YOU MUST TACKLE BOOKS THAT ARE BEYOND YOU, OR, AS WE HAVE SAID, BOOKS THAT ARE OVER YOUR HEAD. ONLY BOOKS OF THAT SORT WILL MAKE YOU STRETCH YOUR MIND. AND UNLESS YOU STRETCH, YOU WILL NOT LEARN.
–Mortimer Adler
As a classical school, SLOCA is serious about great books—texts that have stood the test of time, whose ideas have trickled down into our current culture and continue to lend their wisdom to thinkers across the West and the world. Many of these great books are included in the SLOCA curriculum—read in whole or in selections at the high school and middle school and as adaptations in the lower grades—but we believe that everyone should experience the wonder of these texts, so we invite you to come along for the ride! These books may show you how to be or how not to be, they might challenge you or delight you, they may even confuse or frustrate you, but they will all teach you something about what it means to be human. And as we humans wend our way toward goodness, truth, and beauty—in other words, a life of flourishing—these 125 books can be our guides!
book list
Beowulf
The Bible
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Federalist Papers
The Eumenides by Aeschylus
Aesop’s Fables by Aesop*
Little Women (Parts One and Two) by Louisa May Alcott
Summa Theologica (selections) by Thomas Aquinas*
Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, edited and explained by Peter Kreeft
Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
Poetics by Aristotle
Rhetoric by Aristotle
Confessions by Augustine
City of God (selections) by Augustine*
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Emma by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Novum Organum by Francis Bacon
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer*
Inferno by Dante Alighieri
Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri
Paradiso by Dante Alighieri
Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
Selections of Sherlock Holmes stories (Adventures and Memoirs) by Arthur Conan Doyle*The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Selected essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson*
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano
Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
Faust (Part One) by Johann Wolfgang Goethe*
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Histories by Herodotus
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
Iliad by Homer
Odyssey by Homer
Odes by Horace*
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Showings by Julian of Norwich
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard
Selected writings and speeches by Martin Luther King Jr.*
Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
Second Treatise of Government by John Locke
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Lais of Marie de France by Marie de France
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
selections from the Essays by Michel de Montaigne*
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Selected short stories by Flannery O’Connor*
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Metamorphoses by Ovid
Pensées by Blaise Pascal
Apology by Plato
Phaedo by Plato
Phaedrus by Plato
Republic by Plato
Symposium by Plato
Plutarch’s Lives by Plutarch*
Selected short stories by Edgar Allan Poe*
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
As You Like It by William Shakespeare
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
The Bhagavad Gita
One Thousand and One Nights*
The Qur’an
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Dhammapada by the Buddha*
The Way of Chuang Tzu by Chuang Tzu*
Analects by Confucius
The Gift by Hafiz
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
Selected poems by Rumi*
Selected poetry by W.H. Auden*
Selected poetry by William Blake*
Selected poetry by Emily Dickinson*
Selected poetry by John Donne*
Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
Selected poetry by Robert Frost*
The Temple by George Herbert
Selected poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins*
Selected poetry by Langston Hughes*
Selected poetry by John Keats*
For more information, check out the full Beyond Packet!
@ The Den Store
View and purchase books from the Beyond books list at the Den!
