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Have you lost the art of reading for pleasure? Are there books you know you should read but haven't because they seem too daunting? In The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer provides a welcome and encouraging antidote to the distractions of our age, electronic and otherwise. In her previous book, The Well-Trained Mind, the author provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to home-school their children, and that book is now the premier resource for home-schoolers. In this new book, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them to the use of adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading.The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres--fiction, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry--accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the end of each chapter--ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich--preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing.The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there's no reason you can't read and enjoy Shakespeare's Sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the "Great Books" without a guide and a plan. Susan Wise Bauer will show you how to allocate time to your reading on a regular basis; how to master a difficult argument; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre--what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary?--and also between genres. Followed carefully, the advice in The Well-Educated Mind will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.… (more)
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I was doing what the
She gives "representative," annotated lists of classic novels (75% British or Usan), autobiographies, histories, plays, and poetry, in chronological order. She rightly cautions the reader not to read criticism or introduction by anyone but a novel's author until after reading that novel, but then, amusingly, sketches the plots of, for instance, Crime and Punishment and Invisible Man. Summaries of novels whose plots are not their most important feature -- plus a few sentences about the novels' themes and import, i.e., criticism.
The novels start with Don Quixote (of course) and end with Possession. The autobiographies range from Augustine to Elie Wiesel, the history from Herodotus to Fukuyama, the drama from Aeschylus to "Equus," and the poetry from Gilgamesh to Rita Dove. She skipped from "School for Scandal" to "Doll's House," and I immediately thought she was lame (were playwrights not writing notable plays because they were forging correspondence between dead presidents?) for skipping an entire century, but then I realized I couldn't name a single play from the early 1800s either (except for "Our American Cousin," whose literary import (if any) is not why I know about it). But I am not her audience. I might not have had a classical education but I did have a liberal one and have read most the titles or authors in her five categories.
Training your own mind : the classical education you never had -- Wrestling with books : the act of reading -- Keeping the journal : a written record of new ideas -- Starting to read : final preparations -- The story of people : reading through history with the novel -- The story of me :
their poems.
I was a bit annoyed at how mired in 'dead white guys' the reading lists are in the annotated reading list segments of the second part of each chapter. There were a couple female authors, and even a couple non-white ones, but the focus is still toward traditional Western classical education, with all the elitist, paternalist biases that tradition contains. But as a guide to get readers started reading more thoroughly, this book definitely works, and it is easy to use the framework Bauer provides to read other books not included in her lists. In fact Bauer does suggest adding in and taking out books from her lists as the readers feels is necessary. I have already read 50% of the books in her fiction list, so I am not quite her target audience anyway; the point of this book is really to help adults who did not get a solid classical education catch up through their own self-study (and through discussing their readings with a friend who is also reading the same books, but since I have no willing friend around who could keep up with my reading that is not likely to happen soon).