Great Books and World Classics

Middlemarch is a novel that is set in a provincial town in England in the years leading up to the Reform Act of 1832, which broadly increased voting rights in … Continue reading George Eliot: Middlemarch

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair.  He was a novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic. His memoir Homage to Catalonia recounts his participation in the forces of … Continue reading George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four

Geoffrey Chaucer was the author of the Canterbury Tales, which is an anthology of 24 short stories that are supposedly being told by people who are traveling from London to … Continue reading Geoffrey Chaucer: The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (April Showers)

The Metamorphoses was the most famous work of the Roman poet Ovid. The Metamorphoses is Ovid's attempt to tell the history of the world, from Creation to the deification of … Continue reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the Tale of Narcissus and Echo

The discipline of psychology emerged from the discipline of philosophy. In the late 19th century, the British philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that the human mind could be studied scientifically. … Continue reading William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience

The Miller's Tale is one of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. These tales were supposedly stories that a group of pilgrims told each other as they were on their way from … Continue reading Geoffrey Chaucer: The Knight’s Tale and the Miller’s Tale

Here's an interlinear Greek/English translation: farside.ph.utexas.edu/Books/Euclid/Elements.pdf Here's a series of videos: Euclid's elements: definitions, postulates, and axioms Euclid's Geometry was built on assumptions. But what if you altered one of those … Continue reading Euclid’s Elements

The Odyssey is an account of how Odysseus made his way home to his wife Penelope after the Trojan War. (The Trojan War itself was discussed in Homer's Iliad.) At … Continue reading Homer’s Odyssey: Scylla and Charybdis

Rene Descartes' Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published in French in 1637.  It was later translated into Latin. … Continue reading Rene Descartes: Discourse on the Method

Cancer Ward is a semiautobiographical novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who won the Nobel Prize in Litrature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian … Continue reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Cancer Ward