Reddit mentions of The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

People of the Book is almost pornography for bibliophiles. This book had me seriously considering going back to school to learn about document preservation.

I went through a period of wanting to read a lot of books about books about a year ago. I think I even have an old submission in r/books on the same subject. Here are a bunch of books I still have on my amazon wishlist that date to around that time. This will be a shotgun blast of suggestions, and some may be only tangentially related, but I figure more is better. If I can think of even more than this, I'll edit later:

The Man who Loved Books Too Much

Books that Changed the World

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

How to Read and Why

The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Classics for Pleasure

An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books

The Library at Night

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Time Was Soft There

I have even more around here somewhere...

Edit: Ok, found a couple more....

Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book-Hunter in the 21st Century

At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries

Candida Hofer

Libraries in the Ancient World

The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read

A Short History of the Printed Word

Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption

Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work

The Book on the Bookshelf

A History of Illuminated Manuscripts

Bookmaking: Editing, Design, Production

Library: An Unquiet History

Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms

A Passion for Books: A Book Lover's Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Lore, and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for, and Appreciating Books

A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

And yet I still can't find the one I'm thinking of. Will get back to you...

Fuck yeah, I found it!

That last is more about the woman who own the store than about books, but it's awash in anecdotes about writers and stories we all know and love. Check it out.

The structure of the list comes from Harold Bloom's book The Western Canon, in which he separates the history of literature into four ages: theological, aristocratic, democratic, and chaotic.

This website helpfully explains Bloom's inspiration:

> Vico was an eighteenth-century scholar who argued that the history of the nations of Europe follows a three-fold pattern of development from barbarism, to heroism, to reason. This hopeful dynamic is tempered in Vico by the notion that it is an ever-recurring pattern whick breaks down into chaos and starts all over again. Bloom, a contemporary literary critic, uses Vico’s idea to divide the history of Western Literature into three phases in his landmark survey The Western Canon.

Oops, sorry about that!

Despite being rather comprehensive, 1001 List is problematic, and I suspect you might not find it as useful as the Time 100. Its selection seems to be based on what would make you a literary conversationalist at a cocktail party; the selection is heavily skewed to recently published works and a lot of the non-English books seem to be sort of token selections.

In addition it has inexplicable Coetzee obsession which I found maddening because I'm not his biggest fan.

Another literary list I'd recommend is the one compiled by Harold Bloom. http://www.amazon.com/Western-Canon-Books-School-Ages/dp/1573225142

Harold Bloom wrote about this 20 years ago and it had brewing a long time before then

Aha, yes, "The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages" does indeed sound opposed to political readings, to say the least, and he's been criticized for being hopelessly old fashioned, which is doubtless what I'm looking for; thanks!

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Canon-Books-School-Ages/dp/1573225142

He rarely talks about his gnosticism if ever doing it in his books.

If you want to just know buzzwords to throw around, spend a bunch of time clicking around on Wikipedia, and watch stuff like Crash Course on YouTube. It's easy to absorb, and you'll learn stuff, even if it's biased, but at least you'll be learning.

If you want to become SMARTER, one of my biggest pieces of advice is to either carry a notebook with you, or find a good note taking app you like on your phone. When someone makes a statement you don't understand, write it down and parse it up.

So for instance, write down "Social Democracy", and write down "The New Deal", and go look them up on simple.wikipedia.com (Put's all of it in simplest language possible), it's a great starting point for learning about any topic, and provides you a jumping board to look more deeply into it.

If you are really curious about starting an education, and you absolutely aren't a reader, some good books to start on are probably:

"Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words" by Randall Munroe

"A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson

"Philosophy 101" by Paul Kleinman, in fact the ____ 101 books are all pretty good "starter" books for people that want an overview of a topic they are unfamiliar with.

"The World's Religions" by Huston Smith

"An Incomplete Education" by Judy Jones and Will Wilson

Those are all good jumping off points, but great books that I think everyone should read... "A History of Western Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell, "Western Canon" by Harold Bloom, "Education For Freedom" by Robert Hutchins, The Norton Anthology of English Literature; The Major Authors, The Bible.

Read anything you find critically, don't just swallow what someone else says, read into it and find out what their sources were, otherwise you'll find yourself quoting from Howard Zinn verbatim and thinking you're clever and original when you're just an asshole.