I just finalized this next year’s book list for my high school humanities Western civ class, and as always 1. It was much harder to decide what to leave off than what to include, and 2. My driving decider was: what do I wish I’d read at their age that I would then want to pick up and read again, 30 years later (ahem, as in—me right now)? We’re in the second of a three-year time cycle, so roughly 500-1650 A.D.

Here’s the list:

• The Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethius

• Beowulf, by Anonymous

• The Song of Roland, by Anonymous

• Le Morte d’Arthur, by Thomas Malory

• Inferno, by Dante Alighieri

• Macbeth, by William Shakespeare

• Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

• Don Quixote, by Cervantes

• The Collected Poems of G.K. Chesterton (White Horse & Lepanto)

• Tales From The Perilous Realm, by J.R.R. Tolkien (Leaf by Niggle + On Fairy-Stories)

• Excerpts of:

  • The Rule of St. Benedict

  • Proslogion, by St. Anselm

  • Summa Theologiae, by St. Thomas Aquinas

  • The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer

  • The Prince, by Macchiavelli

  • Ninety-five Theses, by Martin Luther

  • Institutes of the Christian Religion, by John Calvin

  • The Spiritual Exercises, by St. Ignatius of Loyola

  • The Book of Common Prayer

  • The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas á Kempis