© Copyright 2007 - 2024 Peter J. Ponzio
Great Books
The Great Books of the Western World was a series of books designed by Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins, and was intended
as a means to provide people with information, knowledge, understanding and wisdom.
Discussion Questions -Classics
The Odyssey The Iliad Paradise Lost Richard III A Midsummer Night’s Dream Oedipus Rex Boswell’s Life of Johnson The Twelve Caesars The Pickwick Papers The Age of Reason A Christmas Carol Far From the Madding Crowd
The Great Conversation
The method of liberal education is the liberal arts, and the results of a liberal education is discipline in those arts. The liberal artist learns to read, write, speak, listen, understand, and think. He learns to reckon, measure, and manipulate matter, quantity, and motion in order to predict, produce, and exchange. As we live in the tradition, whether we know it or not, so we all are liberal artists, whether we know it or not. We all practice the liberal arts, well or badly, all the time every day. As we should understand the tradition as well as we can in order to understand ourselves, so we should be as good liberal artists as we can in order to become as fully human as we can. Robert M. Hutchins
Discussion Questions -Science
Fiction
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Frankenstein Slaughterhouse Five Ender’s Game
Discussion Questions -
History/Contemporary Affairs
A Stillness at Appomattox Readings in Human Rights All Quiet on the Western Front “Letter from Birmingham Jail” All Men are Brothers American Sphinx Declaration of Independence Devil in the White City
Discussion Questions -
Contemporary Literature
The Heart of Darkness “A Rose for Emily” and “The Rocking Horse Winner” East of Eden Ethan Frome Snow Falling on Cedars Murder on the Orient Express The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry The Waste Land rabbitrun Anna Karenina, books 1 - 3 Anna Karenina, books 4 - 8 “Eveline” A Good Man is Hard to Find Darkness at Noon Brighton Rock Desire Under the Elms Love in the Time of Cholera The Cherry Orchard To Kill a Mocking Bird All the King’s Men The Interpretor of Maladies The Hobbit The Boys in the Boat
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
The Sailor who fell from grace
with the sea
A Catcher in the Rye
