AIBU to feel uneducated after coming across this list of 'Great Books' that HIGH SCHOOL students are meant to have finished??

[HopefulAnnie]

www.welltrainedmind.com/great-books/

Website is called Well Trained Mind as well haha!

I have read maybe 12 books here and have barely heard of the rest. I can't believe this is a high school reading list, I feel so thick but these books seem somehow advanced to me.

I'm going to try and start from the 9th grade and read a couple and work my way up.

How many of these books have you guys read?

I've read quite a few, but not nearly as many as I should have, having had the chance to do a publicly funded history degree.

The author clearly likes absolutes, as she states that home education was 'unheard of' in the 1970s.

I do like reading lists - we were given a wonderful one when I went into sixth form and if you're looking for things to read you might as well get recommendations from well-educated people. But YANBU to feel inadequate because of a list made by somebody else. Make your own, maybe?

BTW, there are a couple of blogposts that talk about the false BBC attribution:

www.purplecar.net/2009/03/how-do-memes-start-a-case-study-100-books-in-facebook/
kriswager.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/bbc-100-book-meme-or-is-it.html

Oh, wow, you're a braver woman than me, name. I can't cope with more than a paragraph of NIV. Bleugh.

If someone's got to read the Bible for general purposes, rather than as a theologian/historian, it should be the KJB. IMO.

Interesting - no F Scott Fitzgerald, no The Catcher in the Rye?! And why would you put Huckleberry Finn in the list for kids in 11th Grade when it's clearly a story which can be appreciated by much younger children? It's a list for classics students, more than a general all round "well-educated" tick-list.

In all honesty, I could read those books (I have read quite a number of them), but life is short and wikipedia is easier.

What is The Message?

As noted by someone above, Well Trained Mind is an American homeschool course in "classical education" which is different from the UK Classics degree. As far as I know it amounts to a huge amount of rigorous study.

It doesn't have a lot of religous texts because if you are a religious home educator in the US there are different programs you would follow. (Charlotte Mason, for example)

Name, I certainly found that reading Mark, Luke and Acts of the Apostles killed any lingering shreds of Christian faith in me, so perhaps that's why.

I would have gone for Isaiah myself, perhaps because due to Handel/Messiah it's such a deeply embedded part of my own culture.

Oh, ouch.

That's really horrible.

I think Revised Standard is a decent compromise on the KJB. It's lightly modernized, but still has a nice flow to it.

I forget which version it is that translates 'and the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not' as 'and the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not understand it', but we used to have it at church as children and it gave my mum the horrors.

Psalms and Song of Songs are culturally useful IMO. And bits of Revelations.

The only reasons I get any ticks on that list are:
I've read the bible and the koran;
I went to a 'classical' grammar school.
There's nothing on it that made me think "Oh, I must read that!"
So it can fuck off as far as I'm concerned

It's just a show-off list, isn't it?

I've read plenty of Shakespeare and I think everyone as some point read "Of mice and men"

I've had to read social sciences and psychology text books, if you can get through those without your eyes blinding, your doing ok.

I certainly won't be reading The Message, Namechanger, what patronising gobshite!

I'm really astounded by some of the replies here.

I would say that list was pretty representative of what I was reading in the last years of education. I've read about 90%* of that list, I thought most semi-educated people would have.

*Disclaimer...this may be a massive lie

Lilac. Very modest of you not to have mentioned you'd read them all by age six!

6? by 3 surely?

I wouldn't take seriously any list where they can't spell the author's name correctly (Engles for Engels?)

Well, I've only read 7 of them! Almost all from the last section.

That is the most boring book list I've ever seen! My DDs would be totally put off literature if they had to plough through all that heavy going stuff.

I wonder how many of those books the list author themselves have read - it says no one will read them all.

And if they haven't read them, why put them on a list of recommended reading?

I've read a lot of those before I was 18, and some of them were dire beyond all description.
'Thus spake Zarathustra' for one. And none in languages other than English in all its historical varients. Plus I had to reread a number, because although I read them the first time round and saw some performed, I hadn't fully understood the text.
But yes, it's an American list for showing off, and I'd be fascinated to know how many of the adults recommending it have read all the texts on it and understood them.
Bet it's not many.
As for feeling thick if you haven't read any of them, why? Reading books is one skill amongst many.

Ninth grade, BC 5000-400 AD

The Bible: Genesis, Job
Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2500 BC)
The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer (c. 850 BC)
History of the Persian Wars by Herodotus (485-424 BC)
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (c. 440 BC)
Medea, Euripides (c. 431 BC)
The Frogs, Aristophanes (405 BC)
Republic, Symposium, Plato (c. 387 BC)
On Poetics, Ethics, Aristotle (384-322 BC)
The Bible: The Book of Daniel (c. 165 BC)
The Aeneid by Virgil (c. 30 BC)
Metamorphoses by Ovid (c. 5)
The Bible: Paul, 1 & 2 Letters to the Corinthians (c. 58 AD)
The Wars of the Jews by Josephus (c. 68)
The Annals of Tacitus (c. 117)

Tenth grade, 400-1600

Augustine, Confessions and City of God, Book 8 (c. 411)
The Koran (selections) (c. 650)
Beowulf (c. 1000)
The Mabinogion (c. 1050)
Aquinas: Selected Writings (ed. Robert Goodwin) (c. 1273)
The Inferno, Dante (1320)
Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1400)
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (selections)(c. 1400)
Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (selections)(c. 1470)
The Prince by Machiavelli (1513)
Utopia by Thomas More (1516)
Faustus, Marlowe (1588)
The Faerie Queene, Spenser (1590)
Julius Caesar (1599), Hamlet (1600), or other plays, Shakespeare

Eleventh grade, 1600-1850

Cervantes, Don Quixote (abridged)(1605)
Divine Meditations, John Donne (c. 1635)
Paradise Lost (selections), Milton (1664)
Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
Gulliver’s Travels, Swift (1726)
Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake (1789)
“The Rights of Man,” Paine (1792)
Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge (1798)
Pride and Prejudice, Austen (1813)
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)
“Ode to a Nightingale” and other poems of Keats (1820s)
The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper (1826)
“The Lady of Shalott” and other poems of Tennyson (1832)
“The Fall of the House of Usher” and other stories of Poe (1839)
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (1847)
Moby Dick, Melville (1851)

Twelfth grade, 1850-present day

Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engles (1848)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe (1852)
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman (1855)
Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky (1856)
On the Origin of Species, Darwin (1859)
Great Expectations, Dickens (1861)
War and Peace, Tolstoy (1864)
The Return of the Native, Hardy (1878)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche (1883)
Huckleberry Finn, Twain (1884)
Selected Poems, W. B. Yeats (1895)
The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1900)
“The Innocence of Father Brown,” Chesterton (1911)
Selected Poems, Wilfrid Owen (1918)
“A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes,” Frost (Pulitzer, 1924)
“The Trial,” Kafka (1925)
“Murder in the Cathedral,” T. S. Eliot (1935)
The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck (1939)
Mein Kampf, Hitler (1939)
Animal Farm, Orwell (1945)
The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank (1947)
Invisible Man, Ellison (1952)
“The Crucible,” Miller (1953)
“A Man for All Seasons, Bolt (1962)
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” Stoppard (1967)
“The Gulag Archipelago,” Solezhenitsyn (1974)