English 287:  Great Books

Various lists of "great books"

Many different lists of "great books" have been compiled over the ages.  Here are several of interest worth consulting whenever you're looking for something new and worthwhile to read.

"The top 100" selected by round 100 well-known authors from 54 countries voted for the "most meaningful book of all time" in a poll organised recently by editors at the Norwegian Book Clubs in Oslo.

Find out what topped the list.  Part of the fun of these sorts of lists is the discussion they set loose.  See what some prominent British writers and publishers thought about the results.

Great Books Lists, compiled by Robert Teeters, offers links to a number of lists of great books, from within and beyond the Western Tradition.  Some of these are listed below, with annotations.

Great Books of the Western World (2nd ed., 1990)

Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins of the University of Chicago were persuasive advocates for the value in the modern age of a systematic acquaintance with an extensive but basic body of great works within the Western Tradition.  (See Jay Satterfield, "The Great Ideas:  The University of Chicago and the Ideal of Liberal Education".) 

This is the latest version of the list, an up-dating of their original suggestions (1952).  You might find interesting Adler's 1997 brief essay on the criteria and procedures adopted for "Selecting Works for the 1990 Edition of the Great Books of the Western World".

A useful companion for anyone who undertakes to read such works is Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren's How to Read a Book.

The Adler/Hutchins program has inspired a host of independent programs, each with its own approach and selection.

  • The Malaspina Great Books Program (at Malaspina University College, British Columbia) has compiled a more  comprehensive series of lists -- "Malaspina Interdisciplinary Core Reading Lists."  

"These lists are based in part on the original Adler List and expanded to include readings in science, art, theatre, music and cinema.  Our list also attempts to redress an under-representation in the so-called Great Books "canon" of significant works by women, minorities, cross-cultural sources, and gay and lesbian writers.  Also included in the lists is a selection of important historical figures." 

These lists can be approached from a number of different points of view, for instance

Malaspina also provides a useful list of what it designated as Great Books Five Star Sites.  These are "anchor sites" for reliable and effective information on specific authors and artists featured in the Malaspina Great Books Program.  Here is how the compilers explain their list:  

"What do the designations mean? They mean that in our evaluation of WWW resources available (for the authors/artists we refer to), a five Star site uses internet capacities effectively and that the information there (or linked from there) appears to be reliable. The Great Books Five Star designation is just that: a "designation" and not an award. It is useful perhaps to those who value recognition from a page developed by educators -- as opposed to recognition from a non-academic site. Our main interest in assigning these designations is to recognize and encourage excellence in a medium where there is a lot of "noise." We are (we hope) playing a useful role in encouraging the use of the Internet as a reliable source of educational and cultural resources. 

" We also provide links to the Library of Congress, the National Library of Canada and COPAC (in the UK), as well as links to online texts, and online book stores in three countries. We do not recommend that students rely exclusively on Internet resources." 

(There is also a hypertext-annotated compilation of lists of major works recommended by Drs. Adler and others.  This site is currently under construction, so some of the links need to be backed up.  In the future it promises to be highly useful.)

Great Books and Classics.  Here you will find links to classic works of religion, philosophy, politics, science, history and literature from both East and West, spanning nearly four thousand years of human history. Works are indexed alphabetically by Author or Title, and chronologically by Author (or work, if anonymous). There are also separate indexes for works included in various reading lists, and works which are available in languages other than English.

Literary Sources on the Net, compiled by Professor Jack Lynch, is an invaluable guide not merely to the web, but to titles of works available in most libraries and still in print.

Bartleby.com:  Great Books Online, named the "Best Literary Source for 2002," by Yahoo Internet Life Magazine, is a source for free ebooks of many important texts, and a pointer to sources for buying copies in physical book format.  It features prominently the famous Harvard Classics and Shelf of Fiction lists, compiled by Professor Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard.

"Lasting American Literary Works of the Twentieth Century" is a list that appeared in the September 1994 issue of Esquire magazine (Volume 122, No. 3, pp. 118-121).  It was excerpted from The Western Canon by Harold Bloom (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1995).   Bloom describes it as "a modest prophecy as to survival possibilities," a prediction as to what will prove to be the lasting American literary works of the 20th century (278 books).

As its title suggests, Bloom's book is by no means restricted to 20th Century American literature.  This is as good a place as any to put it forward as a handy reader's sidekick for his or her explorations in the Western literary tradition:  Harold Bloom, The Western Canon:  The Books and Schools of the Ages.   Have a look at the reader comments at Barnes & Noble and at Amazon.

Cross Country Checkup's Summer Reading List 1995.  "Recommending books is the only pleasure superior to reading them. There is no snobbery here. We run the gamut from the Edge Westerns to Spinoza. As the author of Ecclesiastes would have it, of the making of books there is no end, and as Anthony Powell titles it, 'books do furnish a room!'"

  Suggestions are welcome.  Please send your comments to lyman@ksu.edu .

   Contents copyright © 2002 by Lyman A. Baker. 

Permission is granted for non-commercial educational use; all other rights reserved.

  This page last updated 19 August 2003 .