Well Educated Mind

Well Educated Mind Mini Challenge

Susan Wise Bauer wrote the book "Well Educated Mind" as a guide to the Classical Education you never had.  She outlines how to read a book from the standpoint of the grammar, logic and rhetoric stages. Read, think and formulate your opinion of what the story means to you. She recommends keeping a journal and outlining the story as you read.

Included in the book are her suggestions of 30 great books to read from 5 genres: Fiction, Autobiography, History/Politics, Drama and Poetry. The books are listed chronologically and she suggests reading them in order. The genres are broken down into 5 chapters with an detail explanation how to read them and a synopsis is included on each title with the best edition to read.

The goal of the mini challenge is to read at least 3 books in each category.  Any book read can be applied to the 12 classics in 12 months challenge.  Listed are the first 15 suggestions in each category, however you may choose from any title listed in the Well Educated Mind.

Fiction:

1. Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes
2. The Pilgrim's Progress -John Bunyan
3. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
4. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
5. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
6. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
7. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
8. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
9. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
10. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
11. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
12. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
13. The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
14. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
15. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

 Autobiography

1. Augustine - The Confessions
2. Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe
3. Michele De Montaigne - Essays
4. Teresa Of Avila - The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself
5. Rene Descartes - Meditations
6. John Bunyan - Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners
7. Mary Rowlandson - The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration
8. Jean Jacques Rousseau - Confessions
9. Benjamin Franklin - The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
10. Henry David Thoreau - Walden 
11. Harriet Jacobs - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself 
12. Frederick Douglass - Life and Times of Frederick Douglas 
13. Booker T. Washington - Up from Slavery 
14. Friedrich Nietzsche - Ecce Homo
15. Adolf Hitler - Mein Kampf 

History/Politics

1. Herodotus - The Histories
2. Thucydides - The Peloponnesian War
3. Plato - The Republic
4. Plutarch - Lives
5. Augustine - The City of God
6. Bede - The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
7. Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
8. Sir Thomas More - Utopia
9. John Locke - The True End of Civil Government 
10. David Hume - The History of England, Volume V
11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract
12. Thomas Paine - Common Sense
13. Edward Gibbon - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
14. Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 
15. Alexis De Tocqueville - Democracy in America

Drama

1. Aeschylus - Agamemnon
2. Sophocles - Oedipus the King
3. Euripides - Medea
4. Aristophanes - The Birds
5. Aristotle - Poetics 
6. Everyman (14th Century)
7. Christopher Marlowe - Doctor Faustus
8. William Shakespeare - Richard III
9. William Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream
10. William Shakespeare - Hamlet
11. Moliere - Tartuffe 
12. William Congreve - The Way of the World
13. Oliver Goldsmith - She Stoops to Conquer 
14. Richard Brinsley Sheridan - The School for Scandal 
15. Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House 

Poetry 

1. The Epic of Gilgamesh 
2. Homer - The Iliad and the Odyssey
3. Greek Lyricists 
4. Horace - The Odes 
5. Beowolf 
6. Dante Alighieri - Inferno
7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
8. Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
9. William Shakespeare - Sonnets 
10. John Donne 
11. King James Bible - Psalms 
12. John Milton - Paradise Lost 
13. William Blake - Songs of Innocence and of Experience 
14. Williams Wordsworth 
15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge