Has anyone actually read any books in the Great Books

series? Or the Harvard Classics (51 volumes)? Just curious. I have used the GB set a bit myself.

my book fetish so early in the morning! :hi:

I have to mail a set of GB and was just wondering about them.

not ALL of them, by any means, but quite a few. Although my reading has been mostly external to either collection (different editions, that is to say).

From the "Great Books" list:

Homer - Iliad, Odyssey
Aeschylus - Prometheus Bound
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Electra
Euripides - Medea
Aristophanes - Lysistrata
Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
Virgil - The Aenid
Augustine - The City of God
Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologiae
Dante - The Divine Comedy
Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
Machiavelli - The Prince
Hobbes - Leviathan
Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
Shakespeare - Plays & sonnets
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Spinoza - Ethics
Milton - Paradise Lost, Areopagitica
Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Fielding - Tom Jones
Rousseau - The Social Contract
Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations
Gibbon- History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire
Kant- Critique of Pure Reason
Hamilton, Madison, Jay - The Federalist Papers
Boswell - Life of Samuel Johnson
Hegel - Philosophy of History
Goethe - Faust
Melville - Moby Dick
Darwin - Origin of Species
Marx - Das Kapital
Marx & Engels - Communist Manifesto
Tolstoy - War & Peace
Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Nietzsche - Beyond Good & Evil
Tocqueville - Democracy in America
Twain - Huckleberry Finn
Ibsen - A Doll's House
Veblen - The Theory of the Leisure Class
Shaw - Saint Joan
Mann - Death in Venice
Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka - The Metamorphosis
Eliot - The Waste Land
Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

And of the books cllected as the Harvard Classic, my list would probably be similarly extensive...(perhaps I read too much?)

The Bible (a good portion of it anyway)
The Canturbury Tales
Romeo and Juliet
Julius Caesar
Hamlet
King Lear
Paradise Lost
Pride and Prejudice
Declaration of Independence
The U.S. Constitution
A Christmas Carol
A Tale of Two Cities
Walden
Moby Dick
Crime and Punishment
Anna Karenina
Death of Ivan Ilych
Master and Man
Huckleberry Finn
The Great Gatsby
1984
Animal Farm



There are countless other works on that list that I want to read, many of which I already posess. I recently started Paine's "The Rights of Man", and I have "The Communist Manifesto" in my bag for any down time I might come across.

Can't remember which one, just remember it was 1977. Opened it up at lunch and found $500 in it. Immediatly called my Dad at his office and asked wtf? Apparently he won it gambling(a couple years before) and didn't want to tell my Mom, and forgot he'd hid it there. I found almost $600 more in the books when I got home. He gave me zip for a finders fee.

You could have had an $1100 finder's fee!
:banghead: