Great Books is inspired by a curriculum and a book list, as well as a method of education. Mortimer Adler lists three criteria for including a book on the list:
1. the book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems and issues of our times;
2. the book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit;
3. the book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries.
Includes active table of contents. Authors include:
Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison:
The Federalist Papers
Charles Dickens:
David Copperfield
Hard Times
The Pickwick Papers
Daniel Defoe:
Robinson Crusoe
Desiderius Brasmus:
The Praise of Folly
Edmund Spenser:
The Faerie Queen
Francois Rabelais:
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Geoffrey Chaucer:
The Canterbury Tales
Herman Melville:
Moby Dick
Homer:
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Jane Austen:
Emma
Pride and Predjudice
Jonathan Swift:
A Modest Proposal
Gullivers Travels
Leonardo da Vinci:
The Notebooks
Marcus Aurelius:
Meditations
Mark Twain:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Michel de Montaigne:
Essays
Miguel de Cervantes:
Don Quixote
St. Augustine:
Confessions
William Congreve:
The Way of the World
