A Book List

 

The first step to rescue our civilization is to fix the education system. And, as Lord of the Flies suggests, the essence of civilization is literature. After or along with the basic skills, reading, writing, and arithmetic, our schools need to teach the classics. This is the furniture of the mind.

And a sure sign of the decline of our civilization is that the canon is not taught any more, often  suppressed.

Here is my own essential reading list for saving civilization. Nothing just for entertainment, nothing that is just excellent writing, nothing extra, nothing unnecessarily verbose. These are the books that convey the great ideas, that form a healthy world view and summarize the civilizational discourse. Listed roughly by appropriate age, young to old.

Fables (Aesop)

Cinderella (Perrault)

Snow White (Grimm)

Sleeping Beauty (Perrault)

Rapunzel (Grimm)

The Princess and the Pea (Andersen)

The Emperor’s New Clothes (Andersen)

The Ugly Duckling (Andersen)

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll)

Through the Looking Glass (Carroll)

The Odyssey (Homer; in modern translation)

Genesis

Exodus

The Gospel according to Matthew

The Gospel according to Luke

The Nicene Creed

Anne of Green Gables (for Canadian students); Little House on the Prairie (for the USA)

“In the Country of the Blind” (H.G. Wells)

The Declaration of Independence

Animal Farm (Orwell)

Metamorphosis (Kafka)

Lord of the Flies (Golding)

1984 (Orwell)

Heart of Darkness (Conrad)

MacBeth (Shakespeare)

King Lear (Shakespeare)

The Tempest (Shakespeare)

Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)

Meditations (Descartes)

Plato’s Cave

At least, this is the advice of an old guy who has read a lot. Consider this list if you are homeschooling.