Sponsored by Northern New Jersey Mensa and Mensa in Georgia. Join us on Saturday afternoons (4:00 pm Eastern time) to discuss some great work from the Western canon or other literary tradition!
How to read a book
Classical scholar James J. O’Donnell talks about Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s classic How to Read a Book, and the joys of reading great literature.
Here’s what we’re reading
Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and philosopher. In 1792, she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. In this essay, Wollstonecraft argues that women are neither mere ornaments nor property to be traded in marriage. Rather, women are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights[…]
Agatha Christie is one of the best-selling authors of all time. Her And Then There Were None is the seventh best-selling book (100 million copies) of all time. Christie is famous for her 66 detective novels, some of which featured the fictional Belgian detective Hercule Poirot or an elderly English spinster named Miss Marple. Christie[…]
Back in Elizabethan times, it was considered funny to tell stories about how badly a man beat his disagreeable wife. However, Shakespeare turned this trope on its head. For years, people have been arguing about whether the play is feminist or antifeminist. (Kate is eventually “tamed.”) However, the moral of the story is clear: the[…]
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 Britain (but women still could not vote). Middlemarch deals with many themes, including “the woman question” and the nature of marriage, as well as religion[…]
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 the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) during th Spanish Civil War and his consequent disillusionment with Marxist politics. In 1945, Orwell wrote Animal Farm:[…]
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 Canterbury to visit the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The Canterbury Tales were mostly in verse and were written in Middle English.[…]
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 the murdered Roman Emperor Julius Caesar. The Metamorphoses retells 250 myths. In his retellings, Ovid often departs from traditional accounts. Yet his poem was the[…]
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. This idea gained credence when European neurologists began using the clinicopathological method. This meant comparing the problems that a person had had during his or[…]
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 London to Canterbury Cathedral, to visit the Shrine of St. Thomas Becket (also known as Thomas à Becket). Nevertheless, some of the tales told by[…]
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 assumptions? Nikolai Lobachevsky: Non-Euclidean Geometry and Euclid’s Fifth Axiom – Kronecker Wallis
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 one point, Odysseus must steer his ship between two perils: a sea monster named Scylla and a whirlpool named Charybdis. The whirlpool was probably inspired[…]
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. This discourse is famous for Descartes’ assertion Je pense, donc je suis (I think, therefore I am–cogito ergo sum). The discourse was intended to serve[…]
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 literature.” Like Solzhenitsyn, the protagonist of Cancer Ward is a Russian World War II veteran who served time in the Gulag (Soviet forced labor camps)[…]
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (the Brothers Grimm) were German academics who studied the history of the German language and collected and published folktales. They popularized these “Grimms’ Fairy Tales” through books that were translated into many languages. They also laid the groundwork for the study of folklore as an academic discipline. Here’s an English translation[…]
Daniel Defoe was an English writer, businessman, and spy. He was one of the most important proponents of the English novel, and he was also an important political pamphleteer. He was born in 1660 (the year of the Restoration of the Stuart Monarchy)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of “Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.”
Read the text: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling | Project Gutenberg Audiobook: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling Full Audiobook
Here are things we read in the past
Shakespeare’s Othello deals with themes of race and jealousy. Here’s a side-by-side version of the original version (Shakespearean English) and a modern translation: Othello Translation | Shakescleare, by LitCharts Here’s a recording of the play, with Paul Robeson as Othello: Othello, Act I, Scene 1: Venice. A Street “Tush! never tell me” (2024 Remastered Version) Here’s[…]
In our extended celebration of St. Valentine’s Day, let’s talk about Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet! This play has been performed countless times and has been reinterpreted in opera and ballet. Here’s the text, with side-by-side translation from Elizabethan to today’s English: Romeo and Juliet Translation | Shakescleare, by LitCharts Here’s a stage performance: Romeo and[…]
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818. He had no birth certificate and thus never knew his precise age. However, he chose February 14 as his official birthday because his mother regarded him as her “little Valentine.” While he was still a boy, a kindly woman taught him to read, which was[…]
Go Tell It on the Mountain (published 1953) is a semiautobiographical novel by James Baldwin. The novel is set in Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City that was home to the “New Negro” movement and the Harlem Renaissance: a flowering of Black culture involving music, poetry, novels, theater, and the visual arts. Go Tell[…]
Nelle Harper Lee (whose pen name was Harper Lee) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1962 for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The novel was the basis for the movie of the same name. The movie was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning three: Best Actor (Gregory Peck), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Art Direction. […]
Erasmus of Rotterdam was a Dutch Humanist and Christian theologian and regarded as a true “Renaissance Man.” Humanism was a movement that focused on the agency of individuals, which humanists considered the starting point for the study of morals. Erasmus’s work In Praise of Folly is one of the most famous books from the Renaissance.[…]
Hippocrates is a semimythical figure who is regarded as the Father of Medicine. He may have been a real person, a leader within a movement within Greek medicine. However, the actual authorship of any of the “Hippocratic writings” is unknown. These writings are interesting and valuable because they provide detailed descriptions of patients’ symptoms and[…]
The Great Books and World Classics discussion group is a joint effort of Northern New Jersey Mensa and Mensa in Georgia. On December 27, we will be reading the original text of the 12 days of Christmas. Here’s a version sung by the Pentatonix.
The Great Books and World Classics discussion group is a joint effort of Northern New Jersey Mensa and Mensa in Georgia. On December 20, we will be discussing A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Read the original text of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
The Great Books and World Classics Discussion Group is a joint project of Northern New Jersey Mensa and Mensa in Georgia. On December 13, we will be reading First and Second Maccabees, which talks about the story of Hanukkah. 1 MACCABEES CHAPTER 1 KJV
The Great Books and World Classics Discussion Group is a joint project of Northern New Jersey Mensa and Mensa in Georgia. On December 6, we will be discussing A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore. It was the first source to name Santa’s Reindeer (except for Rudolph).
The Great Books and World Classics Discussion Group is a joint project of Northern New Jersey Mensa and Mensa in Georgia. On November 29, we will be discussing Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things (sometimes translated as On the Nature of the Universe). This poem is about the tenets and philosophy of Epicureanism. Read an[…]
The Great Books and World Classics Discussion Group is a joint project of Northern New Jersey Mensa and Mensa in Georgia. On November 22, we will be discussing Dante’s Inferno. The Inferno is the first part of Dante Alighieri’s three part narrative poem The Divine Comedy. The Inferno is followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. The[…]
The Great Books and World Classics Discussion Group is a joint project of Northern New Jersey Mensa and Mensa in Atlanta. On November 15, we will be discussing Le Tartuffe, or the Imposter, or the Hypocrite. This play is a comedy, actually a farce, that was first performed in 1664. Originally suppressed by Louis XIV,[…]
The Great Books and World Classics Discussion Group is a joint project of Northern New Jersey Mensa and Mensa in Georgia. On November 8, we will be discussing The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, which is one of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Read an interlinear translation of the Middle English original into modern English. Watch an animated[…]
The Great Books and World Classics Discussion Group is a joint project of Northern New Jersey Mensa and Mensa in Georgia. On November 1 (All Saint’s Day), we will be discussing The Confessions by St. Augustine. This is an autobiographical account of Augustine’s youth and conversion to Christianity. Widely regarded as one of the great[…]
The Great Books and World Classics Discussion Group is a joint project of Northern New Jersey Mensa and Mensa in Georgia. On October 25 (St. Crispin’s Day!) we will talk about Henry V, by William Shakespeare! Read the original, along with a side-by-side modern translation. See the version that the Laurence Olivier made in 1944.
The Great Books and World Classics Discussion Group is a joint project of Northern New Jersey Mensa and Mensa in Georgia. On October 18, we will be talking about Shakespeare’s MacBeth (“the Scottish play” for those of you who are too superstitious to mention it by name!). Three witches tell MacBeth that he is destined[…]
The Great Books and World Classics Discussion Group is a joint project of Northern New Jersey and Mensa in Atlanta. On October 11, we will be discussing Christopher Columbus’s journal, which discusses his 1492 voyage to the Americas. Read the book Also, here’s the text of the Mayflower Compact, an agreement among the Pilgrims who[…]
The Great Books and World Classics Discussion Group is a joint project of Northern New Jersey Mensa and Mensa in Georgia. One of the greatest works of German literature, Faust is a two-part play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Mephistopheles (the devil) makes a bet with God: he says that he can lure one of[…]
