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Two prominent book lists seem to be making the rounds on my vaguely conservative substack feed. The MENSA reading list for high school students, and St. John's Great Books curriculum. While these two lists are pretty different from each other, and I generally find the St. John's list to be more broad, I find both to be vaguely unsatisfying and narrow in a way that I can't really put my finger on.
I'm reminded of Sam Kriss's critique of a similar kind of list on the /lit channel on 4chan. There's a certain kind of anglo-centrism to this list, an anglo-centrism that is focused on a specific type of worldview. I can't quite put the feeling I have into words here, but if I were to try, I would describe this list as emphasizing a modern (in reference to the modern era of history), Western, progressive (as in history as progress, not woke), Liberal, and individualist perspective of the world. A few big gaps I see below
-No Eastern Bloc/communist authors. Communism might be bad, but it is an ideology that determined the course of the 20th century. Why not add some Soviet Science fiction, or one of the works of Stanislaw Lem.
-No East Asian literature. Journey to the West is something that sticks out, but if you wanted to be more "edgy" you could add some Yukio Mishima, who certainly is quite different from the general theme of this list.
-No post-modernism. Yea, yea insert comment about degenerates, drugs, and nihilism, but this should be something that the youth should decide for themselves. Camus is on here which is borderline, but I would recommend some DFW (Infinite Jest is the best), Italo Calvino, Michel Houellebecq, or David Mitchell.
-No Latin American literature (on the MENSA list, St. John's seems to have Borges and Gabo) The fact that Gabo isn't on here is a crime. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a great, short one that could easily be added to this list, but Ficciones (Borges), The Invention of Morel (Bioy Casares), or The House of the Spirits (Allende).
-No environmentalist literature. Lord of the Rings sort of counts, but I would add Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, or some Wendell Berry.
-Very little history. One of the big problems I see on both the left and the right is a complete ignorance of who we are and how we got here. The Oxford History of the US (although incomplete) would be great to ad to this list, but I'm not sure what else to add that would give more than a basic survey of history which I don't think is useful.
At the end of the day I think lists like these are counter-productive. Rather than encouraging independent thinking, I think they just create another shibboleth on the right to stand opposed to the shibboleth on left: post-modernism and marxism are evil and wrong, the answers to all our problems can be found in the past, and the Western, Modern, Liberal worldview is probably correct. Rather I would suggest reading widely, and with things you disagree with. As Haruki Murakami once said, if you only read what everyone is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. This is just as true for this MENSA list as it might be for the slop that we've normalized.
Now that being said, if you want to build a university degree/program of study, you need to have some kind of reading list. In that sense St. John's list isn't too bad. But to really develop as an independent humanistic thinker, reading the books on their list is not enough. You need to cultivate independent seeking out of literature beyond the "lists" and beyond the slop that is peddled to us by popular culture. You also need to kill the anglocentrism, preferably by learning to read in one or more languages outside of English. If I were in charge of St. John's curriculum, I would cut back these reading lists by about 50%, add in a language requirement, and some kind of independent reading requirement. We had something like the later in my Global Voices (world literature) class in high school, where you had to pick a non-Anglo author and write an essay/give a presentation on its plot/themes/character.
Man I should have gone into the humanities instead of into the sciences. I am so much more passionate about this stuff than STEM.
Tangential: I always been fond of St. John's advertising slogan for its great books curriculum: "The following teachers will return to St. John's next year: Homer, Euclid, Chaucer, Einstein, Du Bois, Virgil, Augustine, Aristotle, Washington, Woolf, Plato, Tocqueville, Austen, Newton, Cervantes, Darwin, Mozart, Galileo, Tolstoy, Descartes, Freud."
I may not agree with the exact selection of names (Freud was wrong about everything, Du Bois is a diversity requirement, etc.), but I really like the notion of just reading the best books written by the greatest thinkers and writers on a given subject instead of using a random textbook and listening to lectures by a random professor.
My list would be a lot more modern (for basically the reasons given by Eliezer in "Guardians of Ayn Rand"), but the basic idea would be that it is better to learn evolutionary biology by reading Dawkins or physics by reading Feynman than by reading an overpriced $100 textbook.
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A big part of understanding the purpose of a list of Canon Classics is to understand that it isn't primarily a question of the editor or professor selecting the books to be read, the authors that come after have already selected them and it is just a matter of discovering which books the authors have selected.
Western Literature and Philosophy starts as a conversation with Homer and the Scriptures*. If you continue in chronological order from there, you build your influences. You have to read Homer to (begin to) understand the allusions Plato, Plato to understand Aristotle, the Bible and Plato to understand Augustine, Aristotle and the Bible to understand Aquinas, and it builds from there. This tradition flows through Rome, through the Middle Ages, through the Enlightenment, in a clear tradition of "everyone after X has probably read X and defintely been influenced by X." I'd argue that it ends as a clear tradition with Joyce and Ulysses,** no writer after Joyce failed to be influenced by Joyce or by people he influenced. There's a Hegelian succession, a dialectic, by which you can see how Homer inspired writers who inspired writers who lead to Joyce.
That's the reason for the Anglo-Centrism of the list, it's meant to tell the story of the Anglo intellectual tradition. Take a classic question: what is the first novel? The Tale of Genji is often cited, but it's influence is essentially limited to Japan. Don Quixote is the first novel in the Western tradition. It's a Columbus vs Vikings situation. Cervantes is essential reading if you want to understand the form of the novel, even modern Japanese novels are influenced by it. Genji is interesting to read, but unless you're looking at Japanese literature specifically not necessary.
As for the accusation that lists like this are ultimately poseur-core: Yes. I'm fully aware that my pursuit of reading the Classics and the Canon is a game of LARPing as a Victorian gentleman or something like that. I find that to be a wortwhile goal. One of the biggest weaknesses of those kinds of lists in my mind is that they stop the LARP too early: if you want to read and understand the 100 great books, you should also be going to the Opera and the Symphony and church and watching plays and playing sports and games and going to museums. Participating in that kind of tradition is valuable and good.
*Obviously there are predecessors to both, they came out of a then-existing tradition, but the only extant examples we have are mostly fragmentary, the only one worth considering is Gilgamesh. I have no problem starting with Gilgamesh, the great books course I took did, it's short and it's worth reading, but I don't think you need to start there as its influence is more in the Campbell-Monomyth vague way than in the direct allusion way, you're perfectly safe starting at Genesis and the Rage of Achilles. Much in the same way that pre-Socratic philosophers undoubtedly existed, but we barely know anything about them, so it makes sense to start with Socrates.
**I picked Joyce because I think he's probably the last unanimous genius in the literary tradition, because his work is dense in classical and biblical and canonical allusion and theme and pastiche and criticism, because the publication of Ulysses is a pretty good stopping place symbolically because of the censorship saga it underwent which unleashed the floodgates of smut under the cover of art, after that world literature truly becomes world literature and it's impossible to tell the story of literature without talking about Mishima and Gabo and the Iron Curtain and it all gets pretty messy. That and I'm a sucker for the beautiful circularity of a tradition that starts at the Odyssey and ends at Ulysses, that starts with the Trojan war at the Eastern limit of Europe, and ends in Ireland at its Western limit.
Nothing wrong with LARPing as a Victorian gentleman, and in many ways a worthy goal for an individual in a world that is decidedly against many aspects of that. As a goal for an educational curriculum that's supposed to prepare youth to be citizens, leaders, and humanistic contributors to be members of Western society, I'm less sure. It's almost certainly better than what we have now, but it's also a system that produced, in large part, the generation that allowed Europe to commit collective suicide in the First World War. Maybe it's not fair to pin the blame on the war on the education system, but the way the European elite were educated during that era certainly influenced the propaganda, mass hysteria, and doubling down that allowed the war to get so out of hand.
All this being said, I think your LARP is good for both you and for the community. It is good to go church, the Opera, museums, play sports, and read old books. There are plenty of countervailing influences in society that want to shove the things I believe are absent from these lists in your face (although they never seem to choose actually good books/media from any of these categories). I just worry that as an ethic to guide society it's incomplete, which is perhaps true of any system we could come up with (José Ortega y Gasset seemed to think so at least).
In terms of the first novel, may I introduce the "Golden Ass" by Apuleius as another contender. It as episodic as Don Quijote, but also contains an overarching plot that I think would qualify it as a novel. And it was published in the 2nd century AD. It has elements of what we might consider post-modernism (nothing new under the sun), while still forming a bridge between antiquity and more modern novels.
In my mind Don Quixote is the first novel because the literary tradition that would follow all flows through Cervantes. Stuff like Genji or The Golden Ass or Daphnis and Chloe all have a good argument for being examples of the form that came before Cervantes, and influenced Cervantes, and novel is kind of a vague concept anyway. But I'll return to the Columbus analogy: there's various stories of various European explorers, or occasionally Zheng He, traveling to the Americas; but Columbus is still the guy because his trip lead to continuous open communication with the new world. In the same way, writers had occasionally written stuff that was novel-like without it leading to a continuous flow of novels being written, but it was after Cervantes that the novel becomes a continuous great form written consistently, and the Quixote and the works it influenced would influence all later novels.
It seems odd to blame the classical European educational system for WWI destroying the world of the classical European educational system. Everything that was worth saving about that world was built by the men who had gone through that system.
And at any rate, St. John's is under no illusions that it is anything other than a set of weirdoes preserving a tradition. They have no need to think about what the world would be like if everyone tried to go to St. John's, or if a hundred other colleges chose to imitate the curriculum. It's not going to happen, not anytime soon. We're not in any danger of suddenly returning to strict standards. The fact that anyone is preserving these strict standards means something.
I hear your point on reading widely and encouraging exploration, but too often that turns into a standard's-free slopfest. At 33, I can balance that literary diet pretty well naturally, without resorting too heavily to listicles, my mind craves Plato and Gibbon; at 16 we need to be working on nurturing a good palette in our young men, and that is going to require some degree of forcing them to read the right stuff. In my mind, your ability to interpret and explore is improved by being immersed in a canon, really any canon. My choice is the classical anglo-high-culture canon because that is my culture, but it is more about taking a bite out of one cohesive set of works as a base from which you can digest other works. China has its own canon of literature and philosophy that can be imbibed profitably. I've heard the Russian Canon praised in that the important works from Pushkin to Pasternak can be read in an industrious year or two.
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I struggle to understand the polemic against lists per se.
It sounds like you and Sam have more of an issue with people treating these sorts of lists as an end all and be all which I completely agree with but I'm also not quite sure who's actually treating them as some sort of objective truth. It's just fun to show others what you like and think valuable and conversely what others like and think is valuable.
It's very difficult to contribute to scientific inquiry without first having a grounding in the state of the art and in my opinion it would also be difficult to be "an independent thinker" without first having a grounding in the most fundamental existing works. That's pretty much just a "list" by another name.
Sidenote: I do agree that often these types of lists are too often Anglo and Androcentric, probably because a significant number of people in the West who still have serious interest in reading are the based right-winger type at this point.
I personally actually like the 4chan one that Sam hates so much the most, although it is missing some obvious candidates like the Classic Chinese Novels, Austen, TKAM and Eliot (I'm sure I'm showing my own biases here though).
I'd be interested in what else you feel these lists don't cover enough. Maybe it could even be... a list?
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I think that the Mensa list has already been picked apart enough below, so let me pick on St. John's list instead.
Having clicked through their terrible web page, I went to wikipedia to check that Thomas Piketty is actually alive and well despite being on that list. Of course, his work is mislabeled "Capital", so he likely got confused with the more seasoned Marx (also on the list) by accident. It certainly feels that there are more dead Greeks on that list than authors who published in the last half-century.
In particular, I am amazed by the inclusion of a lot of original science publications. Sure, they are interesting from a history of science point of view, but very likely they are not the easiest avenue to understand a physical concept. They were targeted at the experts of the field in their time, which very likely uses a language different from what even the current experts are using. So to grok them, you first have to learn the nomenclature of their time (which was generally worse than what we have now, because they were lacking later paradigms). At least, one should read an annotated version which points out that "Radium D" is what we today call Pb-210 or whatever, and which of the claims of the paper actually turned out to be false.
I knew a guy in high school who was totally in the tank for SJC and he was totally pro-reading the Greeks about science, although I could never get him to explain why.
It is actually even worse. Reading Euclid's Elements won't expose you to anything that's wrong but it's probably much easier to learn geometry from khan academy these days.
But when it comes to science, the Greeks were basically just completely wrong about nearly everything.
From The Generation of Animals:
Huh? He goes on like this for 120 pages. How is this worth anyone's time in Anno Domini 2025? It seems it must be an in-group signalling exercise among liberal arts respecters - poseurs aren't going to bother reading all that.
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I'm curious what you would cut.
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Not sure if I'm reading the assumption here right, but: that's a very bad slash. My #1 choice for "Soviet Science fiction" would be something by Strugatski brothers, the thing is, Strugatski brothers were borderline dissidents and there's nothing particularly communist about their stories. Even those few that have non-negligible political elements, you'd probably never guess those were written in the Eastern Block, never mind Brezhnev era Soviet Union.
Trying to fill that gap with Soviet science fiction is er not very productive idea. I'd even say, counter-productive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_speculative_fiction#Soviet_period
"Digging your hole deeper" level of counter-productive.
"Hard to be a God" is seen as dissident fiction now but it's still communist. It took for granted that the future was communist, and that communism would produce a good and stable society. At most it's anti-Soviet and really anti-Khrushchev.
... on their future Earth, which is not a part of the story, no need to worry what happens there, and letsnottalkaboutit. That book iirc is the only one that does explicitly mention communism, and even that passage always stood out to me as, I dunno, tucked on. It has nothing to do with the rest of the story which is set on not-Earth.
This was a very common trope in Soviet fiction, so much that even genuine attempts to play it straight were mostly not taken at face value. Wikipedia:
There's a second layer to this with Strugatski brothers specifically, they were progressivists and one of the key assumptions behind their stories was that some problems which are "hard" today will become solved problems in the future, including apparently the problem of keeping a stable society. However, this was a background assumption and they were very light on the specifics.
Agree with all of this. I’m not saying it’s a book about communism, I’m saying it’s a communist book. In that way it’s almost more convincing than something like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists b/c it shows how a perfectly normal person could believe this was the future.
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Why not Master and Margarita or Gulag Archipelagos? Not Russian sci fi but interesting books.
Master and Margarita would be a much better choice for this list. It's a staple in similar lists for people who can read Russian. But it's not science fiction, by any stretch, it's just fiction.
Gulag Archipelago, please no. Literally anything else by Solzhenitsyn. The MENSA list has One day of Ivan Denisovitch in there already, that pretty much covers the topic. If I were to pick anything else, The Cancer Ward would by my choice.
I said it wasn’t sci fi. Not sure why we need to limit to sci fi. Also it is a great book. I love the conceit that if the devil came to town it wouldn’t look that different from the commies.
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Master and Margarita is arguably magical realism, which is at least speculative-fiction-adjacent.
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Yup fair. This was me talking out of my ass about something I haven't read very much of. Thanks for the correction.
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More and better quality shared shibboleths are exactly what the right needs. Shibboleths provide a sense of community and belonging and act as shortcuts - if someone uses a shibboleth they signal familiarity with the concepts related, allowing you to bypass covering them. I completely agree you should read books others don't, but I think there is also a lot of value in a shared knowledge base, and the St John's curriculum not only provides a lot of instruction in independent thinking (which is necessary, independent thinking is stifled at every turn by the modern world), it also includes a lot of historical works, which provide a connection to our history that inspires pride in the Western intellectual tradition. Beyond that though, I think historical works do a much better job of inspiring interest in history than actual histories, although that might be typical minding.
Also yeah the curriculum should be used as a base, a springboard into the pool of knowledge as opposed to an outline of its breadth.
Well yes and no, picking the 'Junior' list at random, it includes only two works of historiography (Gibbon and Spengler) and lots of original sources. Nothing wrong with Gibbon or Spengler as things to read, though it's a strange choice as literally works of history for a full year. It's even stranger to read the Federalist papers etc. without accompanying it with a single historiographical work. Obviously it's important to read the documents themselves but doing so without attempting or seeing any kind of interpretative framework is meaningless - it would be much more instructive to read a work or two from each of the major historiographical schools of early American history, and realistically I think the course-setters know this, otherwise they would have set primary sources on Rome too, and it's hard to shake the feeling that setting the Federalist papers is a purely aesthetic decision.
In fact just had a look at the Sophmore list and it does set Livy, Tacitus etc. Points for consistency then but this is just silly. The average student would get a thousand times more out of reading Syme or just the Oxford History of the Roman World than any primary sources.
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I think this is probably what St. John's as an institution that you actually attend does this well, re:creating a shared knowledge-base that can be expanded on individually. I think what I am frustrated with, which maybe didn't come across here, is how this is presented by secondary sources (i.e. substack). Read these 100 books and become based, you HAVE to read these books in order to be a learned individual, etc. etc.
Re:histories vs. historical accounts. I think there is a place for both, but a good history book will a). introduce you to many other primary sources about the period and b). take a step back from some of the bias that is inherent in a primary source account (although you can't really get rid of bias completely). Of course pop history often fails to this, which is why I think trying to read more academic history (Battle Cry of Freedom is my favorite axe to grind here) is the way to go.
A lot of great books courses utilize outside scholarship to give context to works. I did multiple classes studying historiography from primary sources in late antiquity, and we read excerpts of modern "accurate" scholarly works, while reading the entirety of the primary sources assigned. You read all of Herodotus, then you read an excerpt covering the modern view of the Persian Empire, and an archeologist's journal article proposing a reinterpretation, etc.
Few modern histories are important to read cover to cover, from a syllabus perspective.
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In defense of some of this, I think they’re meant less as a stand alone list and more of a “add these books to supplement the standard Woke books list that almost everyone gets through high school” list. And the job of the list is to simply correct for just how far left, multicultural and woke the usual readings are. And that is done by curating a book list that specifically includes things left off of those more woke lists. They’re corrective lenses to fix the gaps of literary history, and as such they don’t need the more progressive, liberal, or multicultural voices included because the stuff most kids read or are otherwise exposed to.
For an exhaustive list, sure, I think I’d balance things out more. I want kids exposed to as many views as possible. It builds character to have to understand ideas and perspectives you don’t agree with. But if 99% of the standard curriculum is Woke leaning and multicultural, you don’t correct it with a perfectly balanced curriculum that includes more woke multicultural stuff, you correct it by introducing conservative books.
I'm not sure that modern curricula can be properly described as "multicultural" if they are curated to promote a single political narrative. I remember a fairly woke friend of mine once asked me for book recommendations for Native American history month and was confused when I suggested things like a history of the Comanches, the Popul Vuh, a book about Aztec philosophy, or 1491 by Charles Mann, because what they really meant was "give me another book about how much life sucks on the reservations and how it's all our fault."
Aztec philosophy? Would be interested in that
This is the book I was thinking of, though one might want to supplement it with a more general history.
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This is an aspect of these lists that I hadn't considered, because my own high-school education looked quite a bit like the St. Johns list. I graduated public (although rich, white, and suburban) high school in 2016, and we had at least one Shakespeare every year, various English classics (Austen), Robert Penn Warren, Kafka, Camus, etc. There was some woke stuff too, but nothing that actually really challenged the Liberal, Modern worldview. But I suppose that things have likely become significantly worse since then.
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The purpose of such lists is to give students a grounding in the literature and philosophical traditions of their own culture, not an understanding of the whole world; the Western/Anglo centrism is the point. They should not be taken (as some intend) as a substitute in and of themselves for a complete education, which would naturally include world history, foreign languages and cultures, science and math, etc.
Moreover I think the focus on independent thinking, or as it was always put by my teachers, "we don't do rote memorization here" misses a key point, which is that without a core knowledge of facts, dates, and historical figures, or the web of references and cross-talk that define a particular literary tradition, a student has no framework in which to integrate new information and it will tend to slip away. You need to speak one language fluently before you can learn another. We don't need to go full Asian cram school, but teachers these days would probably better serve their students by adhering more strictly to a shared curriculum, not less.
We know from studies of memory formation that interleaving (i.e. mixing your study sessions for two subjects) improves retention and cross pollination of different subject matters. Studying multiple strands of literary culture I think would same to have the same effect. Same with languages. High-school and university students are plenty fluent in English to start an L2 (if not L3), without having to worry about mixing up the two languages which often occurs when one is at low levels in multiple languages.Since I started studying Spanish seriously I know my own knowledge of English has grown immensely.
I don't doubt that intelligent and capable students could benefit from such an education, but your average child today would be lucky to get through a single YA chapter book without scrolling TikTok for 5 hours after every page, so I think the baseline curriculum should focus on providing them with the rudiments of a shared literary culture. With proper tracking of students, the higher levels can study foreign languages, among other things, but for most people it's a waste of time (and I say that as an aspiring polyglot).
This is a good point. Things have fallen further than I might like to think.
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This is profoundly not true. Young children easily learn multiple languages at once, and adults typically struggle to learn a second language to native-like proficiency.
Continuing the metaphor you've created here: I think it's very likely that a young person raised in a "multicultural" environment where they consume the full Western/Eastern canons simultaneously is likely to have a much better proficiency of both than someone who fully studies either canon before moving onto the other.
You're right, that was a poor way to phrase what I meant, which was "you can't learn a language properly as an adult if you never acquired one as a child."
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St John's main program is indeed Western Classics based, though they have an Eastern Classics MA program at their Santa Fe location, which looks pretty interesting. You imply there isn't a language requirement, but there is -- Classical Greek and a bit of French, as I recall. The way they study science, math, music, art, and language aren't entirely captured in the book list, since they are actually working their way through some of the texts as textbooks (or listening to the musical selections and singing them), not just reading them.
Mainly, they can't necessarily update their Books List in Current Year, because they know perfectly well that if they do that, it will open up the floodgates to the kind of purges many libraries have been going through, which would kill their niche.
I think I came off too harsh against St. John's in my post. I haven't attended the college and so I don't know what the experience is like on the ground, and from what you and other's have said, it seems like I'm missing quite a bit of what they do there. What I'm more frustrated with is people using this list on substack to peddle a way to become a well-read, well-rounded humanistic individual. It's part of the path to be sure, and if you don't read any of these books I think that's not a good sign. But merely checking the box isn't enough. You need to move beyond the curated list. Which hopefully these kinds of things actually spur people to do. So maybe there's not a real problem after all...
Well, substackers would quickly put themselves out of business if they said "I can't give you a definitive list of what to read to be a well-rounded/based/moral/whatever individual, you must think for yourself and ignore the opinions of pundits like me" so you shouldn't really expect that sort of honesty from them.
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I have noticed this a ton on hacker News and related communities ,where there is sort of cross pollination. People who are in technology who seem really enamored by the humanities. I have never experienced this feeling as much.
That's because the sort of people forums like HN and this one select for have a STEM education and disproportionately high verbal intelligence i.e. people who would have done very well in the humanities, but chose not to enter those fields for practical, financial, or ideological reasons.
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A lot of the great books lists are (or were) designed for students in the West to understand how Western intellectual traditions have evolved. They were designed to be somewhat narrow, which is required if you’re trying to trace a common thread from Ancient Greece through to the modern day.
If keeping with the original mission above, if you wanted to introduce Confucius, then you would need to tie it into his influence on Leibniz, and Leibniz’s subsequent influence on later Western thought. Then you have to ask how influential Leibniz was and if you want to devote the bandwidth to him and Confucius.
I do recall a lecture at SJC about Hume and Eastern thought, I don't remember which strand.
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The Great Books program is specifically supposed to be a replacement for a traditional college curriculum in which you learn things from primary sources in and see Western Civilization being shown off.
Much of what you ask for is contra to the mission - if you made the changes you are suggesting it would be something else.
It's like getting annoyed at Western Canon lists for not having Eastern material.
Yeah, it really does just say it right up front. Just another isolated demand for rigor. Not a single reading list can emphasize a pre-Marxist classical view of Western Civilization. Have to isolate them and act like they need to be "more diverse", ignoring all the diversity around them that people get plenty of already.
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The MENSA list is terrible. It is like something that stupid and pretentious person will create if asked what the really smart guys read.
I concur. It is depressing. Especially the last page.
(Protip: always have people attest that what they is attest is true explicitly, they might lie otherwise. Also refer to 12th graders as kids, they really like that.)
30 pretentious books a year, for four years, and most of them don't exactly sound like fun. If a adolescent manages to read through LotR, good for them! If they read through this list, child protection should investigate.
From personal experience, reading is much easier than understanding and being able to appreciate a work. Just because I have read "The Catcher in the Rye", it does not mean that I can understand why it is world literature. (Granted, a few books are a bit more on the nose there: "all quiet on the western front" or "Uncle Tom's cabin" might also contain literary depth I did not fathom (and Kafka surely does), but at least they update your world view without you needing to know Greek symbolism or whatever.)
Also, from what I can tell, no science fiction. Fantasy is limited to Tolkien (and ancient Greece). Horror is only E.A. Poe afais. Telling a kid to read Thomas Mann is a good way to get a non-reader.
When I was a kid, the only thing which my father discouraged was mono-culture. But otherwise, I read all kinds of books: deep stuff which went a mile over my head, good stuff which was also fun to read (Asimov), trashy stuff.
Kind of tangential, but would you mind briefly expanding on what your father considered “mono-culture” and how he discouraged it? My dad’s mantra was probably “actions have consequences’ but he also had a great disdain for bandwagon-type behavior and it struck me as potentially similar.
Well, I think that mono-culture might have been reading more than three 500 page volumes of Perry Rhodan (an endless, German Scifi series of questionable literary value) in a row. I think there was just verbal disapproval, nothing coercive, I generally got to read what I wanted, and as much as I wanted. (There were some efforts to limit screen time, though.)
The idea was not so much that I should not read junk, but that I should not only read junk. I think a term which my father used to describe me was "literary garbage chute", because of my tendency to devour a wide range of books of highly varying literary standards and genres.
Thanks for fleshing that out a bit. Sounds like your dad had a pretty good approach. FWIW I asked because I’ve got a kid on the way and I’m concerned about providing an environment that encourages the consideration of alternative viewpoints. Thanks again
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Also, it calls LotR a 'trilogy'. Who is going to be pedantic about such things if not MENSA?
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Much like the entire MENSA brand.
I’m getting flashbacks to a brief fling I had two decades ago with a Mensa activist. A not insignificant reason for it being so brief was that I very quickly got fed up with having to spell out so much trivial stuff.
I'm curious what a Mensa activist is?
I think she was a member of a board of the local Mensa subchapter.
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It looks like a perfectly fine high school reading list? It explicitly says it’s for grades 9-12. We read many of the same books when I was in high school.
What sort of list would you propose instead?
Russian literature is built on suffering. Either the character suffers, the author suffers, or the reader suffers. If all three are suffering, then it's considered a Russian masterpiece.
And there are too many russian or russian feel books there.
Where is the fun, where is the color, where is the humor? The fun parts of being a human. And well into 21st century you just can't ignore the sci-fi and fantasy
I'm sorry but Master and Margarita is one of the most fun, funny, and colorful books I've read in my life. Considered a Russian masterpiece, at least where I'm from. Also they explore a much wider breadth of themes than just "sufferring". But fair, the true old Russian classics are in Realism, which, due to the nature of the genre and Russian society at that time obviously includes a lot of suffering.
And Moscow 2042 is also a Russian masterpiece but both are absent from the list. Also the funniest book I have read at a point in my life.
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Ayn Rand is the sore thumb that sticks out to me, but the anglo-centrism is the real problem. There should be far more Latin American and continental authors on there.
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