When you finish a great novel, is there one idea you were meant to walk away with? And if you miss it, have you missed the book? In this Classical Et Cetera we ask whether every story is built around a single theme, or whether literature is more open than that. We discuss reading a book two ways, letting it have its way with you and then stepping back to understand it. We also look at how a great author guides the reader and how our literature guides help students find meaning.

Explore our Literature Curriculum right here: https://www.memoriapress.com/literature-poetry/

0:00 Introduction

1:10 What We're Reading

5:41 One Central Idea in Literature

21:58 Two Ways to Read

Can anyone have the best of both worlds? In this _Margin Notes_ we take up C.S. Lewis’s _The Great Divorce_ — where a bus carries ghosts from a grey town to the outskirts of heaven, and each is asked to surrender the one thing they love more than God. We discuss whether pride or selfishness lies at the root of every refusal, why heaven must be chosen while hell is only drifted back into, and how freedom and eternity meet.

Get the book right here! https://www.memoriapress.com/curriculum/educational-resources/the-great-divorce/

If you could build a book list for a single century, what would make the cut? In this Classical Et Cetera we land on the 1800s, the century of the novel. We discuss why the form exploded with rising literacy, the printing press, and serialized fiction, then trade lists across English, Russian, French, American, and Norwegian writers plus the Romantic poets. We also share practical ways to get through long, difficult books, from reading a shorter work first to pairing the text with a good audiobook.

Best Books by Era Greece: https://youtu.be/dijEqf0kcAM?si=9kVIpElDUhPlexqW Rome: https://youtu.be/gMcuWkz6XQ4?si=HzXnHEfm6wQBlzhz Middle Ages: https://youtu.be/rDB05FAPP0U?si=YuKH062Kr6uBrRak 1500-1799: https://youtu.be/qN1UoML-QAg?si=tP1kNbuKtBIRKaMG

00:00 Introduction 02:40 What We’re Reading 13:02 Listener question 17:54 Topic: Best Books of 19th Century 24:12 The List Begins 42:45 Tips for Tackling Long Books

English novelists Jane Austen Charles Dickens — A Christmas Carol The Brontës — Jane Eyre George Eliot — Silas Marner, Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda Elizabeth Gaskell Anthony Trollope — the Barchester Towers series, The Eustace Diamonds Thomas Hardy — The Mayor of Casterbridge Robert Louis Stevenson — Treasure Island George MacDonald

Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy — War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, short stories Fyodor Dostoevsky — Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov Boris Pasternak — Doctor Zhivago Anton Chekhov

French novelists Alexandre Dumas — The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers Honoré de Balzac — The Human Comedy Victor Hugo — Les Misérables

American writers Nathaniel Hawthorne Herman Melville — Moby-Dick, Billy Budd Walt Whitman Edgar Allan Poe — The Tell-Tale Heart Henry James

Romantic / British & Irish poets William Blake William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor Coleridge Alfred Tennyson John Keats W.B. Yeats

Norwegian Sigrid Undset — Kristin Lavransdatter Knut Hamsun — Growth of the Soil