her “Anne of Green Gables” series are wonderful. Anne is so charming even Mark Twain liked her
La Shawn, I loved Song of Solomon. I believe children who are exposed to great literature and nurtured to love reading will be adults whom also love literature and reading.
A recent study of chess and chess masters determined that a large part of expertise is exposure to numerous examples. We get chess Masters at younger ages than we did half a century ago because there is now a large library of Master-class games available even to the beginning student.
One may extrapolate that recognizing good writing is dependent upon exposure to myriad examples of good writing. Alas, a large part of children’s literature has been thoroughly dumbed down; a Nancy Drew mystery from the 30s is far more complex than a Nancy Drew mystery of the 90s. (Incidentally, they apparently trimmed them down at some point, so there’s now an “Originals” line with all of the text as first published.) If you wouldn’t read it as an adult because it’s infantile or puerile (as opposed to preferring adult books because the children’s books aren’t complicated enough), are you so sure you should be giving it to your children?
*cough* Change of subject.
As a counter-example to the poor aliterate students above, I present two occurrences. Last fall, a friend of mine presented a show called Shakespeare On Request, in which she performs at least one monologue or dialogue from every Shakespeare play (including Two Gentlemen of Verona “because I’m hardcore”) in a semi-random fashion— the audience calls out a play (helpfully posted on a board), and she gives them a choice of speeches, i.e. silly props or no silly props.
During the run we had one whole family dragged to the show (not exactly kicking and screaming) by a teenager who had loved the show the previous weekend and wanted to see it again. Score one for Shakespeare.
The second example is Ashland, Oregon, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, considered the world’s second best Shakespeare company. (The first is Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company.) I routinely see teenagers and college students there and many of them are visibly excited about the performances.
But the real example is my husband’s niece, who utterly loved Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus, and to whom I gave a spare copy of the complete works of Shakspeare. (We had three.) She was not only overjoyed to receive it, but her mother reported that she began reading through it immediately upon returning home.
She was fourteen.
It’s got to be presented right. If the classics are a treat to you— or if you act as though they are— children will see them as one too. Visual aids are acceptible. I love books on the order of 180-200 a year, and I LOVE Jane Austen, but for some reason I can’t get my head around the funny until I’ve seen a movie adaptation of each work. Then the text is hilarious and remains so. I have no idea why this is— this doesn’t happen for any other author— but don’t discount an alternate method of presentation if the reading alone doesn’t work.
Except for those “translated” Shakespeares. Those are Abominations In the Sight of God. *shudder*
Those dumbed-down Shakespeare presentations are truly horrible. Somehow hearing Hamlet say: “So I’m like, do I off myself? Do I, like, put up with this stuff or do I go like whoa, dude, gotta check out now?” just isn’t quite the same as the original.
bad as dumbed-down shakespeare is, it could be worse. you’ve never really heard the bard until you’ve heard him done with a genuine west texas drawl in, say, amarillo.
“butt, SAWFFT!! whut lahht thu’ yawnder winder brakes? it’s thuh AYYST, an’ ol’ JEW-lietts thuh SUNN!!”
on the other hand, i suppose it’s unlikely that elizabethan merry minstrels could do a credible bob wills or waylon.
Susannah–
I am so pleased that you and your children have rediscovered Thornton Burgess! I loved his work when I was a child, and felt privileged to introduce my son to it (his favorite is Danny Meadow Mouse).
I’ve been spending recent weeks trying to fill some of the gaps in my own education, although I admit War and Peace was more than I could take. I think the important thing is to approach all these works with a fresh mind, seeing them as works that have survived for a reason, not as chores you have to get through. And you won’t like or relate to everything. That’s okay.
# 60–absolutely right. If it isn’t good enough for me, it certainly isn’t good enough for my son. I make a point of reading what he does, not to check up on him but so that we can discuss it. It makes a difference.
Oh, and I want to comment on my previous post. I don’t think I dislike “the Merchant of Venice” just because it was presented badly to me (although it was). It’s really a vile play, and the anti-semitism is appalling. Mr. S. wrote plenty of good stuff, so there’s no need to inflict this one on ourselves or our children at all.
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