Books Good Enough to be on the List

How about Gilead by Marilynne Robinson? The U.S. is considerably more than 200 years old now, and our history is full of wrenching conflicts and contradictions that merit discussion.

In Gilead, a dying minister in a small Kansas town reflects on an incident in his abolitionist grandfather's life that reverberated down the generations. It's not just about the continuing impact on our country of slavery and the violence that ended it, but also about very personal issues of judgment, forgiveness and redemption.

What would the rest of you add to the reading list if a few more slots opened up?

Flow by M. Csikszentmihalyi,
The Ethics by Spinoza,
How to Solve it by G. Polya,
Hesiod,
more by Francis Bacon,
the British Philosophers Whitehead, Russell and Stuart Hampshire
more mathematics
but above all, I'd take Homer at a much slower pace: I can see adding two or three weeks on Homer each year.

Yes, Homer is full of good stuff. Every place Odysseus visits says something new and deep about human nature and the way we interact with each other.

I haven't read Flow, but have read a few reviews of Csikszentmihalyi's work-- enough to intrigue me.

What is Polya solving? I'm not familiar with his work.

Pretend we're on the instruction committee at SJC. The rule is, for every suggested addition, there must be a suggested deletion to make room in the curriculum. Shall we try that out here?

By the way, Don and Patti just returned from a one week Summer Classics session (5 seminars) at SJC Santa Fe. Miss Brann was the senior tutor and we read and discussed Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice. Each book informed and illuminated the other. Amazing. We were very lucky! Miss Brann is celebrating her fiftieth year as a tutor at SJC.

It is much easier to add then it is to delete. I think one has to start with the basic criteria for the structuring of the list before one can add or subtract.

David Perrings

I am currently going through the current list and i do not plan on being finished any time soon. How many other lists are out there ?

I'd be hard-pressed to suggest deletions, because I doubt there's anything on the list that doesn't deserve to be read and thoroughly reflected upon. Besides which, it's been 30 years since I graduated, so my memory of the list (especially the less memorable books!) is quite faded.

Since we're an alumni group rather than current students, we aren't constrained to limit our reading to what's on the current list, so I think we do have the luxury of considering "additions" without being forced to delete.

That's not to say I wouldn't enjoy a thread on suggested deletions! It might bring back a lot of fond or not-so-fond memories.

I'm not so timid as to be unable to suggest deletions:
Euripides -- and read Hesiod
Vergil (whom I love) -- and read more Bacon
Leibnitz (a brilliant thinker, but derivative) -- and read Spinoza's Ethics
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Kafka (fiction is a waste of seminar time) -- and read Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein and Hampshire
Csikszentmihalyi would fit into senior lab.

Polya's How to Solve it fits in the general tradition dating back to Bacon and Descartes on the search for a general 'method' for discovering truth. (Maybe back to Aristotle)'s Enchridion.) But it could be added to the sophomore math tutorial, violating the historical order, say after Descartes.

As for Homer, I'd concentrate on The Iliad, six seminars, reduce the number of Odyssey seminars down to one or two, and cut into Plato's Republic down to four: book 1, 2-4, 5-7, 8-10.

Oh, not Euripides! He was my very favorite of the Greek dramatists.

And don't chuck out the fiction! I'm so grateful to have read Emma and discovered Jane Austen, which I probably wouldn't have done for many years if I hadn't read her at St. John's. Austen has such a finely-honed sense of ethics, which I really don't think can be appreciated in the abstract. And Dostoevsky is so essential, I wish there were room for The Idiot as well as The Brothers Karamazov. One really must have examples drawn from life to ever begin to understand the kinds of dilemmas people face in the real world when various moral principles collide and people's ability to delude themselves intervenes.

Okay, I'll agree to trimming the number of sessions on The Republic. In my opinion, only the introduction, where Socrates tells everyone to eliminate war and cooking and live on vegetables, really counts - not that I follow his dietary guidelines. (Silly old Socrates - be serious!)

I'm not saying that reading fiction is a waste of time--hardly: it's just that fiction is a waste of time in the St. John's Seminar. Seminars are, or should be, an occasion for shared discovery. Shared discovery isn't necessary for fiction--the excitement of the best fiction is a very private affair--and maybe shared discovery gets in the way of appreciating fiction.

I'm glad that you enjoyed Euripides more than Sophocles and Aeschylus. But enjoyment isn't the right "metric" for evaluation here. It's sort of like TV ratings: "High School Musical" got high ratings, but that doesn't mean it's among the best shows on TV and certainly not among the most thought-provoking. Sophocles and Aeschylus provoke thinking in ways that Euripides doesn't, even if they aren't anywhere near as much fun as Euripides.

I see what you mean, but I learned a lot from some of the seminars on fiction. Maybe your tutors just didn't handle fiction well.

Where would you class readings from the Bible, particularly parables? These are essentially short stories.

To read parables as short stories seems to limit them.

Fiction and short stories are a recent invention -- only the last 300 or so years. To classify all of writings only by contemporary categories isn't fair.

You may be limiting short stories, Rick. The best of them can be as profound as a Biblical parable. Admittedly, the modern-day publishing world is swimming in short stories and most are not that deep. But that's a judgment on the authors, not on the short story form.

How about "A Farewell to Alms", by Gregory Clark, chair of economics at UC Davis, published just this summer? It really is a barnburner of economic theory. (Realizing, yes, that this last sentence would sound nuts to most non-Johnnies.) "Farewell" may be the modern "Wealth of Nations", and presents some provocative theories on the causes of the Industrial Revolution, the economic balance of the world since then... and what comes next.

#14,

You raise and interesting question, what is the most recent book on the current list? How old does a book have to be inorder to qualify?

david

Well, CW would say we only read Dead White Men. However, some of the theories he posits will be so unpopular with CW that Gregory Clark may be a Dead White Man Walking... which may be good enough. ;-)

But the real (if partial) answer to your question: "Relativity" is one of the most recent readings in the maths/sciences. And Albert's getting up there in years.

CW ?

Conventional Wisdom. "Miss Wisdom" in class.

13
To read parables as short stories limits the possibility of what a parable can do or say; to read short stories as parables presumes that we already know what parables can do.
I'm not saying, Margaret, that short stories or fiction have no value: I'm taking the task proposed quite seriously: what books should a young student seriously study for four years in order to become "liberally" educated; by my lights few pieces of fiction, long or short, pass that hurdle.
I was wonderfully transformed by Emma back then, it's a wonderfully insightful study of the everyday psychopathologies of greed and vanity. And hilarious to boot.
But I think the challenges of careful reading and writing aren't met by them. I think students would be better served by, say, more time on Nietszche.

How do you define "the challenges of careful reading and writing"? Do we not educate ourselves largely for the purpose of being transformed? And if we take to heart Socrates' instruction to think deeply about the nature of vice and virtue, doesn't fiction often challenge us at a deeper level? I think we are drawn to identify with characters in fiction (sometimes despite ourselves) in a way that, with the more profound works of fiction, gets under our skin and forces us to think at the subconscious level as well as the conscious about questions of vice, virtue, the nature of reality, etc. Reading philosophers like Nietszche (and I have a quote from Nietszche posted beside my desk, alongside one from Bob Dylan and another from Luther Burbank, so I am by no means dismissing his value) requires an open mind and a willingness to do the work of reflecting on the author's ideas and making them our own (if only for the purpose, sometimes, of dismissing them in the end) before we truly gain much from our reading. With philosophy, we may either agree too easily and therefore come away from our reading unchanged, or dismiss the ideas too easily, with the same result. Fiction at its best lures us in by presenting characters we love (or hate) despite our preconceived notions. And laughter is an amazing tool for transformation. Somewhere in the Bible it says we must all become fools for God.