Crack The Book: A Beginner's Guide to Reading the Great Books

This week we pair two early-modern comedies that show how laughter can reveal truth. But first, we do a quick review of European history, looking at France, Spain, Italy and England, trying to place the things we're reading inside history. (I knew next to nothing about Spain at this time so it was really helpful for me!)

Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) introduces a middle-aged dreamer who decides to become a knight-errant, s...

After three (very full!) weeks of Shakespeare, we reluctantly leave England for Italy—and step into the vivid world of Renaissance art. Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List serves up a refreshing change of scene with Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography.

Both were brand-new to me, and both were a delight. Vasari, himself an accomplished painter and architect, profiles ...

This week on Crack the Book, I’m still in awe of Shakespeare — and not ready to leave him behind. Somewhere between Falstaff’s jokes and Othello’s heartbreak, I realized just how much I’ve climbed the Shakespeare learning curve. The language that once felt impossible now feels like music, and these plays — Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2, and Othello — have been my favorite week yet.

To start, though, I covered a ...

Back with more Shakespeare! Before we get started with Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest, I share a little about my experience with Shakespeare before this project.

In short, it was almost ZERO.

I tell you this so you can have confidence as you start your own Shakespeare journey. I have been shocked, amazed and gratified at how rewarding the time put in with Shakespeare has been. And now, on to the plays!

T...

After the last three weeks with Dante, we jump to another three-week series with Shakespeare and NINE plays!

Shakespeare can be daunting, so I offer a few thoughts on how to approach him:

• Watch a movie FIRST
• Get a good edition (hello, Folger Shakespeare Library)
• Keep a one-line-per-scene summary as you read
• Enjoy!! It will get easier and the plays are so very worthwhile.

Hamlet dazzles with layered characters and razo...

Jack is back as we discuss Paradiso, Jack's favorite part of Dante's Divine Comedy. I absolutely love getting to chat with him again (see a couple of earlier episodes linked below). We talk about why he loves Dante in general, and Paradiso in particular. Highlights include:

• Dante's bravery (or chutzpah!) in writing his poetry and scholarly works in Italian rather than Latin;
• Who Dante is for (spoiler--it's for YOU), and why (the...

My very dear friend Lisa Beerman joins me for this episode, and we talk all things Purgatory. Since we share a deep love for this book of the Divine Comedy she's our perfect companion for this part of the journey.

We have a wide ranging conversation about translations, "ways in" to the Comedy, and the usefulness of Dante in everyday life. I hope you enjoy this conversation! Links to a few of the resources we discussed are below.

We l...

This week it’s Dante, and it will be amazing. Full stop. Of all the classics you could read, The Divine Comedy may be one of the most intimidating, but it’s also one of the most necessary. In this episode I’ll break it down and share how to make the journey approachable. You can do this.

We begin with Dante’s early autobiographical work, the Nuovo Vitae (“New Life”), a short book of prose and poetry reflecting on his youth and his g...

This week marks the halfway point in my year-long reading project through Ted Gioia’s *Immersive Humanities* list, and instead of turning to Dante just yet, I’m stopping to take stock. Call it my “halftime report.”

When Gioia built his list, he gave himself some rules: keep each week under 250 pages, make it global not just Western, mix in art and music, and move (mostly) in chronological order. I’ve tried to follow his structure, b...

How is this project different than reading books in school? Well, I'm going a lot faster, but it's more than that. I reflect a little on the differences to get us started. I'm grateful that reading on my own is giving me time to reflect on goodness and Beauty-with-a-capital-B. And did this week ever deliver on the Beauty!

This week’s reading was the letters of Peter Abelard and Heloise, a glimpse into one of the most famous love sto...

This week’s stop on Ted Gioia’s 12-Month Immersive Humanities List took me to Africa for two epics: Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali and The Mwindo Epic. One was a pleasant surprise, the other… well, I’d like my hours back.

Sundiata follows a young prince who can’t walk or talk, is exiled, then returns to save his homeland with his griot (advisor and best friend) at his side. I accidentally ordered the children’s ed...

This week on Crack the Book, we take a big leap forward—from Augustine’s Confessions in the ancient world to 14th-century England—with selections from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. No translation was needed, technically, but the Middle English still felt like a new language.

Both were new to me, which now feels shocking—how did I miss even a snippet of C...

What happens when a brilliant young skeptic is prayed into faith by his mother? This week I finished Confessionsby St. Augustine. It wasn’t all smooth sailing, but the first nine books were a revelation.

Written around 400 A.D., Confessions traces Augustine’s path from pagan philosopher to Christian convert. His story is deeply personal, full of reflection on education, desire, ambition, and the slow turning of a...

This week I’m considering two spiritual classics from very different traditions: the Bhagavad Gita and the Rule of St. Benedict—well, sort of. Due to a packing mishap and a limited bookstore selection, I ended up reading Benedict’s Way, a modern commentary that includes excerpts from the Rule, rather than the Rule itself. Not ideal, but still worthwhile.

I also tried a technique I’ve used before: reading both texts in tandem, switch...

This week’s reading was A Thousand and One Nights, also known as The Arabian Nights. The backstory (very, very briefly) was that a king, upon finding his queen to be unfaithful, executed her, and declared himself done with women, sort of. Every night, a new woman was brought to be his queen. Every morning he had his vizier execute the poor unfortunate girl. One day the vizier’s own daughter Scheherazade asked to be married to the k...

This week, we take on Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, a hilarious surprise from Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities Course. Written in the mid-300s A.D., this is the very first Latin prose novel, penned by Algerian-born Apuleius. Lucius, our hero, is a young man who meddles in magic, transforms into a donkey, and embarks on wild adventures before returning to human form. We were so captivated that note-taking fell by the wayside, much like ...

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics.

Before we start, though, we talk about graduation speeches...and share the graduation speech we wish we'd heard.

Next, we journey from Western literature back to ancient China to explore two timeless texts: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (c. 500 B.C.) and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (c. 400 B.C.), roughly contemporary with Confucius and Plato. ...

This is such a great book!! In this episode, my son Jack joins me to examine The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, a Roman scholar living just after the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE. A renaissance man before the Renaissance, Boethius translated Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, served as a trusted aide to the Gothic king Theodoric in Ravenna, and was a mathematician, astronomer, and family man whose sons becam...

In this episode of Crack the Book, we take a look at Week Fourteen of Ted Gioia’s Humanities Course, covering Virgil’s The Aeneid (Books 1–2), Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 1), and selections from The Portable Roman Reader. The focus is on key texts from Roman literature, their historical context, and their connections to earlier Greek works, providing an overview of their content and significance.

Key Discussion Points:

• Virgil’s ...