Great Books of the Western World the Ten Year Plan

Encyclopedia Britannica actually produced in 1952 a set of Books called the Great Books of the Western World. The series was edited and compiled by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler and their board. They included as the first book a volume called The Great Conversation. In this volume they discuss liberal education, the Western tradition and how they chose which works to include in the set. It is an excellent volume that brings out a lot of good points about education. I highly recommend it, I may summarize it in another post. But the piece I want to discuss in this post is the Ten Year Reading Plan. They suggest different ways to study the Great Books series, but I was fortunate enough to be included in a book club where we started with Year One of the Ten Year plan.

It was awesome!! I wasn't sure if I wanted to take the time to attend a book club twice a month, but everytime I went, I was enlightened and uplifted. When I read the works, I could feel my brain grow and when we got together and discussed the works, we all got way more out of it. It was very interesting to see people's views change. I don't think any of us were the same after reading about Alexander the Great by Plutarch and The Prince by Machiavelli. We were learning history and philosophy at the same time, and then we were able to watch things that are going on now and compare and contrast. After that first year, I was finally able to put names and times and places together. Now when I hear great names or works or ideas, I have a place for them to go and a foundation to base my ideas. The works chosen follow a chronological order for each year of the plan. It was awesome.

I loved it so much, I wanted to include the plan here. I will type them in sometime in a different post, here is a link on someone's website with the plan and links to the works themselves. It is past copyright so it is all free!! Note: Try to get the 1952 version especially for Aristophanes. Those Greeks were kinda crazy and the older version has a nicer translation for a lot of it!!