So, readers and friends, this is what I look and sound like these days:
This is an interview by my friend John Hancock, who has substack and video series called “The Torch.” John’s a longstanding member of the Provo Great Books Club I lead. Our group meets once a week for a two-hour discussion of a shorter work or a section of longer one considered to belong to the Great Books canon. The latest have been centered on the Prometheus myth: we did Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony, this last week discussed Prometheus Bound (probably by Aeschylus), and coming up we’ll read Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. We spent the summer with two non-thematic units, one on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and another on Homer’s Odyssey.
The format is an informal conversation, a seminar, modelled after the approach of the two St. John’s Colleges. The chief facilitator asks an opening question, and then we take it from there in any direction our members want, with everything being on the table. Our members are mostly from the Utah county area of Utah, and that’s the area we recruit new members from, but we do have a few exceptions who join us via Zoom.
If you want to ask questions about how to get such a group going, ask away in the comments. I suspect it’s easier than you think.
The video addresses the criteria for determining what counts as a Great Book, and you could look at one of the lists provided by St. John’s College. And if you want to see what we’ve read over the years, see below.1
PROVO GREAT BOOKS CLUB: WHAT WE’VE READ TOGETHER, 2017-2023
2017
Virgil, Aeneid --from Livy, Histories, books I-V; Shakespeare, Coriolanus; Julius Caesar; Cicero, De Republica; --from Aristotle’s Politics, book III, selections from books I and IV; Dante, Inferno; --from Plutarch, Lives, “Pericles,” “Cato the Younger,” “Alcibiades,” “Tiberius Gracchus,” “Gaius Gracchus,” “Alexander,” “Julius Caesar,” “Dion,” and “Brutus”; Plato, Symposium; Dante, La Vita Nuova, Purgatorio
2018
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; Milton, Paradise Lost; Ralph Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station”; Homer, Iliad; Bible, Job; Aeschylus, Oresteia; Euripides, Electra; Aristophanes, Clouds, Frogs; Plato, Republic; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; --from Tocqueville, Democracy in America, various selections, around 30%; Marx, The German Ideology; Solzhenitsyn, March 1917
2019
Augustine, Confessions; Ellison, Invisible Man; --from Aristotle’s Politics, book III, selections from books I and IV; Rousseau, Second Discourse; Solzhenitsyn, GULAG Archipelago (Erickson abridgement); Delsol, Unlearned Lessons of the 20th Century; Austen, Mansfield Park, Lady Susan; Aristotle, Metaphysics, around 30%; Hume, Enquiry into Human Understanding; Kant, Prologomena to Any Future Metaphysics; Hegel, Lectures on World History; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
2020
Shakespeare, Henry V; Rape of Lucretia; Coriolanus; Julius Caesar; Antony and Cleopatra; Much Ado about Nothing; Richard II; Henry IV, pt. 1; Henry IV pt. 2; Cymbeline; --special walk n’ talk sessions: Cantos I-XI of Dante’s Inferno cc. w/ Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid; Dante, Purgatorio; T.S. Eliot, selected poems, including “Wasteland” and “Four Quartets”; Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground and Demons; Aristotle, On the Soul (De Anima)
2021
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov; Aquinas, On Human Nature (selections from the Summa Theologica, and commentary on De Anima); Dante, Paradiso; Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Electra; Aeschylus, Oresteia; Euripides, Alcestis, Electra, Medea, Bacchae; Shakespeare, Richard III; Austen, Persuasion; Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Tolkien, Tales from the Perilous Realm
2022
“Pearl Poet,” Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl; Plato, Alcibiades I, Gorgias, Symposium, Apology; Xenophon, Apology, Memorabilia; Aristophanes, Frogs, Clouds; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy; Shakespeare, King Lear, The Tempest, Twelfth Night; George Eliot, Middlemarch; Moliére, School for Wives, Lover’s Quarrels, Don Juan, Tartuffe, The Misanthrope; Pascal, Pensées; Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
2023
Conrad, Lord Jim, and Heart of Darkness; Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde; Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens; Homer, The Odyssey; Dostoevsky, The Idiot; Hesiod, Works and Days, Theogony; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
Fascinating! Although I've always been a devourer of great books, about the same time period as your Provo Great Books Club I set myself the formal task of reading 50 books per year, covering psychology, archaeology, history, literature, poetry and current events. An important part of that has been remediating my abysmal public school education (it was already getting bad in the '70s when I was in high school) by reading the Greek and Roman classics, including Aristophanes The Birds, Plutarch's Lives, Xenophon's Conversations of Socrates, Ovid's Metamorphoses and more. The first thing you realize is that the intellectual achievements of that period in some ways have never been surpassed. Certainly puts our era in context as one of incredibly low intellectual tenor. Certainly fits with all civilizations in terminal decline, as Toynbee might have said.
This is marvelous!