The Rooted Reader

Or, The Radical Reader--let's recall that radical also means going to the root of things. Here's a curated list of readings (or listenings--free audio of the great majority of great works is also easily found) for the autodidact who would stand before the world in wonder and eschew ideological pigeonholing:

Gilgamesh

The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer 

Works of Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho

The Dialogues of Plato 

Works of Aristophanes and Aristotle

The Aeneid of Virgil 

The Bible 

Tao Te Ching and poems of Cold Mountain

Plutarch's Lives

Confessions of St Augustine

Beowulf

The Divine Comedy of Dante

Works of Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Francis, Thomas Aquinas, Rumi

The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer

Works of Shakespeare

Montaigne's Essays

Cervantes' Don Quixote

Milton's Paradise Lost

Bach, especially St Matthew Passion

Mozart, especially Don Giovanni

Beethoven, especially Ninth Symphony and late string quartets

Lyrical poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, PB Shelley, Keats

Frankenstein, by MW Shelley

Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Fragments

Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Beyond Good and Evil

Which brings us up more or less to modernity. While reading forward to this point, we might also go about reading and listening but also watching and playing back down toward the depths of time from the present moment:

Mythgard podcasts and courses

Atlantic articles

Music of Kendrick Lamar and Sufjan Stevens

Films of Miyazaki and Tarkovsky

Peterson's podcasts and courses

Haidt, The Righteous Mind

Mazzotta's Open Yale Course on Dante

Essays and fiction of Berry, Robinson, Nafisi, Pullman

McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Wilson, Consilience

Video games from Uchikoshi, Itoi, Miyamoto

Essays and fiction of Morrison, Baldwin, Ellison

Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry

Works of Piaget, Jung, Neumann, Frankl, Buber, Solzhenitsyn

St-Exupery's Wind, Sand, and Stars and The Little Prince

Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Essays and fiction of Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Borges, Tolkien

Proust's In Search of Lost Time

Works of James, Darwin, Marx, Freud

Works of Chekhov and Ibsen

Poetry and speeches of Whitman, Lincoln, Dickinson

Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky

Anna Karenina and War and Peace by Tolstoy

Works of Hume, Burke, Smith, De Tocqueville

Red and Black and On Love by Stendhal

And so on, until we are right back where we started, left in awe, grounded and liberated at once. So that we can say, with the Soothsayer in Antony and Cleopatra:

In nature's infinite book of secrecy
A little I can read.

Not that only books can do this, but they express themselves in the words with which to understand them, whereas other things express themselves, so to speak, in silence. As much as possible, we want to do this reading in the original languages, which entails learning them alongside our own. We want to acknowledge the progress and convergence taking place over time in some fields, like math and medicine, while wrestling, too, with what has been lost--or has become hard to recognize or to speak of, regardless of what language we try to use--like faith in religion or beauty in art.

To participate in the nature of things unmediated by articulate speech is of course possible--where else would our words come from? What else would they refer to? Consider the technological and even the social world (think of games, sports, music, dance). Perhaps these ways are even more profound than can be expressed in words, yet we are certainly enriched by close engagement with written works, via whatever media, as they give us practice  expressing ourselves to one another across time and space. These works guide us, individually and as communities, as nothing else can, in threading the needle through difference and sublimating the potential for violence into creative discourse, whether it be harmony or discord. In that sense, the word is literally, as well as metaphorically, eternal, life-giving. In the connections it draws us into, it is bound up with love. It trains judgment. It flexes forgiveness. The proof of these outrageous claims? We hope to live and breath it.

Inevitably, if you've read (or listened and all the rest) as far as this, you'll have a lifetime of reading opening before you, as we all have. Even if you've only glanced at the list, you may well have a bone to pick with the titles and authors on it and not on it, or perhaps with the idea of a list at all. Let it be a library, if you like. Either way, it's something for us to talk about!

And so, down among the roots or up amidst the branches, the buried lead, the dipping bait: this is by no means supposed to be an isolated endeavor; on the contrary, from these seeds--great works--we intend to do the work of growing seminars for citizens, cultivating teachers with classroom coaching sessions, and sprouting fresh thoughts in the clay of even the most recalcitrant students with personalized tutorials. Online and in person, in the shared pursuit of meaning, learning ensues. And at times, even happiness. Such is our experience, and we are happy to have the chance now to share it as widely as possible.

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Reading Observing Orienting Talking -- A ROOT for every STEM to stem from

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