Approaches to reading The Great Books of the Western World 1952 edition
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.ย. 2024
- A tour through the contents of the volumes with a running tally of how many I've completed in my 4 plus decades of reading them. Plus a tour through the 10 year reading plan, as well as other approaches to reading the set.
I am very thankful for your videos - great inspiration.
You are so welcome!
I've read the entire Great Books of the Western World and all the Harvard Classics but it took me almost 30 years
That is super impressive!
@@greatbooksbigideas well I had help. My grandmother was a college professor who taught music and literature and my grandfather was a deacon who had an extensive philosophy heavy theological library and my father was an engineer old school with a slide rule and drafting table in his office at home so if I had a question one of them could probably answer it
Thank you so much for doing this, Jim! I will be unboxing a set of The Great Books tomorrow morning and am thinking about my plan so your video was well timed😊After seeing your discussion of the 10 year plan, I am thinking of a blended approach. My first thought is to start chronologically with the literature and use the 10 year approach for the history, philosophy, and science. I’ll see how it goes but am really excited to get started!
Congrats on getting a set! Which version do you have? They come in different cover styles. The blended approach is a sound one. I’m thinking of following their suggestions for the math and science titles, which I haven’t made much progress with heretofore.
Love this series. I'm on year 3 at the moment, which I also supplement with following my nose. The physical books are difficult to come by without great expense in the UK so I use the *ahem* digit copies, which are the scanned books, to read the introductions or unique content and then I track down the main content on project guttenberg for free or Oxford classics for physical books. I'm completely obsessed so I'm loving your video series. Thank you! Please could you show us the rest of your library? Have you read gateway to the great books or the great books program?
@@greatbooksbigideas I have the 1952 version, reprinted in the late 1980s.
@@sarahdavis2653 What are some of your impressions thus far, Sarah? Do the GB readings allow you time to read outside the list?
@@running_out_of_options8122 yes. I can only really manage about an hour of GBWW at a time and then my brain needs a break so I read something related or more easy going afterwards. Usually I end up down a rabbit hole from something or other in the text. Side quests lol
I'm surprised to see that Rousseau's 'Confessions' was omitted. There are also no plays by the central classic French playwrights like Molière, Jean Racine, and Pierre Corneille, their chief works securely canonical in French culture.
Indeed, there are many gaps!
You might want to check out Harvard Classics and see if that set contains those authors. HC leans more towards essays and literature whereas GBWW has more material pertaining to science and math. Also please note that neither of these sets were intended to be exhaustive; the collections were curated to provide a foundational classical liberal education. The reader/student would then be expected to pursue further works in areas of their interest as lifelong learners.
Great point. The GBWW editors make it very clear that these aren't the only titles one should read, and the canon is always a moving target, as it were.
You can find the French drama on GBWW 1990 edition (volume 31).
Great video! Does the 10 year plan cover all the volumes included in the set? Or is it just a selection from the complete set? Not sure I could just stop reading some of the books halfway to wait till the following year though…
Thanks! It's just a sampling, but they covered every author represented in the set. For example, you read several plays by Shakespeare, but not all of them. The beauty of self-education is you can go your own way, so if you have the time, why not keep reading all the way?!
@@greatbooksbigideas Yes, definitely true… just wish I could get my hands on it! 😅 but I appreciate the overview, it means I can source the books separately & get the same value…