Great Books of the Western World http://www.feedbooks.com/list/296 <p>This list is based on The Great Books of the Western World, edited by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler.</p> <p>From Wikipedia: <br />It came about as the result of a discussion among American academics and educators, starting in the 1920s and 1930s and begun by Prof. John Erskine of Columbia University, about how to improve the higher education system by returning it to the western liberal arts tradition of broad cross-disciplinary learning. These academics and educators included Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, and Alexander Meiklejohn. The view among them was that the emphasis on narrow specialization in American colleges had harmed the quality of higher education by failing to expose students to the important products of Western civilization and thought.</p> <p>Great Books started out as a list of 100 essential primary source texts considered to constitute the Western Canon. </p> 25 85 Utopia/Dystopia http://www.feedbooks.com/list/3 <p>A list of utopia/dystopia books.</p> <p>Utopia is a fictional island near the coast of the atlantic ocean written about by Sir Thomas More as the fictional character Raphael Hythloday (translated from the Greek as "knowing in trifles) recounts his experiences in his travels to the fictional island with a perfect social, legal, and political system. It may be used pejoratively, to refer to a society that is unrealistic and impossible to realize. It has also been used to describe actual communities founded in attempts to create an ideal society.</p> <p>A dystopia is a fictional society that is the antithesis of utopia. It is usually characterized by an oppressive social control, such as an authoritarian or totalitarian government.</p> <p>Some academic circles distinguish between anti-utopia and dystopia. As in George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a dystopia does not pretend to be good, while an anti-utopia appears to be utopian or was intended to be so, but a fatal flaw or other factor has destroyed or twisted the intended utopian world or concept.</p> <p>Source: Wikipedia</p> 16 36 Literature 101 by Sparknotes http://www.feedbooks.com/list/1318 <p>Books featured in my Sparknotes Literature 101 compilation ISBN 1-4114-0026-7. Since they are available on feedbooks for kindle and other devices, I thought they'd make good book club selections.</p> 0 59