Looking for a Summer (Long) Reading List?

It seems that everyone from Oprah to the New York Times to the UST Libraries offers summer reading lists, but you can make book that no one has a reading list like St. Thomas' Great Books Reading Group.

Organized in late 1991 by Dr. Tom Tommet, who taught in the Physics Department from 1979 to 2007, and Father Robert Wellisch, the group has met every month (with a few exceptions) for 20 years. Its reading list is as impressive as it is varied. In the grand tradition of summer reading lists, Bulletin Today presents this Great Books Reading Group list for your summer reading pleasure – or the next several summers!

The reading group will meet for the last time from 7 to 9 p.m. Wednesday, July 13, in Room 154, Murray-Herrick Campus Center. The group will discuss The American Catholic Revolution, by Father Mark S. Massa, S.J.

Great Books Reading List, 1991-2011

1991

November, Emile, Jean Jacques Rousseau

1992

January, Intellectuals, Paul Johnson
February, The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
March, The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
April, "Murder in the Cathedral," T.S. Eliot
May, Worldly Philosophers, Robert Heilbroner
June, "Antigone," Sophocles, and "Antigone," Jean Anouilh
July, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
August, Everything That Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor
September, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
October, “Genesis,” Bible
November, “St. Joan,” George Bernard Shaw
December, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche

1993

January, “Paradise Lost,” John Milton
February, Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
March, Observation and Experiment, Claude Bernard
April, Faust Part 1, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
May, "The Starry Messenger" and "Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina," Galileo
June, “How an Aristocracy May Be Created by Industry,” and “Why Americans Are Often So Restless,” from Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
July, The Canterbury Tales – selections, Geoffrey Chaucer
August, The Immense Journey, Loren Eisley
September, Confessions, St. Augustine
October, “Othello,” Shakespeare
November, Poetics, Aristotle
December, poems – reader’s choice, Robert Frost

1994

February, “Treatise on Happiness,” Thomas Aquinas
March, Howard’s End, E.M. Forster
April, “Book of Job,” Bible
May, Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
June, The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
July, Middlemarch, George Eliot
August, The Beast in the Jungle, Henry James
September, The Wives of Henry the VIII, Antonia Fraser
October, “As You Like It,” Shakespeare
November, “The Inferno,” Dante
December, Ethics, Aristotle

1995

January, “Macbeth,” Shakespeare
February, Poetry and Criticism, Matthew Arnold
March, poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins
April, A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
May, The Idea of the University, Cardinal John Henry Newman
June, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris
July, Moby Dick, Herman Melville
August, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A JourneyThrough Yugoslavia, Rebecca West
September, The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil
October, “King Lear,” Shakespeare
November, Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould
December, The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

1996

January, A Simple Heart, Gustave Flaubert
February, Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
March, “Don Giovanni,” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
April, Hymn of the Universe, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
May, “The Misanthrope,” Moliere
June, “Of Personal Identity,” David Hume
July, "An Enemy of the People," Henrik Ibsen
August, On the Soul (De Anima), Aristotle
September, "Man and Superman," George Bernard Shaw
October, Plagues and People, William H. McNeill
November, Religion in the Age of Science, Ian Barbour
December, Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

1997

January, Utopia, Thomas More
February, The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
March, Works of Love, Søren Kierkegaard
April, Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot
May, The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
June, “The Price,” Arthur Miller
July, Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose
August, Democracy: An American Novel, Henry Adams
September, Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said
October, “Caesar and Cleopatra,” Bernard Shaw
November, “Anthony and Cleopatra” Shakespeare
December, Lives (a selection), Plutarch

1998

January, “Hippolytus,” Euripides, “Phaedra,” Jean Baptiste Racine
February, Physics and Philosophy, Werner Heisenberg
March, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
April, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings, Amy Kelly
May, Brecht on Theatre, John Willet, editor
June, The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton
July, Becket, Jean Anouilh
August, Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
September, Walden or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau
October, meeting canceled
November, Seize the Day, Saul Bellow
December, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

1999

January, "Candide," Voltaire
February, The Prince, Machiavelli
March, "Mother Courage," Bertholt Brecht
April, The Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus
May, Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
June, Oration on the Dignity of Man, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
July, Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
August, The Writing of Fiction, Edith Wharton
September, Dubliners, James Joyce
October, What’s Wrong with the World, G.K. Chesterton
November, “The Skin of Our Teeth,” Thornton Wilder
December, Reluctant Dissenter, James Patrick Shannon

2000

January, All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
February (snowed out), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
March, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Shakespeare
April, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
May, The Man Who Listens to Horses, Monty Roberts
June, The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
July, Catholic Social Teaching and Movements, Marvin L. Krier Mich
August, Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
September, Jesus Through the Centuries, Jaroslav Pelikan
October, “School for Wives,” Moliere
November, The First World War, John Keegan
December, Civil War Short Stories, Ambrose Bierce

2001

January, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
February, Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
March, Galileo’s Daughter, Dava Sobel
April, The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien
May, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, James McPherson
June, "Copenhagen," Michael Frayn
July, Science and Human Values, Jacob Bronowski
August, "Beowulf," Seamus Heaney, translator
September, Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond
October, Behind a Mask, Louisa May Alcott
November, A Critical Study of Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies, Hector Berlioz
December, Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

2002

January, The Roots of Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin
February, “Iliad,” Homer
March, "Book of Hours," Rainer Maria Rilke
April, “Prometheus Bound,” Aeschylus
May, Serendipities, Umberto Eco
June, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier
July, John Adams, David McCullough
August, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, David Sterritt
September, A Catholic University, Monsignor Terrence J. Murphy
October, The 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos
November, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, by himself
December, E=mc2: A Biography of the Equation, David Bodanis

2003

January, The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
February, When Corporations Rule the World, David C. Korten
March, Nobel Prize Women in Science, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
April, The Stranger, Albert Camus
May, The Middle East: A Brief History, Bernard Lewis
June, “The Physicists: A Play,” Friedrich Durrenmatt
July, The Dissent of the Governed, Stephen L. Carter
August, 1984, and the essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell
September, The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri J.M. Nouwen
October, "A Man for All Seasons," Thomas Bolt
November, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
December, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

2004

January, The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis
February, I Have a Dream, Martin Luther King Jr.
March, The Only Woman in the Room, Beate Sirota Gordon
April, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Goethe
May, Authentic Leadership, Bill George
June, Our Cosmic Habitat, Martin Rees
July, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr.
August, Longitude, Dava Sobel
September, Aristotle’s Children, Richard E. Rubenstein
October, Heading South, Looking North, Ariel Dorfman
November, “Richard III,” Shakespeare
December, Provocations, Søren Kierkegaard

2005

January, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, C.G. Jung
February, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman
March, The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong
April, Hard Times, Charles Dickens
May, Reading Lolita in Iran, Azar Nafisi
June, God and the Gun, Martin Dillon
July, The Passion of Artemisia, Susan Vreeland
August, Barefoot Gen, Keiji Nakazawa
September, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
October, Billy Budd, Sailor, Hermann Melville
November, Ethan Fromm, Edith Wharton
December, The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Sota

2006

January, “Rashomon,” Fay and Michael Kanin
February, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, Thomas E. Woods
March, Rothschild’s Fiddle, Anton Chekhov
April, Into Africa, Martin Dugard
May, Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich
June, The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece, Jonathan Harr
July, The Red and the Black, Stendhal
August, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day
September, The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan
October, The Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
November, Collapse, Jared Diamond
December, Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

2007

January, The Promise of Nature, John F. Haught
February, “You Never Can Tell,” George Bernard Shaw
March, What Jesus Meant, Garry Wills
April, The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad
May, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, Alfred Whitehead
June, Sor Juana, Octavio Paz
July, Marriage, a History, Stephanie Coontz
August, The King’s Game, John Nemo
September, The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
October, The World As I See It, Albert Einstein
November, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
December, Night Flying Woman, Ignatia Broker

2008

January, All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
February, My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Lloyd Wright
March, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
April, “What’s the University For?” The Hedgehog Review, Vol. 2, No. 3 (fall 2000)
May, The Tin Drum, Günter Grass
June, Jesus Before Christianity, Albert Nolan, O.P.
July, “Arms and the Man,” George Bernard Shaw
August, Nuclear Weapons: What You Need to Know, Jeremy Bernstein
September, A Room With a View, E.M. Forster
October, Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, Eduardo Galeano
November, The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
December, The Last Days of Socrates, Plato

2009

January, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
February, The Double Helix, James Watson
March, The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
April, Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
May, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
June, Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer, Richard Rhodes
July, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt
August, The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
September, Another Sort of Learning, Father James Schall, S.J.
October, "A Shropshire Lad," A.E. Housman
November, When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity During the Last Days of Rome, Richard Rubenstein
December, Ishmael, Daniel Quinn