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Should Kids Read Great Books ?

Aristotle

October 22,2017

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ , according to C.S. Lewis, failing to introduce students to the books of the past may be more of a serious problem than today’s schools realize. In his essay collection God in the Dock, Lewis explains three reasons why students should have a steady diet of old books:

1. It’s Easier to Learn from the Source

When it comes to Plato and Aristotle, many automatically assume they are not up to the task of reading and understanding the works of these great men. Such an assumption, Lewis notes, is completely false:

“I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about ‘isms’ and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. … The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.”

2. It Broadens Perspective

Reading old works, Lewis argues, broadens a student’s knowledge and allows him to better critique and evaluate the modern books he reads:

“If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why— the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed ‘at’ some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance.”

3. It Aids in Understanding the Present

Lewis acknowledges that the authors and thinkers of the past made mistakes. But acquainting ourselves with the books they wrote will enable us to better see the ways in which we can avoid those same mistakes:

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. … Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united— united with each other and against earlier and later ages— by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century— the blindness about which posterity will ask, ‘But how could they have thought that?’ … None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

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A Recommended Reading List – from C.S. Lewis

Bike_Ridgewood_Public_Library_theridgewoodblog

 

August 26,2016

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, this is a  Recommended Reading List from C.S. Lewis ,looks like it time to hit the Ridgewood library.

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement.

Lewis wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. C. S. Lewis’s most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics in The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and been transformed into three major motion pictures.

A Canon List from An Experiment in Criticism

Homer

Iliad (c. 8th BCE)
Odyssey (c. 8th BCE)

Unknown, Book of Jonah (8th-4th BCE)
Pindar

Olympian Odes (early 5th BCE)
Pythian Odes (early 5th BCE)
Fragments (early 5th BCE)

Aeschylus, The Eumenides (5th BCE)
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BCE)
Aristotle, Poetics (335 BCE)
Virgil

The Georgics (29 BCE)
The Aeneid (29-19 BCE)

Lucian, Vera Historia (2nd)
Apuleius, Metamorphoses/The Golden Ass (late 2nd)
Unknown, Beowulf (8th-11th)
Unknown, The Song of Roland (11th-12th)
Laȝamon, Brut (c. 1190-1215)
Unknown, Huon of Bordeaux (c. 1216-1268)
Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda (early 13th)
Dante, Divine Comedy (1308-20)
Geoffrey Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales (late 14th)
Troilus and Criseyde (1380s)

Unknown, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th)
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (1485)
Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (c. 1516)
Arthur Brooke, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562)
Sir Philip Sidney, Arcadia (late 16th)
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590s)
William Shakespeare

Romeo & Juliet (1591-5)
Twelfth Night (1601-2)
The Winter’s Tale (1611)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1590-7)
Henry V (c. 1599)

John Donne, “The Apparition” (early 17th)
Michael Drayton, “The Shepherds Sirena” (1627)
Thomas Browne, Urn Burial (1658)
Jean Racine

Andromaque (1667)
Phèdre (c. 1677)

John Milton

Paradise Lost (1667-74)
Samson Agonistes (1671)

Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712-4)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 1735)
Voltaire

“Micromégas” (1752)
Candide (1759)

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759)
William Beckford, Vathek, an Arabian Tale (1782)
James Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)
William Wordsworth

“Michael” (1800)
The Excursion (1814)

Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice (1813)
Walter Scott, Guy Mannering (1815)
Benjamin Constant, Adolphe (1816)
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819)
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Witch of Atlas (1824)
Elias Lönnrot, The Kalevala (1835-49)
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
Charles Dickens

The Pickwick Papers (1836)
Great Expectations (1861)

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)
Edward Fitzgerald, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859-89)
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869)
George Eliot, Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life (1871-2)
Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872)
Lewis Carroll, “The Hunting of the Snark” (1874-6)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island (1883)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Edwin Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)
John Ruskin, Praeterita (1885)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
H.G. Wells

First Men in the Moon (1901)
“The Door in the Wall” (1911)

Beatrix Potter, Tales (1902-1930)
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (1904)
E.R. Burroughs, Tarzan (1912-1965)
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908)
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale (1908)
James Stephens, The Crock of Gold (1912)
D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913)
Gertrude Stein, “Sacred Emily” (1913)
James Branch Cabell, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919)
Kafka, The Castle (1926)
Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan (1946)
J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1954-5)