You can now view my list of 200 Great Authors in both table and image formats. I'll be reading the Great Books by each of these authors over the next 40 years (I'm in year 4 and the 40 years leaves plenty of room for rabbit trails) - books.booksoftitans.com/grea… And here is the full list here (year of author's death): 1 - Enheduana - 2250 BC 2 - The Epic of Gilgamesh - 2100 BC 3 - Writings from Ancient Egypt - 2000 BC 4 - Enuma Elish (Creation Epic) & Atrahasis (Flood Myth) - 1700 BC 5 - The Rig Veda - 1500 BC 6 - Homer - 700 BC 7 - Hesiod - 700 BC 8 - Sappho - 570 BC 9 - Aesop - 564 BC 10 - Lao Tzu - 531 BC 11 - Sun Tzu - 496 BC 12 - Confucius - 479 BC 13 - Aeschylus - 456 BC 14 - Herodotus - 425 BC 15 - Sophocles - 406 BC 16 - Euripides - 406 BC 17 - Thucydides - 400 BC 18 - Aristophanes - 386 BC 19 - Xenophon - 354 BC 20 - Plato - 348 BC 21 - Aristotle - 322 BC 22 - Chuang Tzu - 286 BC 23 - Epicurus - 270 BC 24 - Euclid - 270 BC 25 - Archimedes - 212 BC 26 - The Ramayana - 200 BC 27 - Terence - 159 BC 28 - Lucretius - 55 BC 29 - Cicero - 43 BC 30 - Virgil - 19 BC 31 - Ovid - 17 AD 32 - Livy - 17 AD 33 - Seneca - 65 AD 34 - The Bible - 100 AD 35 - Josephus - 100 AD 36 - Quintilian - 100 AD 37 - Tacitus - 117 AD 38 - Plutarch - 120 AD 39 - Epictetus - 135 AD 40 - Ptolemy - 168 AD 41 - Marcus Aurelius - 180 AD 42 - The Mishnah - 200 AD 43 - The Bhagavad-Gita (in the Mahabharata) - 200 AD 44 - St. Irenaeus of Lyons - 202 AD 45 - Clement of Alexandria - 215 AD 46 - Origen - 253 AD 47 - Plotinus - 270 AD 48 - Eusebius - 339 AD 49 - St. Athanasius of Alexandria - 373 AD 50 - St. Basil the Great - 379 AD 51 - St. Gregory of Nazianzus - 390 AD 52 - Gregory of Nyssa - 395 AD 53 - St. John Chrysostom - 407 AD 54 - St. Jerome - 420 AD 55 - St. Augustine - 430 AD 56 - The Talmud - 500 AD 57 - Boethius - 524 AD 58 - The Koran - 632 AD 59 - Beowulf - 1000 60 - Murasaki Shikibu - 1014 61 - Abolqasem Ferdowsi - 1020 62 - Sei Shōnagon - 1025 63 - The Song of Roland - 1100 64 - Saint Anselm of Canterbury - 1109 65 - Anna Komnene - 1153 66 - Hildegard of Bingen - 1179 67 - The Mabinogion - 1200 68 - The Forest of Thieves and the Magic Garden - 1200 69 - Moses Maimonides - 1204 70 - Magna Carta - 1215 71 - Saint Francis of Assisi - 1226 72 - The Saga of the Volsungs - 1270 73 - The Poetic Edda - 1270 74 - Rumi - 1273 75 - Thomas Aquinas - 1274 76 - Njal's Saga - 1280 77 - The Sundiata - 1300 78 - Dante Alighieri - 1321 79 - The Tale of the Heike - 1330 80 - Giovanni Boccaccio - 1375 81 - Geoffrey Chaucer - 1400 82 - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - 1400 83 - Julian of Norwich - 1416 84 - Margery Kempe - 1438 85 - The Arabian Nights - 1450 86 - Thomas à Kempis - 1471 87 - Niccolò Machiavelli - 1527 88 - Thomas More - 1535 89 - Desiderius Erasmus - 1536 90 - Nicolaus Copernicus - 1543 91 - Martin Luther - 1546 92 - The Book of Common Prayer - 1549 93 - François Rabelais - 1553 94 - John Calvin - 1564 95 - Teresa of Avila - 1582 96 - St. John of the Cross - 1591 97 - Michel de Montaigne - 1592 98 - Edmund Spenser - 1599 99 - The Story of Hong Gildong - 1612 100 - William Shakespeare - 1616 101 - Miguel de Cervantes - 1616 102 - Francis Bacon - 1626 103 - John Donne - 1631 104 - George Herbert - 1633 105 - Galileo Galilei - 1642 106 - Miyamoto Musashi - 1645 107 - René Descartes - 1650 108 - Blaise Pascal - 1662 109 - Molière - 1673 110 - John Milton - 1674 111 - Baruch Spinoza - 1677 112 - Thomas Hobbes - 1679 113 - John Bunyan - 1688 114 - Matsuo Bashō - 1694 115 - Jean Racine - 1699 116 - John Locke - 1704 117 - Isaac Newton - 1727 118 - Daniel Defoe - 1731 119 - Alexander Pope - 1744 120 - Jonathan Swift - 1745 121 - Charles-Louis Montesquieu - 1755 122 - David Hume - 1776 123 - Jean-Jacques Rousseau - 1778 124 - Voltaire - 1778 125 - Founding Fathers - 1787 126 - Adam Smith - 1790 127 - Edward Gibbon - 1794 128 - James Boswell - 1795 129 - Olaudah Equiano - 1797 130 - Immanuel Kant - 1804 131 - Jane Austen - 1817 132 - John Keats - 1821 133 - William Blake - 1827 134 - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - 1831 135 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 1832 136 - Sir Walter Scott - 1832 137 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1834 138 - Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison - 1836 139 - Alexander Pushkin - 1837 140 - Emily Brontë - 1848 141 - Edgar Allan Poe - 1849 142 - William Wordsworth - 1850 143 - Mary Shelley - 1851 144 - Søren Kierkegaard - 1855 145 - Charlotte Brontë - 1855 146 - Alexis de Tocqueville - 1859 147 - Arthur Schopenhauer - 1860 148 - Nathaniel Hawthorne - 1864 149 - Alexandre Dumas - 1870 150 - Charles Dickens - 1870 151 - John Stuart Mill - 1873 152 - George Eliot - 1880 153 - Gustave Flaubert - 1880 154 - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 1881 155 - Charles Darwin - 1882 156 - Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1882 157 - Karl Marx - 1883 158 - Victor Hugo - 1885 159 - Emily Dickinson - 1886 160 - Herman Melville - 1891 161 - Walt Whitman - 1892 162 - Alfred Tennyson - 1892 163 - Frederick Douglass - 1895 164 - Harriet Beecher Stowe - 1896 165 - Friedrich Nietzsche - 1900 166 - Anton Chekhov - 1904 167 - George MacDonald - 1905 168 - Mark Twain - 1910 169 - Leo Tolstoy - 1910 170 - William James - 1910 171 - Henry James - 1916 172 - Marcel Proust - 1922 173 - Joseph Conrad - 1924 174 - Franz Kafka - 1924 175 - Thomas Hardy - 1928 176 - G.K. Chesterton - 1936 177 - Edith Wharton - 1937 178 - Sigmund Freud - 1939 179 - William Butler Yeats - 1939 180 - Mikhail Bulgakov - 1940 181 - James Joyce - 1941 182 - Virginia Woolf - 1941 183 - Dietrich Bonhoeffer - 1945 184 - Sigrid Undset - 1949 185 - George Orwell - 1950 186 - Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1951 187 - Albert Einstein - 1955 188 - Thomas Mann - 1955 189 - Dorothy Sayers - 1957 190 - Zora Neale Hurston - 1960 191 - Ernest Hemingway - 1961 192 - William Faulkner - 1962 193 - W.E.B. Du Bois - 1963 194 - C.S. Lewis - 1963 195 - Flannery O'Connor - 1964 196 - T.S. Eliot - 1965 197 - John Steinbeck - 1968 198 - J.R.R. Tolkien - 1973 199 - Daphne du Maurier - 1989 200 - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - 2008

Today’s authors at Landmark Booksellers.

Where to start with Greek Mythology - should you dive right in or do some prep work first? This is the topic of today's podcast episode. Watch it here - booksoftitans.com/p/where-to…

Big if true…

Thursday morning reading: Jason and the Argonauts. This is the November book for the Short Great Books reading group I lead in Franklin, TN. I’ve selected this verse translation by @Poochigian, of whom I’ve read his translations of Sappho and Aristophanes and really like them.

It’s not just what I write in my books that turns them into journals. It’s also what I put into those books. I try to add keepsakes and bookmarks between the pages. I like the idea of being surprised by these things when my future self takes books off my shelf. booksoftitans.com/p/books-as…

I’m using a commentary for my second read-through of Plato’s Meno. I’m finding it very useful, not just for this dialogue but for Socratic dialogues in general. The Meno dialogue asks the question - can human excellence be taught? If not, can it be acquired through practice? Or are people just born with it?

Lieutenant Dan in Franklin, TN this Friday! We have an event with Gary Sinise this Friday, October 23rd. He will be interviewed by thriller writer Jack Carr (@JackCarrUSA). Full details here - landmarkbooksellers.com/even…

Library goals

Saturday morning reading: digging into Plato’s Meno which asks if virtue can be taught.

Who best can teach virtue, the philosopher or the sophist? That's the question posed in Plato's Euthydemus dialogue and is what I discuss in episode 302 of the podcast. Watch it here - booksoftitans.com/p/euthydem…

Thursday morning reading: Meno by Plato. I made it through half of the dialogue this morning. I’m really enjoying it. It asks a simple question - can virtue be taught? The answer of course is not so simple. First, virtue must be defined.

I’ve always thought of philosophy as a pursuit of ideas, but the word itself introduces love into the equation. What does it mean to love wisdom? That’s the topic I explore in today’s article - booksoftitans.com/p/to-love-…

Robin Waterfield translates sophrosyne as self-responsibility in Euthydemus. It’s usually translated as self-control, prudence, or moderation and it’s one of the cardinal virtues. I like the self-responsibility translation. The Charmides dialogue is centered around sophrosyne.

Sunday morning reading: a second reading of the Euthydemus dialogue, this time using the one translated by Robin Waterfield. The following dialogues are found in this Early Socratic Dialogues book by Penguin Classics: Ion, Laches, Lysis, Charmides, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, and Euthydemus. This Euthydemus dialogue is a comparison of approaches to philosophy, either through dialectic to seek truth or the way of the sophist to win the argument irrespective of its veracity.

Voltaire was responding to Leibniz's optimism in his satire called Candide. Here's a minute clip from episode 301 that released this morning. booksoftitans.com/p/candide-…

Watch episode #301. I cover Candide by Voltaire, a lovely satire weaving together the Inquisition, Eldorado, and chivalric tales. I talk about the 1755 earthquake that led to this work, share some of the storyline, and close out with The One Thing - booksoftitans.com/p/candide-…

I got a corner desk where I record podcasts. It’s also become a reading area for me in the mornings. I like my reading chair, but I find it helpful to read at a desk for texts where there is a lot of engagement in terms of writing in the book. I finished Plato’s Euthydemus dialogue this morning amidst green lamps and black coffee.