Read

Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat, toured the United States in 1831 and published his two volumes in 1835 and 1840 to explain what democracy, which he took to be inevitable, would mean. He found equality of conditions shaping everything, praised township government, associations and religion, and warned of individualism, the tyranny of the majority and a soft despotism.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, edited by Sanford Kessler and translated by Stephen D. Grant (Hackett Publishing, 2000). Read over two sessions, Junior Fall at Torrey Honors.

Edmund Burke’s Reflections of 1790, written before the Terror, attacked the French Revolution as an experiment in abstract reason that would end in tyranny. It defends prescription, prejudice, inherited liberty and the partnership between the dead, the living and the unborn, and it is the founding text of modern conservatism.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by Brian R. Clack (Broadview Press, 2021). Read in full, Junior Fall at Torrey Honors.

Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, from the Lyceum address of 1838 to his last public address in 1865, are the most important body of American political writing after the founding. They argue that the Declaration’s equality principle is the nation’s creed, that slavery contradicts it, and that the Union must be preserved, in a prose that reaches its height at Gettysburg and in the Second Inaugural.

Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, edited by Roy Basler (Da Capo Press, 2001). Read in Junior Fall at Torrey Honors: The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions; Fremont, Buchanan, and the Extension of Slavery; The Dred Scott Decision; A House Divided; the Address at Cooper Institute; the First Inaugural Address; the Proclamation of a National Fast Day; the Final Emancipation Proclamation; the Proclamation for Thanksgiving of October 3, 1863; the Address at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg; the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction; the Proclamation of Thanksgiving of October 20, 1864; the Annual Message to Congress; the Second Inaugural Address; and the Last Public Address. Read again in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026, with the Speech on the Dred Scott Decision (1857) and the Fragment on the Constitution and the Union (1861) added.

Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in 1838 and became the most powerful orator and writer of the abolitionist movement. The speeches read here, from ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ to ‘Lessons of the Hour’, hold the country to its own founding principles, argue for the Constitution as an antislavery document, and confront the failure of Reconstruction.

The Portable Frederick Douglass, edited by John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Penguin Books, 2016). Read in Junior Fall at Torrey Honors: What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?; The Dred Scott Decision; The Day of Jubilee Comes; The Mission of the War; Our Martyred President; The Freedman’s Monument to Abraham Lincoln; Lessons of the Hour; To My Old Master; The Inaugural Address; Letter from the Editor, on the burning down of his Rochester house; and The Color Line. Read again in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026: ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ and the Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876).

John Locke’s Second Treatise, published in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution, derives government from a state of nature in which everyone is free and equal and holds natural rights to life, liberty and property. Government rests on consent and exists to protect those rights, and a people may resist a ruler who breaks the trust, the argument the Declaration of Independence would later compress into a paragraph.

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, edited by C. B. Macpherson (Hackett Publishing, 1980). Read in full, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors.

Cicero, the Roman statesman and orator who died in 43 BC, wrote these works in his last years as the Republic collapsed around him. On Duties argues that the honourable and the useful never truly conflict; On Friendship grounds friendship in virtue; and the Dream of Scipio looks down on Rome from the heavens to put earthly glory in its place.

Cicero, On the Good Life, translated by Michael Grant (Penguin Books, 1971). Read in Freshman Spring at Torrey Honors: On Duties; Laelius: On Friendship; and The Dream of Scipio.

Eighty-five essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, published as Publius in 1787 and 1788 to argue for ratifying the Constitution. They explain the extended republic and the control of faction, separation of powers and checks and balances, and the energetic executive, and they remain the authoritative commentary on the American design.

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, edited by Isaac Kramnick (Penguin Books, 1987). Read in Junior Fall at Torrey Honors: numbers 1 to 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14 to 16, 21, 23, 37 to 39, 51, 57, 84 and 85. Read again in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026: numbers 1, 9, 10, 23, 39, 47 to 51 and 85.

The Declaration of 1776, drafted by Jefferson, states the principles: equality, unalienable rights, government by consent and the right of revolution. The Constitution of 1787 and its amendments are the machinery, a federal republic with enumerated powers, separated branches and a Bill of Rights, and the argument over how the two documents relate runs through the whole of American politics.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States (Bantam Classics, 2008). Read in full, Junior Fall at Torrey Honors. Read again, with the Amendments, in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

The charter King John was forced to seal at Runnymede in 1215 bound the crown to the law: no free man to be imprisoned or dispossessed except by lawful judgment, no taxation without counsel. Reissued and reinterpreted for centuries, it became the ancestral text of due process and limited government, and the Petition of Right of 1628 invoked it against Charles I.

Read with the Petition of Right (1628) in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

The first constitution of the United States, drafted in 1777 and in force from 1781, made a ‘firm league of friendship’ among sovereign states under a Congress that could not tax, regulate trade or compel anything. Its failures in the 1780s, catalogued by Madison in ‘Vices of the Political System’, are the case the Constitution was written to answer.

Read with the New Hampshire Constitution of 1776, the Declaration of Rights from the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, Washington’s Circular Letter to the States (1783) and Madison’s ‘Vices of the Political System of the United States’ (1787) in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

The questions on law from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica define law as an ordinance of reason for the common good and distinguish eternal, natural, human and divine law. The treatise founded the natural-law tradition in the West: human law binds only so far as it derives from the natural law, and an unjust law is no law at all.

Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Law: The Complete Text, translated by Alfred J. Freddoso (St. Augustine’s Press, 2009). Read in Junior Spring at Torrey Honors: Questions 90 to 97.

Jennifer Sciubba’s tour of the forces that shape a population — sex, death and migration — and how ageing, youth bulges and movement across borders set the terms of politics in this century.

Malthus’s 1798 argument that population grows geometrically while food grows arithmetically, so misery and vice check every improvement — the essay every later demographic argument is still arguing with.

Bricker and Ibbitson against the population bomb: the real story of this century is a world whose population peaks and then falls, and what an emptying planet means for the countries that shrink first.

Timothy Carney on why raising children in America has become so hard — overparenting, hostile cities, a culture that treats family as a private hobby — and what a family-friendly society would change.

Sarah Harper’s survey of the demographic transition across the world’s regions: where populations are still young, where they are ageing fast, and what each means for work, care and migration.

Peter Zeihan’s argument that the American-guaranteed order that made globalisation possible is ending, and a map of what deglobalisation does to energy, food, manufacturing and finance, region by region.

Goodhart and Pradhan’s case that the labour glut which held down inflation and inequality for thirty years is reversing as societies age and China’s workforce shrinks, and that inflation and interest rates follow.

Jonathan V. Last on America’s falling fertility: why birth rates dropped below replacement, what that does to an economy and a culture built on growth, and why policy has so little purchase on it.

John Winthrop’s lay sermon of 1630, written for the Puritans sailing to Massachusetts, set out the covenant that would bind their colony: a community knit together in love, where rich and poor need each other, watched by the world as ‘a city upon a hill’. It is the founding statement both of American exceptionalism and of communal obligation.

Read with the Mayflower Compact (1620) and the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641) in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

Ronald Reagan’s televised speech for Barry Goldwater in October 1964 made him a national figure: a case against the growth of government and for individual freedom, and against accommodation with communism, framed as a choice between self-government and ‘the ant heap of totalitarianism’. Set beside the Kennedy and Johnson inaugurals it marks the fault line of postwar American politics.

Read with John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural (1961) and Lyndon Johnson’s Inaugural (1965) in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

Robert Putnam’s 1995 essay in the Journal of Democracy, later a book, documented the decline of American civic life since the 1960s: falling membership in clubs, churches, unions and leagues, more people bowling and fewer bowling together. It made ‘social capital’ a household term and revived Tocqueville’s argument that democracy depends on associations.

Read in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

The Supreme Court’s 1857 decision, written by Chief Justice Taney, held that no Black American could be a citizen and that Congress could not bar slavery from the territories, striking down the Missouri Compromise. Justice Curtis’s dissent answered on history and text, and the ruling, meant to settle the slavery question, helped bring on the war.

Read the Opinion of the Court and the dissent, with the Northwest Ordinance (1787), Calhoun’s speech on the abolition petitions (1837), the Wilmot Proviso (1846) and Clay’s Compromise of 1850, in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

John Dickinson’s twelve letters of 1767 and 1768, the most widely read American argument before the Revolution, answered the Townshend Acts by distinguishing Parliament’s power to regulate trade from a power to tax for revenue, which the colonies had never granted. Letter V presses the point that a people taxed without consent are slaves, in the measured voice of a loyal subject.

Read Letter V, with the Edenton Tea Party resolves and the print of the Society of Patriotic Ladies (1774 and 1775), Phillis Wheatley’s poem to Washington and their correspondence (1775), and Abigail and John Adams’s ‘Remember the Ladies’ letters (1776), in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

The essays written against ratification in 1787 and 1788 under names like Brutus, Centinel and the Federal Farmer argued that a republic must be small, that the new government’s powers were unlimited in practice, and that without a bill of rights liberty would be lost. They lost the argument and won the Bill of Rights, and their warnings about consolidation and the judiciary are still cited.

Read Brutus II, Centinel I and Federal Farmer I and IV in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign speech in San Francisco in September 1932 restated the social contract for an industrial age: the frontier was closed, the task was no longer producing wealth but administering it, and government must guarantee an ‘economic declaration of rights’. It is the intellectual charter of the New Deal, and Hoover’s reply and the 1933 Inaugural show what was at stake.

Read with Coolidge’s speech on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration (1926), Hoover’s speech on the consequences of the proposed New Deal (1932) and Roosevelt’s First Inaugural (1933) in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

John Witherspoon, president of Princeton and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration, preached this fast-day sermon in May 1776 to argue that God rules even through human passions and that the colonial cause was just. It is the most influential clerical defence of independence, joining Calvinist providence to the politics of resistance.

Read with the Virginia Declaration of Rights and Jefferson’s Notes on the Debates in Congress (both 1776) in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

Theodore Roosevelt’s speech at Osawatomie, Kansas in 1910 announced the New Nationalism: a strong federal government as steward of the public welfare, regulating corporations, taxing wealth and putting human rights before property rights. It became the platform of the Progressive Party in 1912 and the template for the modern activist presidency.

Read with Charles Merriam’s ‘Recent Tendencies’ (1903), the Progressive Party Platform of 1912, Woodrow Wilson’s ‘What is Progress?’ (1913) and Frank Goodnow’s ‘The American Conception of Liberty’ (1916) in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

James Q. Wilson’s 1985 essay in The Public Interest argued that public policy had run aground by ignoring private virtue: crime, schooling, welfare and work all depend on character, which families and institutions form and which government can only weakly influence. It helped turn conservative social thought from economics back toward culture.

Read in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

Ted McAllister, a Pepperdine political theorist, gave this lecture at the Russell Kirk Center in 2014 on how the stories a people tells about its past make it the people it becomes. He sketches three rival American narratives, the Liberal story of progressive liberation, the Radical story of exploitation behind the ideals, and the Conservative story of Englishmen defending inherited rights, and argues that choosing among them is unavoidable and consequential.

Read as the opening essay of the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

Ilan Wurman’s 2016 essay in National Affairs takes up the conservative critique of the administrative state and asks what a constitutional version would look like. Rather than abolishing the agencies, it proposes restoring the separation of powers within and around them: Congress legislating, courts judging, and a president answerable for execution.

Read in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

George Washington’s public papers as president, from the First Inaugural of 1789 to the Farewell Address of 1796, set the precedents for the office. The Farewell warns against party spirit, sectionalism and permanent foreign alliances and ties republican government to religion and morality; the letter to the Newport synagogue promises a country that gives ‘to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance’.

Read the First and Second Inaugurals, the Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport (1790) and the Farewell Address in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

Margaret Sanger, founder of the American birth-control movement, argued in this 1920 book that voluntary motherhood was the key to women’s freedom and to a better society. It ties contraception to eugenic hopes for ‘the new race’, and with ‘My Way to Peace’ of 1932 it shows how Progressive reform and eugenics travelled together.

Read with ‘My Way to Peace’ (1932) in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s essential writings and speeches, from the Montgomery years to the last night in Memphis. The ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ defends nonviolent direct action and the duty to break unjust laws; the speeches ground civil rights in the Declaration, the prophets and the gospel, and insist on love as a political force.

Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches, edited by James M. Washington (HarperOne, 2003). Read in Junior Fall at Torrey Honors: The American Dream; I Have a Dream; Our God is Marching On; Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution; I See the Promised Land; and Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Thucydides, an Athenian general exiled after a failed command, wrote the history of the war between Athens and Sparta, 431 to 404 BC, as ‘a possession for all time’. Its speeches, Pericles’ funeral oration, the Mytilenian debate and the Melian dialogue, are the first analysis of power, justice, fear and interest between states, and the Sicilian expedition is its tragedy.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, edited by M. I. Finley and translated by Rex Warner (Penguin Classics, 1972). Read in Freshman Fall at Torrey Honors: from Book 1, the Introduction, the Debate at Sparta and Declaration of War, and the Spartan Ultimatum and Pericles’ Reply; from Book 2, Pericles’ Funeral Oration, the Plague, and the Policy of Pericles; from Book 3, the Mytilenian Debate; from Book 5, the Melian Dialogue; from Book 6, the Launching of the Sicilian Expedition, the Story of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the Recall of Alcibiades, and Alcibiades in Sparta; and from Book 7, the Destruction of the Athenian Expedition, sections 84 to 87.

Josef Pieper’s 1948 essay arguing that leisure is not idleness or recovery from work but the receptive, contemplative attitude from which worship, philosophy and culture itself grow — and that a world of total work has forgotten it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the former Unitarian minister who became the voice of American Transcendentalism, wrote these essays and addresses between 1836 and 1844. Nature, the American Scholar, the Divinity School Address, Self-Reliance and the Over-Soul call for an original relation to the universe, trust in the self and a God found within; Experience records the doubts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson (Modern Library, 2000). Read in Junior Spring at Torrey Honors: Nature; The American Scholar; An Address; Self-Reliance; The Over-Soul; and Experience.

Søren Kierkegaard, writing as Johannes de Silentio in 1843, returns again and again to Abraham on Mount Moriah, ready to sacrifice Isaac at God’s command. The book asks whether there is a teleological suspension of the ethical, distinguishes the knight of faith from the tragic hero, and insists that faith is a passion no philosophy can explain.

Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, translated by Alastair Hannay (Penguin Books, 2003). Read in full, Junior Spring at Torrey Honors.

Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of 1785 sets out to find the supreme principle of morality and finds it in the categorical imperative: act only on maxims you could will as universal law, and treat humanity always as an end. Duty, the good will, autonomy and the dignity of rational beings are its themes, in the foundational text of modern ethics.

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, edited by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Read in full, Junior Spring at Torrey Honors.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of 1887, three essays on the origins of morality, traces good and evil to the resentment of the weak against the strong, bad conscience to instincts turned inward, and the ascetic ideal to a will to nothingness. It is his most sustained argument and the source of much of the twentieth century’s suspicion of moral language.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, edited by Walter Kaufmann, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1989). Read in Junior Spring at Torrey Honors: On the Genealogy of Morals, the Preface and the three essays.

Aristotle’s Physics is his account of nature as the realm of things that change: what motion is, the four causes, chance, the infinite, place, void and time. The books read here define nature and causation, treat motion and its continuity, and argue for an eternal unmoved mover as the source of all motion.

Aristotle, Physics, translated by Robin Waterfield (Oxford University Press, 2008). Read in Junior Spring at Torrey Honors: Books 2, 3 and 8.

Francis Bacon’s New Organon of 1620, meant to replace Aristotle’s logic, proposes a new method for the sciences: purge the mind of its idols, gather observations patiently, and rise by induction from particulars to axioms. It is the manifesto of experimental science and of knowledge as power over nature for the relief of man’s estate.

Francis Bacon, Selected Philosophical Works, edited by Rose-Mary Sargent (Hackett Publishing, 1999). Read in Junior Spring at Torrey Honors: The Great Instauration; The New Organon, its Preface, Book One, and Book Two 1 to 20 and 52; and the Preparative.

Charles Darwin’s Origin of 1859 argues, from breeding, geology, geography and embryology, that species are not fixed but descend with modification from common ancestors by natural selection. The chapters read here lay out the theory, answer its difficulties, and end with the grandeur in a view of life that has no need of separate creations.

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Signet Classics, 2003). Read in Junior Spring at Torrey Honors: the Introduction; chapters I to IV, VI and VII; from chapter VIII, Objections to the Theory of Natural Selection as Applied to Instincts, Neuter and Sterile Insects, and the Summary; and chapters IX and XV.

Plato’s Timaeus, a late dialogue, gives a ‘likely story’ of the making of the cosmos by a divine craftsman who shapes matter after eternal forms, and of the world soul, time, the elements and the human body. It was the most read Platonic dialogue for a thousand years and the source of the idea that the universe is ordered by mind.

Plato, Timaeus, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Hackett Publishing, 1997). Read in Junior Spring at Torrey Honors.

David Hume’s Enquiry of 1748 is the readable version of his empiricism: all ideas come from impressions, causation is a habit of expectation rather than a perceived necessity, and reason cannot justify induction. It includes the famous essay against miracles and ends by consigning metaphysics ‘to the flames’.

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Eric Steinberg (Hackett Publishing, 1993). Read over two sessions, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors: the Enquiry only.

René Descartes’ Meditations of 1641 doubt everything that can be doubted and rebuild knowledge from the one certainty that the doubter exists. The six meditations establish the mind as distinct from the body, prove God’s existence and use it to secure the sciences, and the appended Objections and Replies record the fight his contemporaries put up.

René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies, translated and edited by John Cottingham (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Read in full over two sessions, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors, including the Selections from the Objections and Replies.

Blaise Pascal, mathematician and Jansenist, died in 1662 leaving bundles of notes for an unwritten defence of Christianity, published as the Pensées. They diagnose the human condition, greatness and wretchedness, diversion, the misery of a thinking reed, and argue, in the wager and elsewhere, that the heart has reasons that reason does not know.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, translated by Honor Levi and edited by Anthony Levi (Oxford University Press, 2008). Read over two sessions, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors: the Pensées only.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from 161 to 180, kept these private Stoic notes to himself, probably on campaign, and never meant them to be read. They circle the same disciplines: attend to the present, accept what is not in your power, act for the common good, and remember that you will die, all in the voice of a man reminding himself.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, with selected correspondence, translated by Robin Hard (Oxford University Press, 2011). Read in full, Freshman Spring at Torrey Honors.

Plato’s Meno asks whether virtue can be taught and gets nowhere until Socrates shows that nobody present can even say what virtue is. Along the way it poses the paradox of inquiry and answers it with the theory of recollection, demonstrated by leading a slave boy to a geometrical truth he did not know he knew.

Plato, Meno, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Hackett Publishing, 1997). Read in Freshman Fall at Torrey Honors.

Aristotle’s Ethics asks what the good life for a human being is and answers that it is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, over a whole life. It works out the doctrine of the mean, the moral and intellectual virtues, choice and responsibility, friendship and pleasure, and ends by ranking contemplation as the highest happiness.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Terence Irwin (Hackett Publishing, 2019). Read in full over three sessions, Freshman Fall at Torrey Honors: Books I to VII, then Books VIII to X.

Plato’s Republic begins by asking what justice is and answers by building a city in speech, ruled by philosophers, in which each part does its own work. It contains the divided line, the cave, the theory of forms, the critique of poetry and of democracy, and the myth of Er, and it is the most influential book in Western philosophy.

Plato, Republic, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Hackett Publishing, 1997). Read in full over three sessions, Freshman Fall at Torrey Honors: Books I to IV, then V to VII, then VIII to X.

Plato’s Symposium stages a drinking party where Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates and others give speeches in praise of Love. Socrates reports the priestess Diotima’s teaching that eros climbs from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls to Beauty itself, and then Alcibiades bursts in drunk to describe what it is like to love Socrates.

Plato, Symposium, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Hackett Publishing, 1997). Read over two sessions, Freshman Fall at Torrey Honors.

The Christian scriptures in the English Standard Version, read book by book across the whole Torrey curriculum rather than as one text. The Law and the Prophets, the wisdom books, the Gospels, Acts and the letters each take their turn in the conversation, so the Bible is less a single entry on this shelf than the thread running through all of them.

ESV Bible (Crossway), the preferred translation of the Torrey Honors College, read alongside everything else every semester. Freshman Fall: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Hebrews. Freshman Spring: Mark, Luke, Acts, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Philemon, John, 1 and 2 Peter, and Jude. Sophomore Fall: Romans, James, Galatians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus. Sophomore Spring: Proverbs, Song of Solomon, Psalms, and Ecclesiastes. Junior Fall: Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and Isaiah, and in Torrey Total Bible, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Hosea, Amos, Micah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Esther, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Junior Spring: Ezekiel, Job, and 1, 2 and 3 John, with Exodus read again over seven sessions in a colloquium.

The second book of the Bible tells of Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt, the giving of the law at Sinai and the building of the tabernacle. Its themes are the name and presence of God, covenant, freedom and its obligations, and the shape of a people formed by rescue.

ESV Scripture Journal: Exodus (Crossway, 2019). Read over seven sessions in the Exodus colloquium, Junior Spring at Torrey Honors.

John Calvin’s Institutes, first published in 1536 and expanded until 1559, is the most systematic theology of the Reformation, arranged around the knowledge of God as Creator and as Redeemer. The sections read here treat the knowledge of God and scripture, faith and predestination, and the nature of the church and its sacraments.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, edited by John T. McNeill and translated by Ford Lewis Battles, two volumes (Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). Read over three sessions, Sophomore Fall at Torrey Honors: Book I, chapters 1 to 13; Book III, chapters 1, 2 and 21 to 23; Book IV, chapters 1.1-22, 14.1-17, 15, 17.1-10 and 17.16-31.

Martin Luther’s early Reformation writings, from the Ninety-Five Theses of 1517 through the mid-1520s, gathered by John Dillenberger. They set out justification by faith alone, the freedom of a Christian, the priesthood of all believers and the authority of scripture over popes and councils, in prose that is by turns pastoral and ferocious.

Martin Luther, Selections From His Writings, edited by John Dillenberger (Anchor Books, 1958). Read in Sophomore Fall at Torrey Honors: pages 1 to 165.

Athanasius, the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria who fought Arianism for most of his life, wrote this early treatise on why the Word of God became man. His answer is that only the Creator could repair his creation: the incarnation and the cross defeat death, restore the divine image and make God knowable, in one of the clearest statements of classical Christian doctrine.

Athanasius, On the Incarnation, translated by John Behr (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011). Read in full, Freshman Spring at Torrey Honors.

Gregory of Nazianzus delivered the Five Theological Orations in Constantinople in 380, defending the divinity of the Son and the Spirit against the Arians and Eunomians. They fixed the terms of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, and they are as much about how theology may be done, in humility and with a purified life, as about what it says.

Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, translated by Frederick Williams and Lionel Wickham (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002). Read in Freshman Spring at Torrey Honors: the Five Theological Orations.

Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons in the late second century, wrote this short handbook to summarise the faith handed down from the apostles against its Gnostic rivals. It walks through the rule of faith and the whole of scripture as one story, with Christ recapitulating Adam, in the earliest surviving Christian catechism.

Irenaeus of Lyons, On the Apostolic Preaching, translated by John Behr (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997). Read in full, Freshman Spring at Torrey Honors.

Justin Martyr, a philosopher who converted to Christianity and was executed in Rome around 165, addressed these defences to the emperor Antoninus Pius and the Senate. They argue that Christians are neither atheists nor criminals, describe early baptism and eucharist, and claim that the Logos who became Christ was already at work in the best of Greek philosophy.

Justin Martyr, The First and Second Apologies, translated by Leslie William Barnard (Paulist Press, 1997). Read in full, Freshman Spring at Torrey Honors.

Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea and adviser to Constantine, wrote the first history of the Christian church, from the apostles to the emperor’s victory in 324. It preserves lost sources on the succession of bishops, the persecutions and the martyrs, and the heresies, and it reads the church’s survival as providence.

Eusebius, The History of the Church: From Christ to Constantine, translated by G. A. Williamson and edited by Andrew Louth (Penguin Books, 1989). Read over two sessions, Freshman Spring at Torrey Honors: Books 1 and 4 to 6, then Books 8 to 10.

Selections from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, the thirteenth century’s great synthesis of Christian doctrine and Aristotelian philosophy. The questions read here cover what can be known of God and how, the love of God, and the treatise on grace: what fallen nature can and cannot do, and how grace heals, elevates and justifies.

Thomas Aquinas, On Nature and Grace: Selections from the Summa Theologica, edited and translated by A. M. Fairweather (Westminster John Knox Press, 1954). Read over two sessions, Sophomore Fall at Torrey Honors: Part I, Questions 1 to 3 and 20; then Prima Secundae, Questions 109 to 114.

Augustine’s Confessions, written around 397, is the first spiritual autobiography: a prayer addressed to God recounting his childhood, his ambitions and loves, his years as a Manichee and his conversion in a Milan garden. The final books turn from memory to time, creation and the reading of Genesis, and the whole is held together by the restless heart that finds rest only in God.

Augustine, Confessions, translated by Henry Chadwick (Oxford University Press, 2008). Read in full over three sessions, Sophomore Fall at Torrey Honors: Books 1 to 9, then Books 10 to 13.

Augustine of Hippo wrote City of God between 413 and 426, after the sack of Rome, to answer the charge that Christianity had weakened the empire. In twenty-two books it dismantles pagan religion and philosophy and sets out the whole of history as the story of two cities, one built on love of self and one on love of God, that will be separated only at the end.

Augustine of Hippo, City of God, translated by Henry Bettenson (Penguin Books, 2004). Read over three sessions, Freshman Spring at Torrey Honors: Books I, V and VIII; Books XI, XII, XIV and XV.1-8; Books XIX, XXI and XXII.

Thomas Chalmers’s nineteenth-century sermon: the heart cannot be emptied of a love by argument, only displaced by a greater one — so the way out of the world’s hold is not less desire but a better object for it.

Timothy Keller’s brief study of 1 Corinthians 3 and 4: the gospel’s answer to the ego is neither high nor low self-esteem but a self so settled it can stop thinking about itself.

Thomas Traherne, an obscure Herefordshire clergyman who died in 1674, left manuscripts that were found on a London bookstall only in the 1890s. The Centuries are numbered meditations on felicity: the child’s vision of the world as infinite gift, the recovery of that vision through the love of God, and the argument that we were made to enjoy everything.

Thomas Traherne, Centuries (Angelico Press, 2020). Read in Junior Spring at Torrey Honors: the First Century.

G. K. Chesterton’s 1908 account of how he arrived, by his own reasoning, at the creed the church had held all along. Written as spiritual autobiography and argument at once, it defends wonder, paradox, tradition and the doctrine of original sin against the modern fashions of his day, with a joke on nearly every page.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Image Books, 2001). Read in full, Junior Spring at Torrey Honors.

Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot and the most influential churchman of his age, wrote this short treatise on why and how God should be loved. Its answer is that God is loved because he is God and without measure, and it traces four degrees of love, from loving self for self’s sake to loving self only for God’s.

Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, translated by Robert Walton (Cistercian Publications, 1995). Read in Sophomore Fall at Torrey Honors: On Loving God, without the Analytical Commentary.

Written in 1563 for the Reformed church of the Palatinate and adopted across Europe, the Heidelberg Catechism teaches the faith in 129 questions and answers under three headings: guilt, grace and gratitude. Its first question, ‘What is your only comfort in life and in death?’, sets a pastoral tone unusual among confessions.

The Heidelberg Catechism with Scripture Texts (Faith Alive Christian Resources, 1989). Read in full, Sophomore Fall at Torrey Honors.

Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo, finished in 1098, argues by reason alone that the incarnation was necessary: sin dishonours God infinitely, only a man ought to make satisfaction and only God can, so a God-man must. It is the classic statement of the satisfaction theory of atonement and a model of faith seeking understanding.

Anselm, Why God Became Man, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, edited by Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford University Press, 1998). Read in Sophomore Fall at Torrey Honors.

Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel brings the young nihilist Bazarov to the provincial estates of his friend’s family, where his contempt for tradition meets the older generation’s liberalism, and then meets love and death. It is the classic portrait of a generational break, and of what an ideology of pure negation cannot account for.

Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, translated and edited by Richard Freeborn (Oxford University Press, 2008). Read in full, Junior Spring at Torrey Honors.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at nineteen and published it in 1818: the story of a student who assembles a living creature and abandons it in horror. The creature’s eloquent account of his own rejection turns a Gothic tale into a meditation on creation and responsibility, education, loneliness and the limits of scientific ambition.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (Oxford University Press, 2008). Read in full, Junior Spring at Torrey Honors.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest who died in 1889 almost unpublished, invented sprung rhythm and a compressed, alliterative language to catch what he called inscape, the distinct selfhood of things. The nature poems are shouts of praise; the late ‘terrible sonnets’ are records of desolation, and both are addressed to a God felt as overwhelmingly present or agonisingly absent.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Selected Poetry, edited by Catherine Phillips (Oxford University Press, 2008). Read in Junior Spring at Torrey Honors: Winter with the Gulf Stream; Heaven-Haven; The Habit of Perfection; The Wreck of the Deutschland; The Woodlark; God’s Grandeur; The Starlight Night; As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; Spring; The Sea and the Skylark; The Windhover; Pied Beauty; Hurrahing in Harvest; The Lantern Out of Doors; Duns Scotus’s Oxford; Binsey Poplars; The Candle Indoors; The Bugler’s First Communion; Peace; Felix Randal; Spring and Fall; Inversnaid; The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo; I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day; No worst, there is none; To what serves Mortal Beauty?; Carrion Comfort; That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection; Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend.

Herman Melville’s 1851 novel sends the narrator Ishmael to sea on the Pequod under Captain Ahab, whose hunt for the white whale that took his leg becomes a war on the universe. Encyclopaedic, comic and tragic by turns, it is about obsession, the limits of knowledge, the malice or blankness of nature, and the fellowship of men who work.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale (Penguin Books, 2003). Read in full over two sessions, Junior Spring at Torrey Honors.

William Wordsworth remade English poetry with Lyrical Ballads in 1798, insisting on the language of ordinary people and the dignity of humble lives. These poems, from Tintern Abbey to the Intimations Ode, set out his great subjects: nature as moral teacher, childhood as the source of vision, memory, loss, and the mind’s power to half-create what it perceives.

William Wordsworth, Selected Poems, edited by Stephen Gill (Penguin Books, 2004). Read in Junior Spring at Torrey Honors: The Ruined Cottage; The Old Cumberland Beggar; Lines Written in Early Spring; We Are Seven; Expostulation and Reply; The Tables Turned; Lines written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey; A slumber did my spirit seal; Song (She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways); Strange fits of passion I have known; Lucy Gray; Three years she grew in sun and shower; I travelled among unknown Men; To a Sky-Lark; My heart leaps up when I behold; Resolution and Independence; The world is too much with us; It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free; Composed Upon Westminster Bridge; London, 1802; She was a Phantom of delight; Ode to Duty; Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood; I wandered lonely as a cloud; The Solitary Reaper; Elegiac Stanzas; Ode: Composed Upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and Beauty.

Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, the first by a Black woman produced on Broadway, follows the Younger family in a Chicago tenement as an insurance payout forces them to decide what a better life means. Its themes are deferred dreams, dignity, assimilation and the pressure of racism on a family’s choices, framed by the Langston Hughes poem that gives it its title.

Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (Vintage Books, 1988). Read in full, Junior Fall at Torrey Honors.

Shakespeare’s history of 1599 shows the reformed prince Hal as king, invading France, rallying his outnumbered army at Agincourt and winning a kingdom and a bride. It is the most celebratory of the histories and also the most double-edged, asking what a just war is, what a king owes his soldiers, and how much of kingship is performance.

William Shakespeare, Henry V, edited by Claire McEachern (Penguin Books, 2017). Read in full, Junior Fall at Torrey Honors.

Shakespeare’s history of around 1595 opens the sequence that ends with Henry V, showing the lyrical, self-dramatising Richard deposed by his cousin Bolingbroke. It is a play about the divine right of kings and its collapse, about the difference between holding authority and being able to use it, and about a man who finds himself only in losing a crown.

William Shakespeare, Richard II, edited by Frances E. Dolan (Penguin Books, 2017). Read in full, Junior Fall at Torrey Honors.

Dostoevsky’s last novel, published in 1880, turns the murder of a dissolute father into a trial of his three sons: the sensualist Dmitri, the intellectual Ivan and the novice monk Alyosha. It contains the Grand Inquisitor and the argument over whether everything is permitted without God, and it is about faith, freedom, guilt and active love.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Picador, 2021). Read in full over two sessions, Junior Fall at Torrey Honors.

G. K. Chesterton’s first novel, from 1904, imagines a London eighty years on where a joker king revives medieval pageantry for the boroughs and one man, Adam Wayne, takes it seriously enough to fight for Notting Hill. It is a comic fable about local patriotism, the sanity of the small, and the need for both the humorist and the fanatic.

G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (Dover Publications, 1991). Read in full, Junior Fall at Torrey Honors.

Aeschylus’s trilogy of 458 BC, the only complete Greek trilogy to survive, follows the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, her murder by their son Orestes, and Orestes’ trial in Athens, where the Furies are persuaded to become guardians of the city. It dramatises the passage from blood vengeance to law, and from the old gods to a civic order.

Aeschylus, The Oresteia, in Aeschylus II, edited and translated by David Grene, Richmond Lattimore, Mark Griffith, and Glenn W. Most (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Read in Junior Fall at Torrey Honors.

Shakespeare’s comedy of the mid-1590s tangles four Athenian lovers, a company of amateur actors and a quarrelling fairy court in a single enchanted night in the woods. It is a play about the unreliability of desire and perception, the transforming power of imagination, and the theatre’s own trick of making ‘airy nothing’ real.

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by Russ McDonald (Penguin Books, 2016). Read in full, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors.

Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy of around 1599 sends the banished Rosalind, disguised as a boy, into the Forest of Arden, where she teaches Orlando how to love. Court and country, nature and art, the melancholy of Jaques and the wit of Touchstone are set against each other, and the play’s real subject is the freedom that comes from playing a part.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It, edited by Francis E. Dolan (Penguin Books, 2017). Read in full, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors.

John Donne, lawyer, rake and finally Dean of St Paul’s, wrote the most intellectually strenuous lyrics in English, yoking sex, science and theology in a single conceit. The Songs and Sonnets argue love into metaphysics; the Holy Sonnets turn the same violence of wit on God, in poems of fear, sin, mortality and a faith that has to be wrestled for.

John Donne, The Complete English Poems, edited by A. J. Smith (Penguin Books, 1996). Read in Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors. From Songs and Sonnets: Air and Angels; The Anniversary; The Apparition; The Blossom; The Canonization; The Curse; The Damp; The Ecstasy; A Fever; The Flea; A Lecture Upon the Shadow; Love’s Alchemy; A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day; The Primrose; The Relic; Song (Go, and catch a falling star); Song (Sweetest love, I do not go); The Sun Rising; Twicknam Garden; A Valediction: forbidding Mourning; A Valediction: of Weeping; Woman’s Constancy. From the Elegies: The Perfume; To his Mistress Going to Bed. From the Divine Poems: La Corona; Holy Sonnets 1 to 7, 10, and 13 to 17; A Litany; Upon the Annunciation and Passion Falling Upon One Day, 1608; Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward; A Hymn to Christ, at the Author’s last going into Germany; Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness; A Hymn to God the Father.

Shakespeare’s longest tragedy, from around 1600, gives a prince commanded by his father’s ghost to avenge a murder, and follows him through delay, feigned madness and self-interrogation to a catastrophe that takes the whole court. It is the play of interiority: conscience, doubt, mortality, the gap between thought and act, and the question of what the living owe the dead.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by A. R. Braunmuller (Penguin Books, 2016). Read in full, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors.

George Herbert, an Anglican country priest who died in 1633, left one book of devotional lyrics, The Temple, published after his death. Plain in diction and endlessly inventive in form, the poems stage a running argument between the soul and a patient God about affliction, vocation, grace and the difficulty of accepting love.

George Herbert, The Complete Poetry, edited by John Drury and Victoria Moul (Penguin Books, 2015). Read in Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors, a selection from The Temple: The Altar; The Sacrifice; The Thanksgiving; The Reprisal; The Agony; The Sinner; Good Friday; Redemption; Sepulchre; Easter; Easter-Wings; Affliction (1); Prayer (1); The Holy Communion; The Temper (1); Jordan (1); Holy Scriptures (2); The Church-floor; The Windows; Sunday; To all Angels and Saints; Denial; The World; Coloss. 3:3; Vanity (1); Lent; Virtue; The Pearl; Affliction (4); Man; Mortification; Jordan (2); Conscience; The British Church; Dullness; Peace; Divinity; Church-rents and Schisms; The Pilgrimage; The Holdfast; Longing; The Bag; The Collar; The Call; The Pulley; The Priesthood; The Cross; The Flower; The Son; A true Hymn; The 23d Psalm; Aaron; The Odour; The Forerunners; Discipline; The Banquet; Death; Doomsday; Judgement; Heaven; Love (3).

Shakespeare’s darkest tragedy, from around 1606, begins with an old king dividing his kingdom by asking his daughters how much they love him, and ends on a heath and in a prison with almost everyone dead. It is about the stripping away of everything, power, sight, reason, family, and whether anything like justice or love survives the stripping.

William Shakespeare, King Lear, edited by Stephen Orgel (Penguin Books, 2016). Read in full, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors.

Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, from around 1606, follows a Scottish general who murders his king at the prompting of three witches and his wife, and is destroyed by the crime he cannot stop repeating. Ambition, guilt, the corruption of the will and the collapse of time and meaning are its themes, in the most concentrated language he wrote.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, edited by Stephen Orgel (Penguin Books, 2016). Read in full, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors.

Milton’s blank-verse epic of 1667 retells the fall of Satan and the fall of man in order to ‘justify the ways of God to men’. Its magnificent, dangerously sympathetic Satan, its unfallen Eden and its account of free will, obedience and loss make it the great Protestant poem, and an argument about liberty written by a defeated republican.

John Milton, Paradise Lost, edited by Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford University Press, 2008). Read in full over two sessions, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors.

Chaucer’s unfinished Middle English masterpiece from the 1390s frames a storytelling contest among pilgrims riding to Canterbury, each tale voiced by its teller. The tales read here, the Wife of Bath, the Clerk, the Merchant and the Franklin, form the so-called marriage group, arguing over who should hold sovereignty in marriage and what love, patience and honour cost.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, translated by Nevill Coghill (Penguin Classics, 2003). Read in Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors: the General Prologue; the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale; the Clerk’s Prologue and Tale, with Chaucer’s Envoy; the Merchant’s Prologue, Tale and Epilogue; the Words of the Franklin to the Squire; and the Franklin’s Prologue and Tale.

Edmund Spenser’s vast allegorical romance, published from 1590, was meant to ‘fashion a gentleman’ through twelve books of knights, each embodying a virtue. Book I follows the Redcrosse Knight, Holiness, through error, pride, despair and the House of Holiness to his fight with the dragon, an allegory of Protestant faith and of the English church.

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, edited by Thomas P. Roche and C. Patrick O’Donnell (Penguin Books, 1987). Read over two sessions, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors: Book I only.

Samuel Johnson’s philosophical tale of 1759, written in the evenings of a single week to pay for his mother’s funeral, sends an Abyssinian prince out of the Happy Valley to search the world for a life worth choosing. Every calling is tried and found wanting, and the book’s quiet conclusion, that no earthly choice of life satisfies, is offered as its own kind of wisdom.

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, edited by Paul Goring (Penguin Classics, 2007). Read in full, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors.

Dante’s Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy begun around 1308, takes the poet, guided by Virgil, down through nine circles of hell where each sin is punished by its own logic. It is a moral map of the medieval world, a settling of political scores, and an anatomy of how a soul loses itself, written in the vernacular that made Italian a literary language.

Dante, Inferno, translated by Anthony Esolen (Modern Library, 2002). Read in full over two sessions, Sophomore Fall at Torrey Honors.

The third part of the Divine Comedy ascends through the nine heavens to the vision of God, with Beatrice as guide and theology as the subject. Dante strains language to describe light, order and joy, and the poem ends with the pilgrim’s will and desire turned ‘by the love that moves the sun and the other stars’.

Dante, Paradise, translated by Anthony Esolen (Modern Library, 2007). Read in full over two sessions, Sophomore Fall at Torrey Honors.

The second part of the Divine Comedy climbs the seven terraces of the mountain of Purgatory, where the saved are cleansed of the seven deadly sins on their way to Eden. Warmer and more human than the Inferno, it is a poem about hope, art, friendship and free will, ending with Beatrice’s arrival and Dante’s own confession.

Dante, Purgatory, translated by Anthony Esolen (Modern Library, 2004). Read in full over two sessions, Sophomore Fall at Torrey Honors.

Ovid’s fifteen-book Latin poem, finished around 8 AD, strings some 250 Greek and Roman myths on the single thread of transformation, from chaos to the deification of Caesar. Playful, erotic and often cruel, it treats the gods as capricious and change as the only constant, and it became the West’s main sourcebook of classical myth.

The Metamorphoses of Ovid, translated by Allen Mandelbaum (Harcourt, 1993). Read in full over two sessions, Freshman Spring at Torrey Honors: Books 1 to 6, then Books 7 to 15.

Plutarch, a Greek priest and philosopher writing around 100 AD, paired Greek and Roman statesmen in parallel biographies meant to show character through action. The lives of Cato the Elder, the Gracchi and Sulla trace the Republic’s slide from stern virtue into land crisis, factional violence and dictatorship, with the moral life of the individual always the real subject.

Plutarch, Roman Lives: A Selection of Eight Lives, translated by Robin Waterfield (Oxford University Press, 2008). Read in Freshman Spring at Torrey Honors: the lives of Cato the Elder, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, and Sulla.

Virgil’s Latin epic, written under Augustus in the 20s BC, follows the Trojan refugee Aeneas from the fall of Troy to the founding of a new people in Italy. It is a poem about duty and its cost: pietas, the burden of destiny, the loves and lives sacrificed to empire, and a Rome whose glory is shadowed from the first line by grief.

Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fitzgerald (Vintage Classics, 1990). Read in full over two sessions, Freshman Spring at Torrey Honors.

Sophocles’ tragedy of about 441 BC sets Antigone, who buries her outlawed brother, against her uncle Creon, who has forbidden it on pain of death. Divine law against civic law, family against state, and the stubbornness of both parties and the ruin it brings make it the founding drama of conscience against authority.

Sophocles, Antigone, in Sophocles I, edited and translated by David Grene, Richmond Lattimore, Mark Griffith, and Glenn W. Most (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Read in Freshman Fall at Torrey Honors.

Sophocles’ play of around 429 BC shows Oedipus, king of plague-stricken Thebes, hunting the murderer of the previous king until the investigation reveals himself. Aristotle’s model tragedy, it is about knowledge and blindness, fate and responsibility, and a man destroyed by the same intelligence that made him great.

Sophocles, Oedipus the King, in Sophocles I, edited and translated by David Grene, Richmond Lattimore, Mark Griffith, and Glenn W. Most (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Read in Freshman Fall at Torrey Honors.

Euripides’ last tragedy, produced after his death in 406 BC, brings the god Dionysus to Thebes, where the young king Pentheus refuses his worship and is torn apart by his own mother in ecstatic frenzy. It is a play about the irrational in religion and in people, and about what happens to those who deny it.

Euripides, The Bacchae, in Euripides V, edited and translated by David Grene, Richmond Lattimore, Mark Griffith, and Glenn W. Most (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Read in Freshman Fall at Torrey Honors.

Homer’s epic of the Trojan War, composed around the eighth century BC, covers a few weeks in the tenth year of the siege, from Achilles’ quarrel with Agamemnon to Hector’s funeral. It is a poem of wrath and grief, of honour and mortality, in which the gods are frivolous and human beings, who must die, are the ones who matter.

Homer, The Iliad, translated by Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Read in full over two sessions, Freshman Fall at Torrey Honors.

Homer’s second epic follows Odysseus’s ten-year journey home from Troy and his son’s search for him, ending in the slaughter of the suitors who have besieged his house. Cunning against force, hospitality, loyalty, homecoming and the reordering of a household are its subjects, told with a novelist’s relish for disguise and recognition.

Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Richmond Lattimore (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007). Read in full over two sessions, Freshman Fall at Torrey Honors.

Darrow, a Red miner on Mars, loses his wife to the regime and infiltrates the ruling Golds’ brutal Institute to destroy the Society from within, discovering the elaborate deception concealing his people’s enslavement. Book 1 of Red Rising. First published 2014.

Two years later, Darrow rises through Gold society as a rebel spy, waging open war and political duels against rivals like Cassius, until a trusted friend’s betrayal leaves him captured and his allies scattered. Book 2 of Red Rising. First published 2015.

Imprisoned and broken after Golden Son’s betrayal, Darrow is freed by Sevro and the Sons of Ares, then leads a fractured rebellion toward a climactic confrontation with the Jackal and the Sovereign for Mars’s fate. Book 3 of Red Rising. First published 2016.

Kaladin survives enslavement and battlefield horror to discover Radiant powers, Dalinar wrestles with visions urging unity among quarreling highprinces, and Shallan begins a scholarly apprenticeship hiding a desperate theft, as an ancient war looms. Book 1 of The Stormlight Archive. First published 2010.

Shallan uncovers her fractured past and a spy mission gone wrong, Kaladin commands the Windrunners while shielding Dalinar from assassins, and a monstrous new storm forces the survivors to flee toward the lost city of Urithiru. Book 2 of The Stormlight Archive. First published 2014.

Between Words of Radiance and Oathbringer, streetwise young Lift, newly a Knight Radiant, chases a mysterious tyrant across the city of Yeddaw, protecting the powerless while wrestling with her fear of growing up and losing herself. Book 3 of The Stormlight Archive. First published 2016.

Dalinar’s armies settle into reclaimed Urithiru as he confronts his violent past, a new highstorm frees the enslaved parshmen into war against humanity, and the group suffers devastating losses during a desperate rescue mission behind enemy lines. Book 4 of The Stormlight Archive. First published 2017.

Set in the year-long gap before Rhythm of War, ship’s clerk Rysn and the lazy Herdazian Lopen investigate a sentient magical dawnshard on a mysterious island, racing rival powers who would use its reality-altering command for conquest. Book 5 of The Stormlight Archive. First published 2020.

Navani forms a dangerous bond with Urithiru’s spren while researching new weapons against Odium’s forces, Kaladin battles worsening trauma, and the Knights Radiant venture into a hidden dimension to recruit desperate allies for the losing war. Book 6 of The Stormlight Archive. First published 2020.

In the frantic days before Dalinar’s champion duel against Odium, the fractured heroes race to secure the field, confront enemies among their own ranks, and Dalinar bargains to transform the god of hatred itself before the deciding contest. Book 7 of The Stormlight Archive. First published 2024.

Awaiting execution for destroying a world, Hadrian Marlowe recounts fleeing his cold noble family’s plans to make him a torturer, only to be stranded on a backwater planet where he survives as a gladiator amid a foreign court’s intrigue. Book 1 of Sun Eater. First published 2018.

Years later, Hadrian commands a starship hunting the alien Cielcin across known space, navigating fragile diplomacy and imperial politics while his rebellious instincts and moral code repeatedly put him at odds with the very empire he serves. Book 2 of Sun Eater. First published 2019.

Now a celebrated war hero in the Empire’s capital, Hadrian confronts the political fallout of his fame before leaving civilization behind to chase the ancient, alien mystery of the Quiet across the galaxy’s stranger frontiers. Book 3 of Sun Eater. First published 2020.

Decades a prisoner of his own legend at court, Hadrian and his Red Company return to war against the Cielcin, facing a harrowing standoff with one of Prince Syriani Dorayaica’s terrifying White Hand commanders. Book 4 of Sun Eater. First published 2022.

Reeling from Kingdoms of Death’s catastrophe, Hadrian and Valka learn the Cielcin’s monstrous gods are real and insatiable, as the united Cielcin horde and a Commonwealth betrayal leave the Sollan Empire standing alone against annihilation. Book 5 of Sun Eater. First published 2023.

Two hundred years into exile on Jadd raising his daughter Cassandra, Hadrian is summoned back by the Emperor to help a secret intelligence agency hunt down and kill one of the terrible Watchers the Cielcin worship as gods. Book 6 of Sun Eater. First published 2024.

Raised in secret at a remote fortress, young warrior Rezkin is thrust into a kingdom on the edge of war after a devastating battle destroys everything he knew, forcing him to uncover the purpose he was secretly trained for. Book 1 of The King’s Dark Tidings. First published 2015.

As a tyrannical, possibly mad king tightens his grip on the kingdom, Rezkin’s extraordinary training and hidden identity draw him deeper into the realm’s brewing civil war, testing loyalties and the limits of the weapon he was made to be. Book 2 of The King’s Dark Tidings. First published 2016.

After a devastating attack turns former allies hostile, Rezkin leads a ragtag band of refugees against a powerful usurper bent on destruction, fighting to wrest control of Ashai back from the mad king before it is lost for good. Book 3 of The King’s Dark Tidings. First published 2017.

With the newly founded Kingdom of Cael on shaky ground, Rezkin must win recognition from the King of Gendishen to secure his people’s claim to their lands, even as chaos from the earlier war continues to spread. Book 4 of The King’s Dark Tidings. First published 2018.

Every realm Rezkin touches seems to shatter as he forges a new empire from the ruins of fallen kingdoms, until an ancient, mysterious force derails his path and forces shocking revelations about his true origins and the mad king Caydean’s darker game. Book 5 of The King’s Dark Tidings. First published 2022.

Believed dead after his army’s defeat, Rezkin operates from the shadows while Azeria hunts rumors of his survival through the criminal underworld, and a queen’s vulnerability in his absence lets nobles and an ancient magic-fueled plot converge. Book 6 of The King’s Dark Tidings. First published 2024.

With his survival a closely guarded secret, Rezkin covertly unravels the mad king Caydean’s alliance while Caydean readies a devastating weapon meant to secure his ascension, forcing the true king to return and make his final stand. Book 7 of The King’s Dark Tidings. First published 2025.

Retired innkeeper Kvothe tells a traveling scribe the true story of his legendary life, from his family’s slaughter by the mythical Chandrian through his impoverished youth and hard-won entry into the University’s magical arcane arts. Book 1 of The Kingkiller Chronicle. First published 2007.

Continuing his account, Kvothe balances University studies and debt with a mission to Severen’s court, a journey into the dangerous Fae realm with the seductress Felurian, and grueling training among the legendary Adem mercenaries. Book 2 of The Kingkiller Chronicle. First published 2011.

After an alien apocalypse flattens Earth’s cities into a deadly game show, Carl and his cat Princess Donut fight through the dungeon’s first floors, gain a following of fans, and befriend their reluctant guide Mordecai to survive. Book 1 of Dungeon Crawler Carl. First published 2020.

On the dungeon’s third floor, crawlers must choose races and classes as Carl gets tangled in dangerous quests, narrowly dodges an assassination attempt, and comes into possession of a powerful, unstable soul crystal. Book 2 of Dungeon Crawler Carl. First published 2021.

Descending into floor four’s underground maze of trains, Carl’s group allies with other crawler teams to survive the hazards below and secures a forbidden cookbook packed with hidden knowledge about the dungeon’s inner workings. Book 3 of Dungeon Crawler Carl. First published 2021.

Floor five splits the surviving crawlers into isolated bubble worlds, where Carl’s team finds an artifact capable of opening portals elsewhere, but only at the price of worshipping a demanding, capricious fire god. Book 4 of Dungeon Crawler Carl. First published 2021.

Alissa Paine, a Hunter’s daughter and secret Wielder able to control a lethal magical thread, must hide her dangerous gift during her kingdom’s debutante season while deciding which of her mysterious suitors she can actually trust. First published 2025.

When Marissa arrives to collect her son from a playdate, a stranger answers the door: the boy has been abducted by the host’s nanny, dragging Marissa and police into a frantic hunt that unearths a devastating shared past. First published 2021.

Atul Gawande on what medicine does badly at the end of life, and what it could do instead: the difference between prolonging life and preserving what makes it worth living.

Morgan Housel’s short essays on how people actually behave around money — luck, risk, greed, enough — and why doing well with it has more to do with temperament than with knowledge.

1. 1

   Office worker Jason Asano wakes naked in a magical hedge maze full of monsters, escapes a cannibal cult, and discovers he has rare Outworlder powers that draw him into the dangerous politics of a game-like fantasy world. Book 1 of He Who Fights with Monsters. First published 2021.

2. 2

   As Jason settles into life as an adventurer, a citywide contest draws elite young competitors to Greenstone, forcing him to assemble allies while the city’s leaders uncover betrayal tied to a vast, terrible enemy he has already unknowingly crossed. Book 2 of He Who Fights with Monsters. First published 2021.

3. 3

   Riding high on new wealth and influence, Jason is kidnapped by agents of rival magic-society leaders who try to force a painful Star Seed ritual onto his uniquely resistant soul, aided only by his monstrous familiar Colin. Book 3 of He Who Fights with Monsters. First published 2021.

4. 4

   An unexpected return to Earth forces Jason to question whether he still belongs there, as he uncovers secrets his old world hid from him and realizes he may be exactly what a threatened planet needs. Book 4 of He Who Fights with Monsters. First published 2021.

5. 5

   With Earth’s secrets now spreading and magic surging worldwide, Jason is pulled between competing factions and Earth politics, taking on a formidable American gold-rank fighter in one of the toughest battles of his life. Book 5 of He Who Fights with Monsters. First published 2022.

6. 6

   As Earth teeters toward destruction while its supposed protectors squabble, Jason resolves to save it alone, seizing a forbidden power no mortal should touch and taking his first step toward a far wider, more dangerous cosmos. Book 6 of He Who Fights with Monsters. First published 2022.

7. 7

   Arriving at an imperiled kingdom that, for once, doesn’t need rescuing, Jason hopes to rest, but old and new enemies, an inconvenient princess, an ancient king, and an overeager fertility cult all conspire against his quiet vacation. Book 7 of He Who Fights with Monsters. First published 2022.

8. 8

   After a long-awaited reunion, Jason works through old trauma while returning to adventuring, as hidden enemies finally move into the open and his companions are drawn into personal and dangerous missions that push him toward greater cosmic power. Book 8 of He Who Fights with Monsters. First published 2022.

9. 9

   Leaving recent threats behind, Jason and his team set out to explore new lands, only to find a merciless new enemy using shocking tactics, forcing Jason to confront how much he has in common with the angelic foes he fights. Book 9 of He Who Fights with Monsters. First published 2023.

10. 10

    Caught in a web of political intrigue, Jason is torn between duty and his desire for peace as he navigates a universe of rival factions, hidden agendas, and forces powerful enough to upend reality itself. Book 10 of He Who Fights with Monsters. First published 2023.

11. 11

    With the undead threat only forestalled, Jason and his scattered allies must fight faction by faction to reunite a strange, contested realm, facing angelic despots and an undead god while trying to save a friend whose sacrifice bought them time. Book 11 of He Who Fights with Monsters. First published 2024.

12. 12

    Twenty years after being pulled into this world of magic, Jason reflects on his unlikely path through kings, gods, and interdimensional cults, and finally sets off for the long-postponed hometown of his closest friends. Book 12 of He Who Fights with Monsters. First published 2025.

1. 1

   When a hostile System violently integrates Earth into a wider multiverse, solitary camper Zac Atwood wakes beside an invading goblin settlement and must scrape together survival, class progression, and allies against the first wave of alien factions. Book 1 of Defiance of the Fall. First published 2021.

2. 2

   As newly discovered islands reveal other races beyond the demons Zac already knows, his rising power and status make him a target, and he must survive a string of assassination attempts launched by rivals who resent his position. Book 2 of Defiance of the Fall. First published 2021.

3. 3

   Zac’s fight for survival expands into planetary state-building as he learns to manage armies, rankings, and intelligence networks while gaining unsettling awareness that cosmic factions far beyond Earth are now watching his every move. Book 3 of Defiance of the Fall. First published 2021.

4. 4

   Closing out Earth’s opening struggle, Zac’s power finally outgrows the planet’s threats entirely, pivoting his fight from local survival toward the far larger, more dangerous cosmic conflicts that have been quietly circling him all along. Book 4 of Defiance of the Fall. First published 2022.

5. 5

   Racing the clock as the Undead Empire threatens to swallow Earth, Zac enters the eighty-one-level Tower of Eternity for one last shot at power, only to find a System-issued bounty and rival elites waiting outside. Book 5 of Defiance of the Fall. First published 2022.

6. 6

   With the Lich King Adriel defeated and Earth spared its deadly Miasma, Zac faces a new escalating threat as the ominous Great Redeemer draws closer to Earth, guided by the sinister Void’s Disciple and their followers. Book 6 of Defiance of the Fall. First published 2022.

7. 7

   As the long-awaited Dimensional Seed nears maturity, Zac plunges into the Mystic Realm where rival Dominators, trapped factions, and otherworldly powers all converge, closing out the fraught first year since Earth’s integration into the System. Book 7 of Defiance of the Fall. First published 2022.

8. 8

   Newly arrived in Twilight Harbor, Zac is drawn into a once-in-a-millennium trial by the Draugr Catheya, pitting him against local elites and rival factions in the deceptive Twilight Ascent as celestial and internal pressures both mount. Book 8 of Defiance of the Fall. First published 2023.

9. 9

   As the Twilight Ascent reaches its climax amid chaos in the City of Ancients, Zac is bound to the Eveningtide Asura’s plans and left carrying a stolen, ticking fragment of creation, forcing him into one final desperate battle. Book 9 of Defiance of the Fall. First published 2023.

10. 10

    Freed from imprisonment and finally back on Earth after years away, Zac finds the Zecia Sector edging toward war and must build a spaceship to chase clues through the chaotic Million Gates Territory in search of a trapped ally. Book 10 of Defiance of the Fall. First published 2023.

11. 11

    As ancient plans reach fruition and the Multiverse’s elites converge on Zecia, Zac reunites with a lost companion while the enemy secretly reaches the Void Star, threatening to use it as a springboard for a coming invasion. Book 11 of Defiance of the Fall. First published 2023.

12. 12

    Preparing for war against the formidable Kan’Tanu, Zac must fuse life and death itself to ascend to D-grade, racing rival ancient factions for the newly emerged Eternal Heritage as his path toward Hegemony grows ever more perilous. Book 12 of Defiance of the Fall. First published 2024.