Well Educated Mind
Ratings8
Average rating3.9
15
Ratings8
Average rating3.9
An engaging, accessible guide to educating yourself in the classical tradition. Have you lost the art of reading for pleasure? Are there books you know you should read but haven't because they seem too daunting? In The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer provides a welcome and encouraging antidote to the distractions of our age, electronic and otherwise. In her previous book, The Well-Trained Mind, the author provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to home-school their children, and that book is now the premier resource for home-schoolers. In this new book, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them to the use of adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading. The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres—fiction, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry—accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the end of each chapter—ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich—preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing. The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there's no reason you can't read and enjoy Shakespeare's Sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the "Great Books" without a guide and a plan. Susan Wise Bauer will show you how to allocate time to your reading on a regular basis; how to master a difficult argument; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre—what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary?—and also between genres. Followed carefully, the advice in The Well-Educated Mind will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.
Reviews with the most likes.
Very helpful book for developing a systematic approach to reading. I love how the different genres are separated with key questions to ask of the text while reading.
This book is good for adults and high school students.
University literature professor Susan Wise Bauer highlights the importance of self-education through the Great Books. She details skills and questions to ask in order to understand the often difficult reading of the past. She also highlights the histories and gives a recommended reading list of 5 genres of books - Fiction, History, Autobiography, Drama, and Poetry.
Rating: 4.5 Stars
I was thoroughly impressed by Bauer's work. She has some great points, which will help me in my own reading, whether it be a book from her lists or just a book in general. I quite enjoyed her points about asking ourselves the questions of “so what?” and “what does the author want me to do or believe after reading this?”
I loved learning the histories of the different genres and the historical context within which major authors may have been writing in. That was probably the most important and interesting part to me.
Bauer's writing is enjoyable and sometimes humorous. She did a great job with this work and I will continue to enjoy the quotes and the ways of analyzing texts that she taught.
