I’m a sucker for books about books and book lists. On my shelves are titles like Gladys and Mark Hunt’s “Honey for a Child’s Heart: The Imaginative Use of Books in Family Life”; George and Karen Grant’s “Shelf Life”; and James Mustich’s “1,000 Books to Read Before You Die.” Give me a cup of coffee, an hour of time, a comfortable chair, and Nick Hornby’s “Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books,” and you would be hard-pressed to find a happier man within a hundred miles.
Which brings me to John Senior’s “The Thousand Good Books.”
Senior was a writer and teacher whose impact is still felt today. He is especially noted for his work as a professor at the University of Kansas, where he co-founded and taught the Integrated Humanities Program (IHP). Because of complaints that IHP students were “becoming proponents of objective truth,” with some converting to Catholicism, the university shut down the project after a decade.
Yet Senior’s teaching and books led to the founding of colleges like Wyoming Catholic and schools like Gregory the Great Academy in Pennsylvania and the newly-founded St. Andrew’s Academy in Kentucky.
At the end of his book “The Death of Christian Culture,” Senior affixed an Appendix, “The Thousand Good Books.” Shorn of any description except authors and titles, this instructive inventory is divided by categories of age ranging from two to 20. Containing few books of history, theology or philosophy, the list is largely a wonderful collection of Western literature. Some of these are what we call the “Great Books,” like Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” and Hugo’s “Les Miserables,” while others, like Walter De la Mare’s “Songs of Childhood,” Edgar Wallace’s “The Man Who Knew,” and Louisa May Alcott’s “Spinning-Wheel Stories,” long ago disappeared from library bookshelves.
Senior’s choices for this tally of authors and titles – why pick over 30 books by James Fenimore Cooper, or 14 by H. Rider Haggard? – might baffle readers until we consider the title of his list. He chose many of these good books because they were either once popular or simply tell great stories. Moreover, most of Senior’s selections come from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In an invaluable preface to this Appendix, Senior explains more about his choices along with some insightful comments about literature and reading in general. He notes that the “Great Books” of the post-World War II era fizzled out not because of the featured works by authors like Plato and Thomas Aquinas, but because “like good champagne in plastic bottles, they went flat.” To read them with competence, Senior contends, we must first have at our disposal an abundance of “fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes and adventures.” And while the distinction between great and good is fuzzy, Senior helps us out: “Great books call for philosophical reflection; good books are popular, appealing especially to the imagination.” Hence, “The Thousand Good Books.”
Senior tells us upfront that his is only a partial list of such works, revealing right away that mark of any good teacher: honesty. He notes that most of these selections belong to that time “before which cars and 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.” Regarding the books he has chosen, he observes that his compilation is designed for “the amateur—the ordinary person who loves and enjoys what he reads….”
One great pleasure of this list is the adventure in reading it promises. Scores of titles were new to me, as well as some authors, and I suspect the same will be true for others who scout out this catalogue of literature. I’d heard of the British writer Edgar Wallace, for example, but I’ve never read a word of his writing. Ditto for Wilkie Collins, Zane Gray, Alain Le Sage, Richard Blackmore, and more.
Like many of you readers, I have neither the time nor the inclination to attempt too many of Senior’s reading picks, but I do plan on coming back to this list on occasion, selecting a few titles, and seeing what I can dig up at the library or online. I’ll be looking for an escape from today’s headlines – always a healthy motive for a news hound – and for some fun and delight in the printed word.
Take a look at Senior’s list and see what you think.
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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image Credit: Piqsels
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