Friday, October 31, 2008

100+ Great Books

The Great Books (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books) began when in 1972 Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s How to Read a Book carefully listed three essentials for a book to rate as a great one: contemporary significance, timeless relevance, and enduring value. Their list includes far more than a hundred books, beginning with antiquity with Homer, continuing through two millennia with many of the books found in Loeb Classical Library of Harvard University Press (www.hup.harvard.edu/loeb/), and ending near the year of publication with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.