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Book Club, Week 5
Hey all, hope your reading is going well! This week was a major struggle. I’m about a day behind inasmuch as I usually write the week’s article on Tuesday, and release it on Wednesday. I’m releasing today, Wednesday, but I’m also writing today lol.
Book V Review
The Iliad, Book V was not enjoyable for me. I fell behind, and so had to majorly play catch up and so missed details that I would have gotten if I’d paid a bit more attention. Nevertheless, we must continue.
I think one reason I did not enjoy this book so much was that, even though the fighting scene was exciting and all that, it was kind of meaningless a lot of the time because the characters that Iliad focuses on were only partially present. Book V goes into a lot of encounters between enemies but they’re folks that I don’t really care about because I don’t know anything about them. Of course, I’m more willing to perceive my dislike of this chapter as being a fault within myself, not one within the 3k year old book lol.
As far as reading goes, I found this one more difficult precisely because I found myself missing details and moments and that in turn discouraged me in reading. This happens to everyone, so I hope you can relate. The way I beat that discouragement and procrastination from reading (because it felt like this chapter just dragged on) was by reading the book aloud. Genuinely, it becomes more exciting for me when I read it out loud, and I think that’s going to be my default, going forward. I have weeks where my internal voice is loud and weeks where it’s pretty quiet. During those times when I zone out or don’t really feel gripped by the book, reading aloud is the best option for me, I think. Can any of you relate? Perhaps these are all issues of an amateur reader. That I certainly am.
So this week I don’t really have a summary, since I didn’t take any notes. But basically it was the big battle between the Achaians and the Trojans, and the gods and goddesses were pitching in on each side. One interesting thing was that Diomedes was granted god-like powers by Athene during the battle and he kind of superhero’d his way through the army, even wounding gods.
Ok, for this week let’s do Books VI-VII. They together give us roughly 29 pages, which is about what we’ve been doing up to now, and this week, reading aloud being my default (which makes sense for epic poetry), I hope to do a better job of both grasping the plot and taking notes.
My final thought is that I’m grateful for the internet. I’ve been constantly looking up characters and summaries and whatnot in order to help me grasp the story. If you have been on the fence about that sort of thing, don’t worry about doing it!! We all need help sometimes and that has certainly helped me.
What are your thoughts on the book so far? Have you enjoyed reading it? Who might be one of your favorite characters, and what is your opinion on issues I’ve brought up, such as the drastic focus on characters that seem insignificant to the plot? I’d love to hear your feedback!
Here’s the updated reading list. Remember that new additions will be in bold. The Founding of Christendom, By Warren Carroll
Homer (c. 9th century BC)
Iliad
Odyssey
Aeschylus (c. 525-456 BC)
Tragedies
Sophocles (c. 495-406 BC)
Tragedies
Herodotus (c. 484-425 BC)
Histories
Euripides (c. 485-406 BC)
Tragedies
Thucydides (c. 460-400 BC)
History of the Peloponnesian War
Aristophanes (c. 448-380 BC)
Comedies (The Clouds, The Birds, The Frogs suggested)
Plato (c. 427-347)
Dialoges (The Republic, Symposium, Sophist, Phaedo suggested)
Aristotle (384-322)
Works (Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics, The Nichomachean Ethics, Organon suggested)
Epicurus (c. 341-270)
Letter to Herodotus
Letter to Menoeceus
Cicero (106-43 BC)
Works (Orations, On Friendship, On Old Age suggested)
Lucretius (c. 95-55 BC)
On The Nature Of Things
Virgil (70-19 BC)
Aeneid
Vitruvius (c. 80-70 — c. after 15 B.C.)
Ten Books on Architecture
Horace (65-8 BC)
Odes and Epods
The Art of Poetry; (Or Epistles)
Livy (59 BC-AD 17)
History of Rome
Plutarch (c. 45-120)
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Moralia
Tacitus (c. 55-117)
Annals
Epictetus (c. 60-120)
Discourses
Justin Martyr (100-165)
Works (Likely to use “Writings of Justin Martyr” from Veritatis Splendor Publications)
Lucian (c.120-c.190)
The True History
Marcus Aurelius (121-180)
Meditations
Mike Aquilina (Born 1952)
The Fathers of the Church, 3rd Edition: An Introduction to the First Christian Teachers
Plotinus (205-270)
The Enneads
St. Ambrose (c. 339-397)
The Complete Works of St. Ambrose
St. Augustine (354-430)
Confessions
City of God
St. Benedict (c. 480–547)
The Rule of St. Benedict
Beowulf
St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109)
Works
The Song of Roland (c. 12th Century)
The Nibelungenlied (13th Century)
Steve Weidenkopf (born 19974)
The Glory of the Crusades
St. Thomas Aquinas (and Peter Kreeft) (c. 1225-1274)
A Summa of The Summa
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
The Divine Comedy
Francis Petrarch (1304-1374)
Sonnets
Boccaccio (1313-1375)
The Decameron
Chaucer (1340-1400)
Canterbury Tales
Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471)
The Imitation of Christ
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
Notebooks
Machiavelli (1469-1527)
The Prince
Erasmus (c. 1469-1536)
Christian Humanism
Henry VIII and the Reformation
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
Sir Thomas More (c. 1478-1535)
Utopia
Martin Luther (1483-1546)
Three Treatises
St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556)
The Spiritual Exercises (Exercitia spiritualia)
François Rabelais (c. 1495-1546)
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (1507-1573)
Canon of the Five Orders Of Architecture
Andrea Palladio (1508-1580)
The Four Books On Architecture
John Calvin (1509-1564)
Institutes of the Christian Religion
St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)
The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
Essays
St. John of the Cross (1542-1591)
Dark Night of the Soul
Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
Don Quixote
Vincenzo Scamozzi
The Mirror of Architecture
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599)
The Faerie Queene
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Essays
Advancement of learning
Novum Organum
New Atlantis
William Shakespeare (1564-1626)
Works (esp Midsummer night’s dream & Hamlet)
St. Francis De Sales (1567-1622)
An Introduction to the Devout Life
The Catholic Controversy: A Defense of the Faith by St. Francis De Sales
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
The Leviathan
Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
Meditations on First Philosophy
Discourse on Method
John Milton (1608-1674)
Works (Esp. Paradise Lost)
Moliere (1622-1673)
Comedies (The Miser, The School for Wives, The Misanthrope, The Doctor in Spite of Himself, Tartuffe suggested)
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
The Provincial Letters
Pensees
Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677)
Ethics
John Locke (1632-1704)
Letter Concerning Toleration
Two Treatises of Government
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Jean Baptiste Racine (1639-1699)
Andromache
Phaedra
Antoine Desgodetz (1653-1728)
The Ancient Buildings of Rome
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)
Robinson Crusoe
Johnathan Swift (1667-1745)
Gulliver’s Travels
St. Louis de Montfort (1673-1716)
True Devotion to Mary
George Berkeley (1685-1753)
Principles of Human Knowledge
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)
Spirit of laws
Voltaire (1694-1778)
Candide
Philosophical Dictionary
Henry Fielding (1707-1784)
Tom Jones
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
The Vanity of Human Wishes
David Hume (1711-1776)
An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
On the Origin of Inequality
The Social Contract
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)
Tristram Shandy
James Stuart (1713-1788), Nicholas Revett (1720-1804)
The Antiquities of Athens
Adam Smith (1723-1790)
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Critique of Pure Reason
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals
Critique of Practical Reason
Science of Right
Critique of Judgement
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Reflections on the revolution in France
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
John Jay (1745-1829), James Madison (1751-1836), and Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804)
Federalist Papers
Articles of Confederation
The Constitution of the United States
The Declaration of Independence
Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832)
Faust
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1850)
Lectures on the philosophy of History
Philosophy of Right
Asher Benjamin (1773-1845)
The Architect, or Practical House Carpenter
Jane Austen (1775-1817)
Pride and Prejudice
Emma
Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
On War
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1831)
Don Juan
St. John Vianney (1786–1859)
Sermons of the Curé of Ars
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Studies in Pessimism
Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
Pere Goriot
John Henry Newman (1801-1890)
Apologia
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)
Three Musketeers
Count of Monte Cristo
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Representative Men
Esssays
Journal
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
The Scarlett Letter
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
Democracy in America
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
On Liberty
Representative Government
Utilitarianism
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
The Origin of the Species
The Descent of Man
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Works
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Fear and Trembling
Either/Or
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Civil Disobedience
Walden
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Capital
Communist Manifesto
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Moby Dick
Billy Budd
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
Crime and Punishment
The Brother’s Karamazov
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
Three Stories
Lew Wallace (1827-1905)
Ben Hur
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
A Doll’s House
The Wild Duck
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
War and Peace
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Tom Sawyer
The Mysterious Stranger
William James (1842-1910)
The Principles of Psychology
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Beyond Good and Evil
The Genealogy of Morals
The Will to Power
Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916)
Quo Vadis
Brian Stoker (1847-1912)
Dracula
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Plays (Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, Saint Joan)
Loius Sullivan (1856-1924)
Louis Sullivan’s Idea
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
The Ego and the Id (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud)
Pope Pius XI (1857-1939)
Mit brennender Sorge
Henri Bergson (1859-1941)
Time and Free Will
Matter and Memory
Creative Evolution
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
John Dewey (1859-1952)
How We Think
Democracy and Education
Experience and Nature
Logic, The Theory of Inquiry
George Santayana (1863-1952)
The Life of Reason
Skepticism and Animal Faith
Nikolai Lenin (1870-1970)
The State and Revolution
Bertrand Russel (1872-1970)
The Problems of Philosophy
The Analysis of Mind
An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth
St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897)
The Story of a Soul (Tan Classics edition)
Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
The Magic Mountain
Joseph and His Brothers
James Joyce (1882-1941)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses
Jacques Maritain (1882-1973)
Art and Scholasticism
True Humanism
Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
The Trial
The Castle
Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975)
A Study of History
Civilization on Trial
Edward Bernays (1891-1995)
Propaganda
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973)
The Hobbit
The Lord of the Rings
The Silmarillion
Leaf by Niggle
On Fairy Stories
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
Mere Christianity
Miracles
A Grief Observed
The Screwtape Letters
The Great Divorce
The Four Loves
The Problem of Pain
The Abolition of Man
Chronicles of Narnia
John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
A Tale of Two Cities
George Orwell (1903-1950)
Animal Farm
1984
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
Nausea
No Exit
Being and Nothingness
St. Faustina (1905-1938)
Diary
William Golding (1911-1993)
Lord of the Flies
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
The Stranger
The Myth of Sisyphus
St. Pope John Paul II (1920-2005)
Works
Harper Lee (1926-2016)
To Kill A Mockingbird
Tom Holland (b. 1968)
Dominion
