Commonplace book academic edition. College reading lists, papers and free online courses
Something I really appreciate is when someone recommends me a good book, or tells me about a good free course or resource I can use for my studies. So I come back to give you more college reading lists and some courses that are fabulous and free to access!
For the first part of these college lists recommendations read this post
As I told you last time, my academic goal this year (and the following ones) is to read books from the comparative literature and classical philology degrees.
Yale University has a wonderful list for Classical Philology, Classics and History and Classics and Philosophy. Here you just need to click in each and a complete pdf will show
This section for History is going to be part of my own selection:
• Claudian: In Eutropium 1; Panegyric on the Sixth Consulship of Honorius
• Lucretius: De Rerum Natura 1
• Catullus: 1-51, 64, 76, 101
• Ennius: Annales lines 34-50, 72-91, 175-79, 183-90, 268-86, 391-98 (Skutsch)
• Horace: Sermones 1.1, 4-6, 8-10; Carmina 1 and 3; Epistulae 2.1 (Epistle to Au-
gustus)
• Juvenal: Satires 1-5
• Lucan: Bellum Civile 1 proem, 2
• Martial: Epigrams 1
• Ovid: Fasti 4; Metamorphoses 1
• Propertius: 4.1a, 2-4, 6-9, 11
• Statius: Silvae 1.1, 2.2, 4.1-3, 5.1
• Terence: Adelphoe
• Tibullus: 1.1, 1.7
• Virgil: Eclogues; Aeneid 1, 4, 6, 8, 12
They also have a great list of courses available for free on literature, art, Hemingway, Dante, poetry and more. They all have the complete list of lectures and reading lists for each class! Click here to access the web and complete list
Harvard also offers some wonderful courses, I personally recommend the literature ones. They are all really good and offer recommended reading lists here
I think those on Great masterpieces of Literature and Shakespeare are amazing, and the one on Dante´s Comedy is really good too!
I also found this doc with the reading list for Cambridge English Literature and its Contexts, 1300-1550 here you can download the list
I also want to share a small selection of papers and essays that I have been reading and reviewing this week, focusing on classical literature and that I think you might enjoy.
-On Oscar Wilde (1950) by Mishima https://www.jstor.org/stable/45270261
-The Idea of Satan as the Hero of "Paradise Lost" https://www.jstor.org/stable/986321
-The Ion: Plato's Characterization of Art https://www.jstor.org/stable/428704
-The Sublimely Inaccurate Portrait of the Brontë Sisters https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/09/18/the-three-sisters
-New Perspectives in Euripidean Criticism https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/365897?journalCode=cp
-Don Quixote and the Golden Age or the Meaning of Life as Fiction https://www.metacriticjournal.com/getfile/00000018/DariaCondor_1_1.pdf.
Some people here have written to me asking how I decide which books to read, or how I am studying Latin, or what I recommend for this. The first thing I always say is consistency. It is not always easy, but if you want to study something new, or learn a language like Ancient Greek or Latin, you must study every day. Half an hour or an hour a day makes a big difference. Just to give you an idea, my “daily routine” is something like this when is a study day:
7-8am Read (something related to philology) and this is always with my cats in bed
8-9am breakfast
9-12am Uni classes, lectures, and reads
12-1pm Read (something related to classical literature)
1-2pm lunch
2-3pm Greek or Latin
3-4pm Read (articles or something related to my thesis)
4-5pm Relax with a movie or watch a show, these days am watching The Sultan Soleiman
At night I usually do more Latin or Greek grammar and read until 11pm or 2am depending on how I feel
But, of course this is not always how my days goes, most of the time something happens or my migraines are too hard to read or is a bad day for my health (this is a major problem indeed). Remember that you see here and in social media only what we want to show you, so do not put too much pressure on yourself. When my uni work is less I usually spend the day writing and reading and at night I always try to watch a movie or wathever tv show I´m watching at the moment with my mom
(let me know if a post about my routine and tips for learning Latin or Ancient Greek would be of your interest)
As for how I select readings, this is different for each person, it depends on what you want to study or your goals. In my case, I decided to choose mostly new readings, books that are essential and I hadn't read yet, and reread those that require more study like The Divine Comedy, The Iliad or Faust.
Also, I have already recommended the Institute for Classics education courses and resources to you before, is wonderful and free always!
You can now also read their Substack here where you will find essays, reading recommendations and more, focused on classics and Ancient Greek texts
And in case you want to know, this is the selection I made from Princeton list for this year, choosing the amount recommended by the university itself for each category. I tried to make sure that they are all new readings:
Fiction:
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, Half of a Yellow Sun
Baldwin, James, Go Tell It on the Mountain
Camus, Albert, La Peste
Forster, E. M., A Passage to India
García Marquez, Love in the time of cholera (I changed it because I already read (A thousand years of solitude)
Grossman, Vasily, Life and Fate
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Scarlet Letter
Hugo, Victor, Les Misérables
James, Henry, Portrait of a Lady
Wharton, Edith, Age of Innocence
Woolf, Virginia, Between the Acts
Poetry:
Baudelaire, Charles (especially Les Fleurs du mal)
Catullus
Cavafy, Constantine
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Eliot, T. S
Dario, Rubén (especially Azul)
Hölderlin, Friedrich
Keats, John
Sappho
Shelley, Percy Bisshe
Vuong, Ocean
Epic: (also rereading Iliad, Odyssey and Popol Vuh)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Camões, Luís Vaz de, Os Lusíadas
Drama:
Aristophanes (complete)
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, La Vida es sueño
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust
Shakespeare (complete)
Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest
No fiction:
Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory
Marx, Karl, The Communist Manifesto
Borges, Jorge Luis, Ficciones
Longinus, On Sublimity
Wollstonecraft, Mary, Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Wordsworth, “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads
The most important thing is the dedication we give to this, and as I have said before, choosing quality over trends.
Reminder: if you want to support my writing, studies and my medical expenses you can do it with Buy me a coffee something that I would appreciate a lot!
Absolutely interested in the Latin and Greek learning tips!
(Slides in) Someone said commonplace book. Move over and let me read this.