Selina wrote: "Perhaps this is the URL Patrice is referring to ?
https://grahamschool.uchicago.edu/php/ba...
"

That looks like it. Thanks!

It didn't work for me.
Perhaps it's the URL below ?
https://grahamschool.uchicago.edu/progra...

Patrice wrote: "Everyman wrote: "Audrey wrote: "On another note, I think it might be interesting to try to go chronologically in, say, six month cycles. "

This is the general approach that the reading plan for th..."



grahamschool.uchicago.edu/programs/basicprogram/reading-list

hope this works!

Everyman wrote: "Audrey wrote: "On another note, I think it might be interesting to try to go chronologically in, say, six month cycles. "

This is the general approach that the reading plan for the Great Books fol..."



While I do like the chronological approach, there's also the conceptual approach which can be really exciting. For instance, "justice", or "freedom". Sometimes two works that seem very unrelated by time and place can really be saying the same thing, or very different things about the same concept. The U of Chicago Basic program tends to use this approach.

I think you were going that way with the interim reading of Emerson, eman.

I ran across this wonderful quote from Mortimer Adler while I was doing some browsing:

"The difference between great and good books is one of kind, not of degree. Good books are not "almost great" or "less than great" books. Great books are relevant to human problems in every century, not just germane to current twentieth-century problems. A great book requires to be read over and over, and has many meanings; a good book needs to have no more than one meaning, and it need be read no more than once."

Audrey wrote: "On another note, I think it might be interesting to try to go chronologically in, say, six month cycles. "

This is the general approach that the reading plan for the Great Books follows. It is a ten year plan, picking selections from the books, and each year runs roughly chronological over a broad theme or set of themes.

Here is a link to the ten year suggested reading schedule.
http://www.greatconversation.org/Ten_Yr_...

Hope it works. I don't have my linking template up because our power has been blinking on and off this evening (sustained winds at the weather buoy out front of our house are being measured over the last four hours at 45, 47, 48, and 49 mph, so still building, with much higher gusts. So I have the minimum open on my computer so when the power goes i can shut down quickly, since I only have a short window with my battery backup.

I'm following this conversation with great interest. Something else to put out: This group is less than a year old. I think that, in addition to sorting gradually through reading guidelines/preferences for the group, we need time to develop together, for those who have languished for lack of conversation to take the edge off that need, for those who are new to classics or new to discussion to warm to their potential and enjoy themselves. I figure that a year, or two, of nominal structure, such as we have now, will help that process. I suggest that we need the books *and* the comfy chairs near the fire with the mug of something nice. A year or two is not long for classics readers, lol. Speaking only for myself now, I see how comfortable I've become from the last quarter of Don Quixote, when I joined, to now. There's *room* in this group, an expansiveness that perhaps comes from reading long books and deep thoughts from various centuries. One can settle down and let thoughts roam, and then come up and find others, to switch metaphors, picking berries from the bushes quite near. All this to say that I think group process can benefit at this stage from looser guidelines rather than stricter. It takes time to go deep. Appreciation of, and discussion of, classics is occurring with élan!

Everyman wrote: "There are a number of fairly good sources of "classic" classics around, and I would think that any book on these lists would be fair game for this group."

Even there, we run into the same difficulty. In following the links you posted, I discovered Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952) on Great Books of the Western World, as well as Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Faulkner's Go Down, Moses (1942) on the St. John's College Reading List. The Lifetime Reading Plan goes much more recent than I would really consider classic. It includes One Hundred Years of Solitude, which came out in 1967.

On another note, I think it might be interesting to try to go chronologically in, say, six month cycles. We could, for example, follow an order that went something along the lines of: antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, 18th century, 19th century. It wouldn't have quite the effect of reading several works from each period at once, but it might approximate the effect at least a bit, and I think it would be much more practical for an informal group.

An easy way out in determining what is or is not on the list would be for someone to hotfoot it over to the nearest university English Dept. They all have a list of the "Western Canon" available and would be glad to supply it. But, that wouldn't list classics that we want to read that may not have made the list - so that would put us back at square one, wouldn't it?

Patrice wrote: "Fashions come and go but genius remains. "

Perfect. Absolutely perfect.

Charlotte wrote: "Perhaps a distinction should be made between the concept of a 'classic' and an 'important' work. Many 'important' works have been written and are being written each year, but our perception of their importance changes with time. A 'classic' on the other hand is something that has been around long enough for the current generation to understand its place in literary history."

That's a good distinction.

I think the key is that there are a great many groups here on Goodreads, and while I certainly don't want to encourage people to go other places and leave here, OTOH we can't be all things to all people. This group is quite intentionally called both Classics and Western Canon -- books included should, IMO, be legitimately be considered BOTH classics AND part of the core Western Canon that has informed the development of Western intellectual thought (the Great Conversation discussed in the group introduction).

For my part, I like the idea somebody mentioned of this group sticking with "classic" classics. There are so many books that meet this criteria that don't get discussed in this depth anywhere else on Goodreads that I'm aware of.

At the same time, there's no point in scheduling a reading of Spinoza's Ethics, which is certainly a classic classic, if nobody is interested in joining the discussion of it.

There are a number of fairly good sources of "classic" classics around, and I would think that any book on these lists would be fair game for this group. Among these lists, by no means exhaustive,are
Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan.
The Harvard Classics Five Foot Shelf of Books and Shelf of Fiction
The Great Books of the Western World
Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, sections A, B, and C. (Section D he is "not so sure about" because he is trying to predict what books might become part of the Canon in future.)
Adler and VanDoren's classic How to Read a Book
The St. John's College Seminar Reading List.

I do note that most of these sources recommend that books be read generally in chronological order; that is, in order to fully appreciate the values of later classics and their place and role in the development of Western thought, knowledge of early works is of great value. We have not been at all strict about that here, although we did start out with the glorious Oedipus Rex, but it may be that in future we might want to look a bit further back rather than further forward (as this discussion seems to have been developing) for our selections.

This discussion reminds me of Don Quixote. I'm sure in his time and place Amadis of Gaul was considered a "classic". It was influential, it was considered the best of a genre. But we generally don't read it today. Why? My guess is that it's because it is not something that can be related to four hundred years later. What it has to say is bound by it's place and time. There is nothing universal in it's message. And maybe, the ideas in it were just not true. Yet, four hundred years later, we're still reading Don Quixote.

Fashions come and go but genius remains. The time cut-off, imo, is just a way to see if the perceived genius of the time remains so when pulled out of the time. When I was in school in the 60's "relevancy" was all the rage. The students wanted to dictate curricuum and the administrations caved. So, long lists of of books about urban unrest were assigned. None of them are read or remembered today. What a waste that was. I realize i'm preaching to the choir here. I just thought I'd throw out some unfinished thoughts, and make Stringfellow Barr happy. ;-)

Perhaps a distinction should be made between the concept of a 'classic' and an 'important' work. Many 'important' works have been written and are being written each year, but our perception of their importance changes with time. A 'classic' on the other hand is something that has been around long enough for the current generation to understand its place in literary history. Personally, I would suggest that using a year or a generational approach to defining a cut-off point for a work to be a 'classic' is overly simplistic (albeit simple solutions are often the best). The generational approach may seem obvious to us, but in the past when the world was changing less rapidly this might not have been the best solution. Instead a major world changing event might be the best cut-off point for defining a 'classic'. In which case, could I suggest that 1945 might make a good choice. The period after this, after all, is characterised by social change, exemplified by the change in social consciousness in Europe by the welfare state. This is, in many ways, a society which we can all relate to, whereas the majority of us would find it harder to directly relate to the world pre-1945.

This is just a suggestion and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Peregrine: "I'd lobby to have it based on a set number of years back from the current year, and so to advance yearly. "

I would definitely agree with an automatically changing year. It's much too easy to get an idea of when the classics start and then never let it change. When this discussion started, I realized that my definition was exactly the same as it had been in 1999. It should have gone forward ten years, but it hadn't. I think I've been basing my definition on the lives of my grandparents. If they could remember the decade, it was too recent. Which probably would have kept my definition of classic perpetually in the 1920s.

One way to calculate a year might be to go on Everyman's three generation theory. If you calculate a generation as 20 years, that would put our time span at 60 years--1949. Of course, real generations are often longer than that, because most people aren't born when their parents are 20. We could also use 25 years, which would give us a 75 year span--1934. Personally, I'm inclined to think that's a little limiting. However, that's mainly because I can think of books my grandfather read in his 20s that are still around now and which wouldn't be encompassed by the 1934 cut-off year.

Audrey wrote: "As to the discussion of what makes a classic, I'm wondering if it mightn't be simpler to decide that we're not interested in literature from the modern era, whether it's classic or not. It seems l..."

The cutoff date would depend on how old one was, and rightly so, in my opinion. I don't know if I would have read Les Mis when it came out. It may have seemed too current, and I might have preferred classics. Yet my grandchildren would have seen it as a classic (and they all would have loved reading!) I am interested in modern classics. I don't think postmodernism has been around long enough to have generated classics; bestsellers, yes. If we were going to generate a cutoff date, I'd lobby to have it based on a set number of years back from the current year, and so to advance yearly. It's the interest of people younger than our own generation, whichever one that is, which creates classics and maintains their status.

As to the discussion of what makes a classic, I'm wondering if it mightn't be simpler to decide that we're not interested in literature from the modern era, whether it's classic or not. It seems like everyone has a different idea of when books are old enough to be classics, and that tends to be the kind of idea that doesn't change easily. Personally, I have great difficulty wrapping my mind around the notion that To the Lighthouse, Ulysses, and Remembrance of Things Past aren't classics, but I would have equal difficulty granting classic status to a work outside my personal (and, as far as I can tell, random) cut-off date of c. 1935. So, for practical purposes, we might do better simply to come to a consensus of what time periods interest us as a group. The first world war, for instance, would make a logical guideline as to when the modern era began.

I agree that a month isn't nearly enough time to read most classics. At a guess, I'd say that a good half of the books on our current poll would have to be dispensed with if we were going to go by that. And it's not just how long it takes you to read the book, either. I read Anna Karenina in less than two weeks, but I think good discussion of it would take a lot longer than that. There's a lot to discuss in every section, and, in order to do justice to it, I think we'd need to spend time on each one.

Alias Reader wrote: "As for our book selections my preference is to select books that can be read reasonable in one month for most of our selections."

It turns out that many of the "classic classics," if that term makes sense, are longer works, for a variety of reasons. One was that there there were many fewer books published, so thee was no sense of a need to get through a book quickly to get to the next one. Another was that authors tended to write fewer and longer books -- compare Dickens's output, for example, with that of a modern popular author like Stephen King. Another was that there were fewer competing interests (no TV or movies or Internet!) so books could be more prominent on one's leisure time (up to about twenty years ago I had neither a TV or VCR nor a computer, and I did a lot more reading. Now it's rare for me to spend four hours each evening reading, which used to be normal. Of course, there's also that I now share a bed with a wonderful wife who I love like the dickens but who has put a kibosh on the hours I used to spend reading in bed).

The point being, to eventually get to it, that the reality is that most classics are longer than modern books, and are also more dense. (My mother in law lent me the most recent Parker/Spenser mystery and I polished it off in about two hours. Try that with Bleak House!)

So while I think you have a good point, unfortunately (or fortunately if you look at it another way) there are a lot of classics which really need more time for those with very busy lives and lots of competing interests.

Just my two cents. I consider The Great Gatsby, all Quiet on the Western front, Ethan Frome etc. to be classics. If I was forced to give an arbitrary cut off date I would say 1970 or even 1980. Maybe ones age has something to do with their opinion on this.

As for our book selections my preference is to select books that can be read reasonable in one month for most of our selections. I wouldn't mind say 1 or 2 longer reads such as we have done with Les Miz. But not the majority of our reads. Selecting books that can be read in a single month also will allow people who choose to skip a read not to lose touch with the group.

It'd be a classic to my 21-year-old nephew [grin back:]. He read The Great Gatsby; All Quiet on the Western Front; The Outsider, with fascination in high school, and was very eager to receive Crime and Punishment, and Anna Karenina, which I sent him for his last birthday. My own memories of 1960, such as they are, are from a truncated and horizontal position. Classics, for me, start somewhere in the 1920s or '30s.

Peregrine wrote: "If you take the "three generations" guideline, anything from 1960 back would be up for our list."

But I remember 1960 well. How can any book from a year I can remember be a classic? [g:]

If you take the "three generations" guideline, anything from 1960 back would be up for our list. For my part, I'm good with 20th century as long as it doesn't dominate. I wouldn't want any century to dominate. There's more to talk about with a mix.

Interesting additions!

Personally, I'm a bit dubious about 20th century "classics" when there so many "classic classics" still unread here, but we'll see what people think.

And nicely done, to make sure they were on the "to read" list and not the "read" list -- the "read" list is only for books that we have already read here.

I added Shaw's Man and Superman, Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury to the list. Since I've never added books before (and since they're all from the 20th century), I thought I'd run them by everybody.

Kathy wrote: "Maybe the key here is "Western Canon?" So anything that wouldn't give Harold Bloom a heart attack = "classic." ;-)"

LOL!!!

everyman: So my question wasn't intended to be a criticism, but a question really about what we are all about here.
=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-

I didn't take it as criticism. :) It's not a problem, I just saw the books on my TBR shelves and thought I would suggest them. I understand perfectly if they don't fit the Western Canon criteria of this group.

Maybe the key here is "Western Canon?" So anything that wouldn't give Harold Bloom a heart attack = "classic." ;-)

Hi, Everyman. I read your post over a couple of times, and you've convinced me. There ARE a number of places one can read more recent works---and I do read them there; there are very few places---maybe only here---in which one can read "Classic Classics."

(I had to google Hutchins and "Great Conversation. ;)
Thanks for furthering my education. Adelle)

Alias Reader wrote: "I thought they fit the Classics description.

If you don't think so, just disregard. "

I don't consider it just up to me. While I am moderator, I'm not dictator; the interests of the members of the group are also important.

The questions I basically use to ask what books are part of the Western Canon is, have they become established as part of the "Great Conversation" Hutchins talks about, and have they stood the test of time, which for me personally means being of substantive value to at least three generations of readers. But I'm aware that those are subjective tests, and intelligent minds can differ.

One thing I do object to is the concept of an "instant classic," or "this [newly published:] book is destined to become a classic." Classics become classics because they are read and valued over the decades and centuries, not because somebody today thinks they will be classics.

But back to the point, it's a matter of what this group wants to read. Keeping in mind at there are hundreds of other groups here on Goodreads, so books that aren't read here may well be read elsewhere (though of course not with anything like as good a group of participants :) ), so we don't need or want to be all things to all people. (Ayn Rand, for example, might well be read in the Philosophy group or the Classical (Laissez-Faire) Liberalism group.) But nor do I want to make the focus of this group so narrow that it doesn't meet the needs of those serious about reading and discussing these books.

So my question wasn't intended to be a criticism, but a question really about what we are all about here.

My thinking would put An American Tragedy into a Classics category---albeit perhaps more of an American classic than a Western classic. I took an intense English Lit class in college in which we read Dreiser's Sister Carrie. My personal thinking is that An American Tregedy is actually a better book. I've read it a couple of times since then.

I thought they fit the Classics description.

If you don't think so, just disregard.

Alias Reader wrote: "
An American Tragedy- Theodore Dreiser
Atlas Shrugged- Ayn Rand

Hmmm. Do these books raise the question what works are or should be included in the definition of "Classics and the Western Canon"?

An American Tragedy- Theodore Dreiser



Atlas Shrugged- Ayn Rand

Thanks. I will try it myself next time.

Peregrine wrote: "If you would, please. I can't immediately see how to add books. Thanks."

Will do, but it's quite easy -- maybe others would benefit from knowing how, also.

1. Click on the bookshelf option just above discussions. (If you want to keep these instructions available as you undergo the process, open it in a new tab; Firefox does this easily, and I assume IE would, also.)

2. In the upper left is a box that says "add books." Enter your book information in the box and click search.

3. Identify your book, and click "add to group."

4. Very important: In the box that opens, click on "choose shelves." (Otherwise, it will go onto the shelf of books we've already read and I'll have to go in and change that!) Select "to read" and click in "suggested future readings." Then click "close."

5. Click on "Save Group Book." That's it -- the book is added.

It takes much less time to do than to describe.

If you want to add another book, the "add books" box is still there, so just do it again for your next book.

I don't mind doing it -- it's easy enough -- but learning new skills is a way to keep your mind young and healthy! [vbg:]

If you would, please. I can't immediately see how to add books. Thanks.

Peregrine wrote: "Utopia, by Thomas More
On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft"

Feel free to post these to the booklist -- any member can post books to the list (be sure to put on the "to be read" bookshelf, not the "read" bookshelf). Or would you prefer me to add them for you?

Utopia, by Thomas More
On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft