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THE
"GOOD BOOKS" LITERATURE PROGRAM
by Elisabeth Carmack, Ph.D.
 John
Senior (1923-99), the late classicist professor at the
University of Kansas (KU), was a student of the poet,
author, teacher, and great books advocate Mark Van Doren
at Columbia University in the 1940's. Van Doren was
co-moderator of many great books groups at Columbia
in the 1920's with Dr. Adler, and both were students
of John Erskine. Senior's great books credentials go
straight back to the beginning of the movement at Columbia.
Dr. Adler was invited to lecture at KU in the
1970's by Senior.
Senior
was a very personable, renowned and really beloved
figure at KU (along with fellow professors Dennis
Quinn and the late Frank Nelick), and all around eastern
Kansas, as well as beyond. Unpretentious, he humbly
preferred not to be called professor, so we will honor
that wish here. My family had the honor of his
presence for visits and dinner on occasion in the
1980's. Unusually well-read and a sagacious
judge of literature, he compiled a list of books,
broken into four age groups (2-7, 7-12, 12-16, 16-20)
he called the "good books," which he said "everyone
should have read." His son, Andrew, said that his
father regarded the compilation of the list as one
of the most important works of his life. In
his book, The Death of Christian Culture, Senior
explained his terminology and selections:
"The
Great Books movement of the last generation has not
failed as much as fizzled, not because of any defect
in the books - 'the best that has been thought and
said,' in Matthew Arnold's phrase - but like good
champagne in plastic bottles, they went flat.
To
change the figure, the seeds are good but the cultural
soil has been depleted; the seminal ideas of Plato,
Aristotle, St. Augustine and St. Thomas thrive only
in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy
tales, stories, rhymes, and adventures: the thousand
books of Grimm, Anderson, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott,
Dumas and the rest.
Taking
all that was best of the Greco-Roman world into itself,
Western tradition has given us the thousand good books
as a preparation for the great ones - and for all
studies in the arts and sciences. Without them
all studies are inhumane. The brutal athlete
and the foppish aesthete suffer vices opposed to the
virtue of Newman's gentleman. Anyone working at college,
whether in the pure arts and sciences or the practical
ones, will discover he has made a quantum leap when
he gets even a small amount of cultural ground under
him: he will grow up like an undernourished plant
suddenly fertilized and watered.
Of
course, the distinction between great and good is
not absolute. Great implies a certain magnitude; one
might say War and Peace and Les Miserables
are great because of their length, or The Critique
of
Pure
Reason because of its difficulty. Great books
call for philosophical reflection; good books
are popular, appealing especially to the imagination.
But obviously some authors are both great and good,
and their works may be read more than once from the
different points of view - this is true of Shakespeare
and Cervantes, for example.
It
is commonly agreed also that both great and good can
be judged only from a distance. Contemporary works
can be appreciated and enjoyed but not very properly
judged; and just as a principle must stand outside
what follows from it (as a point to the line), so
a cultural standard must be established from some
time at least as distant as our grandparents'.
For us today the cutoff point is World War I, before
which cars and the electric light had not yet come
to dominate our lives and the experience of nature
had not been distorted by speed and the destruction
of shadows. There is a serious question - with arguments
on both sides, surely - as to whether there can be
any culture at all in a mechanized society. Whichever
side one takes in that dispute, it is certainly true
that we cannot understand the point at issue without
an imaginative grasp of the world we have lost.
What
follows is not a complete list, but it is a sufficient
worksheet. Everyone will find more than enough that
he hasn't read; and everything on this list is by
common consent part of the ordinary cultual matter
essential for an English-speaking person to grow in.
Remember that the point of view throughout a course
of studies such as this is that of the amateur - the
ordinary person who loves and enjoys what he loves
not of the expert in critical, historical or textual
tecnology.
The
books have been divided (sometimes dubiously because
some bridge two categories) into stages of life corresponding
to the classical ages of man, and in general agreement
with the divisions of modern child psychology.because
sight is the first of the senses and especially powerful
in the early years, it is very important to secure
books illustrated by artists working in the cultural
tradition we are studying, both as an introduction
to art and as part of the imaginative experience of
the book. This is not to disparage contemporary artists,
any more than the tradition itself disparages contemporary
experiment - quite the contrary, one of the fruits
of such a course should be the encouragement of good
writing and drawing. The good work of the past is
a standard, not a straight-jacket. Book illustration
reached its perfection in the nineteenth century in
the work of Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, Walter
Crane, Gustav Dore, George Cruikshank, "Phiz," Gordon
Browne, Beatrix Potter, Sir John Tenniel, Arthur Rackham,
Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth, and many others. The
rule of thumb is to find a nineteenth-century edition
or one of the facsimiles which (though not as sharp
in printing) are currently available at moderate prices.
The incomplete work sheet that follows may serve as
a rough guide.
Literary
experience begins for very young children with someone
reading aloud while they look at the pictures. But
they can begin to read the simplest stories which
they already love at any early age."
We
have researched John Senior's list of Good Books,
to age twelve, to find all that are in print, at reasonable
prices. At present, this totals to 156 books.
We have further divided them into grades, and in each
grade put them in a rough order of difficulty, while
avoiding too much repetition of sets in one year -
merely as a suggestion for parents lacking the time
to do so. The list may be found on page 38 of
this issue. The balance of the list - to age
20 - will soon be posted on the internet (at greatbooksacademy.org).
Those "good books" no longer in-print may often be
found at libraries or used book stores. Whatever the
merits of other such elementary reader lists, John
Senior's is an enchanting and rapturous tour through
an imaginary and romantic world of beauty, truth,
goodness, and love which "everyone should have read."
For
a complete list of the "Good Books", click
here.
For
the J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: Middle-earth
and Narnian addenda to the "Good Books",
click
here.
To
order any or all of the "Good Books", click
here.
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