Life Syllabus
 

I was catching up with one of my old college roommates over the weekend and the subject of a "life syllabus" came up. The idea is that there are a number of books or writings that, put together, would form a course syllabus for "life." I don't mean it as a "how to" manual for success (a la Seven Habits of Highly Successful People or How to Win Friends and Influence People, though, individually, those books might be possible suggesstions. Instead, I guess I'm talking more about more of a loose guide to being a a well rounded, well read, decently educated, I won't sound like I have my head up my ass at cocktail parties, plus I'm genuinely interested in learning more kind of guy.

Again calling on the collective intellect of the FOFC community, I thought it might be interesting to see if we can put together such a syllabus.

We might break it down into topics--history (of course, you can break that down further), philosophy, literature, sciences, etc., but as far as I'm concerned, really anything goes.

For now, I'll hold off on adding the short list I've compiled to this point, but I'm curious for the thoughts and ideas of others.

What a fantastic idea.

Agreed. Count me in.

And as I'm thinking, I'm realizing that anthologies excerpting many texts would have to form the backbone of such a class, as otherwise the time constraints would prevent many different authors from being sampled. But the bibliography you'd pass out would be as thick as a phone book. :)

I suppose it might be best to go ahead with individual titles, and assume that they'd be judiciously chopped into a pleasing collection.

The Norton people are on this pretty well, if you want to go for excerpts.

Another direction to go would be "review" literature -- which probably accomplishes something, but that something might not be a particularly good match with the original intent. One of my first thoughts was for philosophy, you might prescribe Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy. It's a wonderful book, but it doesn't contain a single original idea -- all it seeks to do is discuss great thinkers from history, and place their lives and ideas into context. It does that very well, in my judgment, but it's clearly like the K-tel version of a true philosophic history.

Yeah, I think that's a fair assumption!

In the hopes of getting some responses going, given my academic background (bachelor's in government), my initial inclusions were:

Aristotle, The Politics
Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Locke, Two Treatises on Government

Well, how many classic books do you think you could fit into the schedule? As far as political philosophy goes, I think Hobbes' Leviathan is necessary reading, and I think you'd be wise to include Mill's On Liberty as well.

But hell... I'd be just as likely to want to weave Lord of the Flies in there, too.

True, true. The list could go on forever. I hadn't read your post suggesting the Durant book before I posted my three--so maybe the better tact is to look for anthology types rather than primary sources.

This would, in the end, be the most realistic approach for accomplishing the goals of such a course.

For the question, then, I guess we're the committee of writers/editors who're putting together the texts in that series; by which we should begin in listing the works that would need to be considered. The main problem would then become breadth, as the initial question has an inherent text limitation.

I think anthology types would give you the most bang for your buck in the science, history, and probably philosophy sections. But I can't really see how excerpted, or reviews of, literature get to the heart of what we'd want from this. That seems like the one category where a number of full texts would probably be required. Because if I'm understanding this correctly we want more than a "cultural dictionary" type course, something deeper than learning the vocabulary, that gets to really engaging some of the more valuable ideas and art that man has produced. I'll get to thinking on some stuff, it's tough to strike that right balance between throwing too many into the mix, and keeping things manageable.

Perhaps some combination of the two approaches would be suitable? For the philosophy section, you could include several specific books or selections, and than also include something like Durant as a catch-all for more context.

I'm rethinking my response to Quik a bit. Ideally, you've got a lifetime to fulfill the "course requirements."

I think I'm thinking too much in terms of an actual course instead of a life pursuit.
For the sake of tossing some books into the mix:

Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, Plutarch
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
Summa Theologica, Saint Thomas Aquinas
The Confessions, Saint Augustine
Dialogues, Plato
Selected Works, Aristotle
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes
Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
The Federalist Papers
Das Kapital, Karl Marx
Night Elie Wiesel

A start, anyway. No histories, literature, or poetry yet...still considering.

Heh, same wavelength. :)

What about something like the most recent Dictionary of Cultural Literacy?

Or we can look at the famed Columbia core curriculum readings...

hxxp://www.college.columbia.edu/students/academics/core/cc_syllabus.php

hxxp://www.college.columbia.edu/students/academics/core/lh_syllabus.php

Yeah, but that's like flipping to the answers section...there's no fun in that. :)

A Brief History of Time is about as succinct a primer on macro physics as you can get if the idea is to briefly introduce a 'student' to the topic.

True, though the core curriculum has its critics (e.g., very weak on modern sciences)...

I'll try a couple smaller categories.

Plays:
Hamlet
King Lear
The Orestia

Speeches/ Declarations
Gettysburg address
Churchill's "Never surrender" speech
Declaration of Independence
Las Casas' testimony on Spanish colonization

Ok some literature that has to be in the mix at least...

Don Quixote Cervantes
War and Peace Tolstoy
Most of Shakespeare, there's really no way around it
A Dostoevsky, probably Crime and Punishment as Karamazov misses with a lot of people
Divine Comedy Dante, mentioned already, but has to be there
Some Twain
Some Dumas, Count of Monte Cristo most likely
Some Dickens, definitely
Iliad and Oddysey

I'm missing a bunch of the so-called canon, but I'm moving on to personal favs instead

Adventures of Augie March Bellow
All of Salinger
Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway
A Graham Greene novel or two, I'm partial to Our Man in Havana but it's not his best or most important
As much Faulkner as you can stomach

I'll post more later, I think we've already got a few years worth of reading thrown out there in the first hour...

The Communist Manifesto
The Holy Bible
The Koran

And a strong second to THe Count of MOnte Cristo. Best book ever IMO.

And just so we can pretend we're not completely eur-amero-centric...

Season of Migration to the North Tayeb Salih, a great little book

To Kill a Mockingbird
Lolita
The Tempest

Also, I am a fan of annotated versions, commentaries, and readers' companions when you can get them. There is the school of thought that you should be coming to your own ideas and not what the annotator wants you to think. And that is certainly valid.

But I read the annotated Lolita, and I know that I got waaaaay more out of the book than I would have had I just read it on my own. A lot of the texts that people are putting on this list are very dense. I think that the benefit that you get from having a (virtual) expert at your side to help unpack some of these ideas outweighs the detriment of missing some of your own insights. YMMV.

dola--forgot Milton's Aeropagitica--the best argument against censorship that I have ever read.

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/areopagitica.html

Here are a few ideas that jump to my mind (they may need to be expounded on by our more well-read members:

-Huckleberry Finn
-The Origin of Species[sp?]
-Atlas Shrugged
-some sort of Confucious anthology? I don't think he wrote a book and if he did I think it would have been burned.
-one of the Fredrick Douglass autobiographies
-The Prince
-Charlotte's Web
-The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
-The Federalist Papers
-the Bible
-The Wealth of Nations

I could blather on forever. Maybe digamma should edit his original post occsionally to include concensus picks for the syllabus

Huge second for Lolita. Lolita the second time through is probably my favorite book of all-time.

Odds and Ends

The Fifties - David Halberstam
The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara

Some other literature to toss into the mix:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Dog Years, Gunter Grass
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

Literary considerations, off the top of my head:

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Rievers, William Faulkner
O Pioneers!, Willa Cather
Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
Ulysses, James Joyce
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
Advise and Consent, Allen Drury
Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
Watership Down, Richard Adams
Maus, Art Spiegelman


good heavens did I get off track there...

Quik: I had Watership Down as well, but decided two animal books were too many and bumped it for Animal Farm. But I'm torn. :)

I think you made the right call. I just got carried away.

I now want to do the whole thing with nothing but anthromorphic creatures. There are plenty of allegorical bits with any number of creatures. Might need its own thread, though.

I whole-heartedly second The Catcher In The Rye for the literature section. The more books I read, or the more I re-read it, the more I'm convinced it is the best book I've ever read.

Same wavelength again. Start up that thread. :)

Modern plays

Oklahoma
Death of a Salesman
A Streetcar Named Desire
Waiting for Godot
Uncle Vanya

edit: can't believe I left out Angels in America

How many credits is this class? 15?

Don't forget your poetry, also:

Longfellow, Poe, Dickinson, Lord Byron, Cummings, Sandberg, Frost, Tennyson, Whitman . . . to name a few.

Tolstoy hasn't been mentioned yet either.

I'm a bit confused. Was this supposed to be a single course, or more of a guideline to life readings? Either way, I never did quite see what's so special about some of these famous novels. It's like they're only pushed because of their past significance, and not for their current value/entertainment.

The Brothers Karamazov? What a snoozer.

Great Expectations. More like, don't have great expectations for this book, because it will absolutely bore you to death.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. wow, this sucked bad compared to the modern genre.

Bram Stocker, Dracula. I can see how this used to be significant because it introduced the idea of vampires to modern culture. But 150 (or however many) years later, we've been hearing about vampires our whole lives, so this book can be rendered obsolete.

Darwin, The Origin of Species. You can waste 4-5 months reading 1400 pages of boring crap, or you can spend half the time and leave with a far better understanding of natural selection and evolution. The problem with Darwin was his ideas were written 140 years ago, and he was really just making a hypothesis based on his observations. It's surprising how accurate he really was, but modern science has a lot more to offer to understanding the concepts than this book can do for you. Learn about transcription/translation, a little Mendelian Genetics and maybe read some Richard Dawkins, and you will have a far better understanding of what's going on here.



Now that I' done being negative, here are some suggestions.

Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo. Wow. How can a book written this long ago still be so entertaining today.

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. When you aren't 'forced' to read this book, it's funny how much more you can appreciate it.

Zinn, A People's History of the United States. I learned more about U.S History from this book than I have from anything else in life.

Machiavelli, The Prince. It's crazy how much political significance this book had on the 20th century.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War. I really enjoy 'strategy', so I enjoyed this book.

Puzo, The Godfather. For pure entertainment value. Influenced several generations, and created a whole genre of books, movies, culture etc..

While I basically agree, I would still insist on the traditional classification of "play." Call me old fashioned.

How about Short Stories? May be a quick way to get some of this literary stuff going...

Flannery O'Connor "A Good Man is Hard to Find"
Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying"
Amos Tutuola "Palm Wine Drinkard"
Shirley Jackson "The Lottery"

Hmmmm...

Thoughts?
Chas

This, to me, challenges one of the core concepts of this whole effort. Do you read the "great books" themselves, or do you read something more modern that seeks to put the great ideas into a broader context? I don't think there is a perfectly clear answer to that - but it goes far beyond Darwin.

There's no doubt that Darwin's Origin of Species was a monstrously influential book... maybe (I cant remember the attribution here, but I'm quoting/paraphrasing someone here) "the greatest idea anyone ever had." But is it essential to read the book itself to grasp the magnitude of the idea?

In literature, there's no two ways around it. You have to read the real thing -- add in whatever commentaries and criticisms you like, but if you don't read the classic book, there's no way to really appreciate it, period. But most other areas, there's going to be this debate -- what do you use as your source? Looking at most of the philosophical writings included thus far -- it probably isn't necessary to read most of them, beyond appropriate excerpts perhaps. You could probably do fine, for practical purposes, just readong someone's summary and critique of the main ideas of The Politics, for instance -- without wading into the direct translation itself. Same for most of the science, mathematics (who would want to even try to read the Principia anyway?), and any number of other areas.


It's a pretty tough fork in the road for this exercise. But if you decide that modern summaries are good enough, then there's basically no point in thinking about the great representative works (which has been most of the effort to date), since a summary form would be able to "cover" much, much more material than we'd be putting together as a list.

Quiksand: I've been thinking about this as well. One idea would be to have a 'professor' that could pull excerpts from some of these works. That way you could read the source material, but you wouldn't have to read every page. I think you could get Darwin's ideas without having to slog through the whole book.

My other question is about the purpose of the syllabus. Is this about reading the great works or about reading influential works or about being able to converse at parties? Some of the choices I would recommend would be very different based on the goals.

For example, I don't think there has been a more widely seen platwright in the 20th century than Neil Simon and you should have a knowledge of him if you want to discuss what's coming to Broadway, but I certainly wouldn't recommend him on the basis of great writing.

Short Story: Gustave Flaubert, "A Simple Life"

I really, really liked this story and think that it has a lot to tell us about the human condition as people actually live it.

(One note about Flaubert: Since I don't read French, I had to read him in translation. There are, of course, competing schools of thought about how much you lose when engaging in that necessary (for most people) exercise. I have heard, though, that the problem is particularly present for Flaubert who was obsessive about detail in his writings. The story goes that one of his friends saw him at a dinner party and asked him how his book was going. Flaubert replied that he had been debating for a while whether he needed to put a comma in a certain place, but had just recently come to the conclusion that he should. The next week, the same friend saw him at another dinner party and asked him what he had done in the past week. Flaubert replied, "I decided to remove the comma."

The general point, of course, is that--especially with subtle literature--you will always lose something in translation. That does not mean that you should not read it, IMO. But it does mean that whenever I put down a translated work, especially one that I enjoyed, I always wonder what I was missing.)

Hmmm.... Arthur Miller... I think he would be considered both a great writer and widely seen playwright.

Just a thought... glad you triggered my memory... I loved reading Miller when I was younger.

Couple of late 19th century playwrights that would be considered would have to be Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde...

Regards,
Chas

Okay, in some part inspired by this thread, I have enrolled in a class for the next few months, which ought to do at least a little of the stuff we discussed here.

Executive Seminar: Freedom, Virtue, and Society

First class is in late September, we will be discussing Huckleberry Finn. I got my shipment of books last night - but seeing th Politics and Leviathan on the list made me want to engage in a little forum necromancy with this thread.

Oh yeah. Glad you bumped this.

Two books came up recently that reminded me of this thread because people in the conversation were so clueless about them. The Maltese Falcon and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

The Wizard Rules books by Terry Goodkind ...

http://www.terrygoodkind.com/wfr.php

IMHO the rules are very good as guides for life (of the books the first four or so were great, the subsequent ones you kind of read because you've read the first few and enjoyed them - but like the Star Wars films ;) ).

Winner.

I can't believe it took this long for Hemingway to pop up.

I'll add "The Last Lion - Vol. I and II" by William Manchester.

Nice.

I got caught up with work and didn't get to concentrate on the list as much as I would have liked.

I've been on an audio book kick for my commute lately--and I've been trending toward American history most recently.

"Great Books of the Western World" Ten Year Reading Plan

http://www.io.com/~beckerdo/books/gb195210.html