Seeking the ancient paths and reading The Great Books by 200 authors chronologically over the next 40 years.
Franklin, TN
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You can now view my list of 200 Great Authors in both table and image formats. I'll be reading the Great Books by each of these authors over the next 40 years (I'm in year 4 and the 40 years leaves plenty of room for rabbit trails) - books.booksoftitans.com/grea…
And here is the full list here (year of author's death):
1 - Enheduana - 2250 BC
2 - The Epic of Gilgamesh - 2100 BC
3 - Writings from Ancient Egypt - 2000 BC
4 - Enuma Elish (Creation Epic) & Atrahasis (Flood Myth) - 1700 BC
5 - The Rig Veda - 1500 BC
6 - Homer - 700 BC
7 - Hesiod - 700 BC
8 - Sappho - 570 BC
9 - Aesop - 564 BC
10 - Lao Tzu - 531 BC
11 - Sun Tzu - 496 BC
12 - Confucius - 479 BC
13 - Aeschylus - 456 BC
14 - Herodotus - 425 BC
15 - Sophocles - 406 BC
16 - Euripides - 406 BC
17 - Thucydides - 400 BC
18 - Aristophanes - 386 BC
19 - Xenophon - 354 BC
20 - Plato - 348 BC
21 - Aristotle - 322 BC
22 - Chuang Tzu - 286 BC
23 - Epicurus - 270 BC
24 - Euclid - 270 BC
25 - Archimedes - 212 BC
26 - The Ramayana - 200 BC
27 - Terence - 159 BC
28 - Lucretius - 55 BC
29 - Cicero - 43 BC
30 - Virgil - 19 BC
31 - Ovid - 17 AD
32 - Livy - 17 AD
33 - Seneca - 65 AD
34 - The Bible - 100 AD
35 - Josephus - 100 AD
36 - Quintilian - 100 AD
37 - Tacitus - 117 AD
38 - Plutarch - 120 AD
39 - Epictetus - 135 AD
40 - Ptolemy - 168 AD
41 - Marcus Aurelius - 180 AD
42 - The Mishnah - 200 AD
43 - The Bhagavad-Gita (in the Mahabharata) - 200 AD
44 - St. Irenaeus of Lyons - 202 AD
45 - Clement of Alexandria - 215 AD
46 - Origen - 253 AD
47 - Plotinus - 270 AD
48 - Eusebius - 339 AD
49 - St. Athanasius of Alexandria - 373 AD
50 - St. Basil the Great - 379 AD
51 - St. Gregory of Nazianzus - 390 AD
52 - Gregory of Nyssa - 395 AD
53 - St. John Chrysostom - 407 AD
54 - St. Jerome - 420 AD
55 - St. Augustine - 430 AD
56 - The Talmud - 500 AD
57 - Boethius - 524 AD
58 - The Koran - 632 AD
59 - Beowulf - 1000
60 - Murasaki Shikibu - 1014
61 - Abolqasem Ferdowsi - 1020
62 - Sei Shōnagon - 1025
63 - The Song of Roland - 1100
64 - Saint Anselm of Canterbury - 1109
65 - Anna Komnene - 1153
66 - Hildegard of Bingen - 1179
67 - The Mabinogion - 1200
68 - The Forest of Thieves and the Magic Garden - 1200
69 - Moses Maimonides - 1204
70 - Magna Carta - 1215
71 - Saint Francis of Assisi - 1226
72 - The Saga of the Volsungs - 1270
73 - The Poetic Edda - 1270
74 - Rumi - 1273
75 - Thomas Aquinas - 1274
76 - Njal's Saga - 1280
77 - The Sundiata - 1300
78 - Dante Alighieri - 1321
79 - The Tale of the Heike - 1330
80 - Giovanni Boccaccio - 1375
81 - Geoffrey Chaucer - 1400
82 - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - 1400
83 - Julian of Norwich - 1416
84 - Margery Kempe - 1438
85 - The Arabian Nights - 1450
86 - Thomas à Kempis - 1471
87 - Niccolò Machiavelli - 1527
88 - Thomas More - 1535
89 - Desiderius Erasmus - 1536
90 - Nicolaus Copernicus - 1543
91 - Martin Luther - 1546
92 - The Book of Common Prayer - 1549
93 - François Rabelais - 1553
94 - John Calvin - 1564
95 - Teresa of Avila - 1582
96 - St. John of the Cross - 1591
97 - Michel de Montaigne - 1592
98 - Edmund Spenser - 1599
99 - The Story of Hong Gildong - 1612
100 - William Shakespeare - 1616
101 - Miguel de Cervantes - 1616
102 - Francis Bacon - 1626
103 - John Donne - 1631
104 - George Herbert - 1633
105 - Galileo Galilei - 1642
106 - Miyamoto Musashi - 1645
107 - René Descartes - 1650
108 - Blaise Pascal - 1662
109 - Molière - 1673
110 - John Milton - 1674
111 - Baruch Spinoza - 1677
112 - Thomas Hobbes - 1679
113 - John Bunyan - 1688
114 - Matsuo Bashō - 1694
115 - Jean Racine - 1699
116 - John Locke - 1704
117 - Isaac Newton - 1727
118 - Daniel Defoe - 1731
119 - Alexander Pope - 1744
120 - Jonathan Swift - 1745
121 - Charles-Louis Montesquieu - 1755
122 - David Hume - 1776
123 - Jean-Jacques Rousseau - 1778
124 - Voltaire - 1778
125 - Founding Fathers - 1787
126 - Adam Smith - 1790
127 - Edward Gibbon - 1794
128 - James Boswell - 1795
129 - Olaudah Equiano - 1797
130 - Immanuel Kant - 1804
131 - Jane Austen - 1817
132 - John Keats - 1821
133 - William Blake - 1827
134 - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - 1831
135 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 1832
136 - Sir Walter Scott - 1832
137 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1834
138 - Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison - 1836
139 - Alexander Pushkin - 1837
140 - Emily Brontë - 1848
141 - Edgar Allan Poe - 1849
142 - William Wordsworth - 1850
143 - Mary Shelley - 1851
144 - Søren Kierkegaard - 1855
145 - Charlotte Brontë - 1855
146 - Alexis de Tocqueville - 1859
147 - Arthur Schopenhauer - 1860
148 - Nathaniel Hawthorne - 1864
149 - Alexandre Dumas - 1870
150 - Charles Dickens - 1870
151 - John Stuart Mill - 1873
152 - George Eliot - 1880
153 - Gustave Flaubert - 1880
154 - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 1881
155 - Charles Darwin - 1882
156 - Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1882
157 - Karl Marx - 1883
158 - Victor Hugo - 1885
159 - Emily Dickinson - 1886
160 - Herman Melville - 1891
161 - Walt Whitman - 1892
162 - Alfred Tennyson - 1892
163 - Frederick Douglass - 1895
164 - Harriet Beecher Stowe - 1896
165 - Friedrich Nietzsche - 1900
166 - Anton Chekhov - 1904
167 - George MacDonald - 1905
168 - Mark Twain - 1910
169 - Leo Tolstoy - 1910
170 - William James - 1910
171 - Henry James - 1916
172 - Marcel Proust - 1922
173 - Joseph Conrad - 1924
174 - Franz Kafka - 1924
175 - Thomas Hardy - 1928
176 - G.K. Chesterton - 1936
177 - Edith Wharton - 1937
178 - Sigmund Freud - 1939
179 - William Butler Yeats - 1939
180 - Mikhail Bulgakov - 1940
181 - James Joyce - 1941
182 - Virginia Woolf - 1941
183 - Dietrich Bonhoeffer - 1945
184 - Sigrid Undset - 1949
185 - George Orwell - 1950
186 - Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1951
187 - Albert Einstein - 1955
188 - Thomas Mann - 1955
189 - Dorothy Sayers - 1957
190 - Zora Neale Hurston - 1960
191 - Ernest Hemingway - 1961
192 - William Faulkner - 1962
193 - W.E.B. Du Bois - 1963
194 - C.S. Lewis - 1963
195 - Flannery O'Connor - 1964
196 - T.S. Eliot - 1965
197 - John Steinbeck - 1968
198 - J.R.R. Tolkien - 1973
199 - Daphne du Maurier - 1989
200 - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - 2008
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I wasn’t homeschooled, but my actual first reading memories are staying up past my bedtime using the light from my fish tank to rebelliously read that exact copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Too funny!😁
Sinful, Rebellious Homeschooler Stays Up Past 9:30 To Read 'Chronicles Of Narnia' buff.ly/yFaPgjG
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Erik Rostad (Books of Titans) retweeted
C.S. Lewis wants you to read Plato’s Republic.
Many people think Plato has nothing to do with the Christian Gospel.
➡️But one of the greatest Christian storytellers of all time knows better. At the end of his Narnia series, C.S. Lewis has Professor Digory tell you: “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato.”
Why not say “it’s all in the Bible, all in the Bible?”
➡️C.S. Lewis understood the importance of Plato for the Christian imagination. He used Platonic philosophy to tell the stories of Narnia.
But many miss one of the most powerful Platonic images of the Narnia series.
And it comes from how C.S. Lewis read Plato’s Republic.
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Recorded a quick episode in Edinburgh for today’s podcast. I cover a question I found very interesting from Book 1 of Plato’s Republic.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
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Morning reading: Book 3 of Plato’s Republic. What passages of Homer should be kept from the Guardians?
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Here’s my Edinburgh bookshop loop: I start at Armchair Books then to proceed to Edinburgh Books a block away. That’s hard work, so I meet my wife for lunch at Holyrood 9A. Blackwells at the University of Edinburgh is just a block away. That’s stop 3. Then I cross from old town to new town and start at Topping & Company. McNaughtan’s is a bit down the street. I then make my way to The Gently Mad bookshop with its fantastic inventory of children’s and classics. Cooper Hays was oddly closed. I then finished up at Waterstones. I believe I purchased at least one book in each shop. Edinburgh is a marvelous book town.
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Where I offer a simple litmus test to know if you’re in a legit bookstore or not - booksoftitans.com/p/books-in…
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Missed closing time by 30 minutes, which is a bummer because I spied a nice Classics section from the window. Huntly, Scotland.
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My latest podcast episode is up - booksoftitans.com/p/seven-bo…
I select 7 books from my library and highlight when I got them, what I liked about them, and what fun knickknacks I found inside.
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Now onto my second consecutive reading of Plato’s Republic, this time using Bloom’s translation. Going to try to read it 3 times during September (3rd translation to be Robin Waterfield’s).
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Finished Plato’s Republic this morning. It ties together so many of his other dialogues and helped me better understand some of them, particularly Ion. Book 10 returns to the poets and their role in Socrates’ city. It closes with a final judgement and a return to the question from Book 1 of the just and unjust person. Truly a masterpiece.
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"Singapore is encouraging its citizens to pick up a book for 15 minutes a day under a new five-year national programme to fight brain rot and strengthen the country’s reading culture."
independent.co.uk/asia/south…
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Good news on the Plato Project front. Only 47hrs 57min and 51sec remaining in his Complete Works. 🤪
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