Posted on 04/24/2014 2:27:32 AM PDT by SoFloFreeper
What we were shooting for was a thorough grounding in the essentials of Western Civilization. The results remain to be seen, but so far it appears to have been successful.
“Silas Marner.” The ONLY book I couldn’t get through, in my entire life.
Thankfully, there were no permanent, lasting effects, and I continued on my merry way, literarily speaking, and am an avid reader to this day.
As for the OT, I homeschool my youngest son, who, as a neonatal stroke victim, has some lasting cognitive problems. His reading list is much curtailed by this, but we do try to read as much as possible. He seems fascinated by Tudor England, and so we read a lot of biographies about that era (Sts. Thomas More and Edmund Campion, for example), and he loves loves LOVES reading the Bible. Poetry is beyond his abilities, though; he just cannot seem to interpret it well. Oddly, the homeschooling group to which we belong puts on a full-blown Shakespearean play every spring, and he adores attending those productions. He seems to have no problem following the action.
Besides those examples, he likes to read the books that have inspired some of his favorite movies: “How Green Was My Valley,” “Captains Courageous,” and “Black Beauty,” for instance.
I’d dearly love for him to read some of the more difficult books, but they are just too much for him. My older son, however, is about to graduate from an extraordinarily rigorous Catholic high school where he has spent the past four years reading an extensive list of classic literature. Had he been homeschooled, I imagine his reading list would have looked much the same.
Regards,
With a few tweaks, that list looks like my oldest son’s reading list.
Add:
The Bible
The works of Flannery O’Connor
Atlas Shrugged
The Baltimore Catechism
The works of Edgar Allan Poe
King Lear
Brideshead Revisited
Since he attended Catholic school, he did not read Bondage of the Will.
Some of your list was read not in English class, but in Latin.
Great list, though. Kudos to you! Your children are blessed.
Regards,
1: Bible
2: “Commentary on the Common Law”, Blackstone.
3: Goodrich “History of the World”
4: Hyeck, “Road to Serfdom”
5: “Constitutional View of the War between The States”, Stevens
6: Thomas Jefferson...everything.
7: Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers
A few of our inoculatory red pills.
Yes, yes! Forgot about some of those (especially “The Road to Serfdom”). It’s so HARD to remember them all.
Best,
Thank you very much, C_I_C!
Best,
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