Talking Books – John Mark Reynolds, David Allen White, and Hugh Hewitt
At one time I listened to a lot of talk radio. I had convinced myself that I was stretching and exercising my brain muscles. However, I got right with the Lord and was convicted about such desultory listening habits. ;0
Please be sure you note the wink icon above before commenting about my putting on of self-righteous airs. But, seriously I do not listen to much talk radio because for every wholesome morsel I discover there it seems that I have to wade through a ton of garbage, — and that is with the good hosts. With the bad ones it is even worse. Usually, I listen to CDs of lectures that I have recorded from one of the websites found HERE.
However, I really wish that I would have been tuned in to Hugh Hewitt yesterday as he was talking books with David Allen White and John Mark Reynolds. David Allen White is professor of English at the Naval Academy and John Mark Reynolds is a professor of Philosophy at Biola.
Hewitt asked each of them to share a reading list of thirty books which they think everyone should read.
You can find a transcript of their discussion HERE. Their discussion was interesting and I encourage you to check it out.
However, I know that most of you will not read the entire transcript of the program so I have copied below some of the books that they recommended. They did not agree with each other on all the recommendations (as one would expect). But, those in the following list were those recommended without negative response by the other discussants. At some time in the future I may share my thoughts about their lists, and offer some alternative selections, but for now I will let them stand without comment.
- The Bible
- Shakespeare
- The Dialogues of Plato
- Homer’s Iliad
- Dante’s Divine Comedy
- Cervantes’ Don Quixote
- David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
- The Brothers Karamazov
, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
- The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- Plato’s Republic
- The Odyssey, by Homer
- Aristotle’s Ethics
- Oedipus Rex
- Augustine’s Confessions
- The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
- Second Treatise on Government, John Locke
- Virgil’s Aeneid
- Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address
- Child’s History of England, by Charles Dickens
- Birth of the Modern, by Paul Johnson
- Declaration of Independence
- Constitution of the United States
- The Federalist Papers
- Democracy in America
- Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
- On the Genealogy of Morals, by Friedrich Nietzsche
- The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis
- Oresteia, by Aeschylus
- Summa Theologica, by Thomas Aquinas
- Pensees
, by Pascal
- Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
- Immortal Poems of the English Language, edited by Oscar Wilson
- Moby Dick, by Hermann Melville
- Essays, by Montaigne
- Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke
- Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
- Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser
- The Song of Roland
- Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll
- Paradise Lost, by John Milton
- The Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethius
- On Friendship & On Duties, by Cicero
- Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes
- Anna Karenina & War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
- Collected Poems: 1909-1962, by T. S. Eliot
- Witness, by Whittaker Chambers
- The Complete Stories, by Flannery O’Connor
- Lost in the Cosmos, by Walker Percy
A few books about which they openly disagreed were:
- The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx
- On The Origin of Species
- Civilization and Its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud
- The Prince, Machiavelli
- Of A Fire on the Moon, by Norman Mailer
- Institutes of the Christian Religion
, by John Calvin
And, here are a few additional titles that were mentioned by Hewitt:
- Plutarch’s Lives
- History of the English Speaking Peoples, by Winston Churchill
John Mark Reynolds has shared a chronological list of his selections on his blog HERE.
For the St. Andrews College reading list GO HERE.
GO HERE for texts used in the Life and Thought seminars at The College at Southwestern.
GO HERE for the GreatBooks.com reading list.
