Books
9 topics, 30 books
Age range
Category
Ulysses
Ages 0–4 · Ages 3–7 · Ages 6–10
James Joyce’s Ulysses is routinely named the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and almost nobody reads it before college, if ever. Its dare is the whole point: Joyce took…
Theseus & Romulus
Ages 0–4 · Ages 3–7 · Ages 6–10 · Ages 10–14
Two young men, born centuries and a sea apart, each took a crowd of quarreling strangers and turned them into a city: one built Athens, one built Rome, and both have outlived…
Alexander & Caesar
Ages 0–4 · Ages 3–7 · Ages 6–10 · Ages 10–14
Two of the most successful conquerors who ever lived were driven by the same thing: a hunger to be the greatest, with no point at which either one ever felt he had enough. That…
Marcus Aurelius
Ages 0–4 · Ages 3–7 · Ages 6–10
The most powerful man in the world kept a private notebook about how to be a better person, and he never meant a single word of it to be read. Two thousand years later, Marcus…
Alfred the Great
Ages 0–4 · Ages 3–7 · Ages 6–10 · Ages 9–12
A king who hides in a swamp, burns a stranger’s bread, then rallies a comeback that saves an entire country, and his real secret weapon turns out to be books. Alfred’s story has…
Machiavelli
Ages 0–4 · Ages 3–7 · Ages 6–10
For five hundred years “Machiavellian” has meant sneaky and untrustworthy, but the man behind the word was neither. Niccolò Machiavelli spent fourteen years watching popes, dukes,…
Stoicism
Ages 0–4 · Ages 3–7 · Ages 6–10
A toppled block tower on a Tuesday morning is the exact problem Marcus Aurelius was working out in his journal: what do you do when something you cannot control wrecks your day?…
Don Quixote
Ages 0–4 · Ages 3–7 · Ages 6–10
The most famous novel in the world, and most people don’t read it until college, if they read it at all. An old man reads too many adventure books, straps on rusty armor, and…
Beowulf
Ages 0–4 · Ages 3–7 · Ages 6–10
The oldest story in English literature nearly burned in a library fire in 1731, and survived by inches. It is the root of every hero-meets-monster story that came after, the poem…