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

While we are on a break, enjoy this episode from Season 2. Season 3 starts May 19!

My son 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:

1. <...

While we are on a break, enjoy this episode from Season 2!

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!)

This is a replay of one of my favourite episodes, episo...

After a year of reading through Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities list, I’ve finally reached the end. How surprising that it doesn’t feel like an ending at all! This final episode is less about individual books and more about what the project revealed over time: how we read, how we think, and how we change.

Having finished, I genuinely believe in occasional deep projects, for a variety of reasons. I offer a wide variety of ideas for ...

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Week 52 and, somehow, the end of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities project. We've got time to process all the emotions next week. For now, on to the readings!

This final week brings together a really cool set of 20th and 21st century works—Octavia Butler, Joan Didion, Tim O'Brien, the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, and David Foster Wallace—all circling what Gioia calls “unte...

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We have a treat this week: My husband Bill read Brave New World shortly after I did, so today we discuss it together!

BNW presents a dystopian world that feels less like oppression and more like a perfectly engineered system. In this world, humans are no longer born but manufactured, sorted into castes, and conditioned for their roles. The goal is “community, identity, stability,” maintained th...

Week 50 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List brings us to three mid-20th-century thinkers wrestling with art, media, and the modern world: Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, and José Ortega y Gasset.

I begin with Susan Sontag’s famous essay “In Plato’s Cave” from On Photography. Writing in 1972, she asks how photography changes our relationship to memory and experience. At the time, photographs were printed objects. We saved them in...

Week 49 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities list brings three modern French thinkers into conversation: Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and René Girard. Unlike many earlier weeks in this project, these readings aren’t novels or unified texts—they’re philosophical excerpts that stand largely on their own. So rather than forcing a single theme, I consider how each of these writers might still be shaping the world we live in toda...

For Week 48 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List, I step into the strange, shimmering world of Kafka's Metamorphosis, Borges' Ficciones, and Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude.

We start with a review of myth, fantasy, fairy stories, and magic: why we need them and what purpose they can serve in our lives (aside from being really fun). Kafka’s tragic insect-turned-son is an isolated, powerless creature, unable to find ...

With only five weeks left in this year-long journey, I can feel the end approaching—less like a high-wire act and more like gathering momentum toward something unknown. Week 47 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities course explores twentieth-century American fiction through short stories and novel excerpts, revealing a distinctly American voice: sharp dialogue, vivid settings, and an experimental edge.

Week 46 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List brought me to two works by Sigmund Freud: An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I finished reading a few days early but needed time to let these ideas settle—and disturb me.

What struck me first was Freud’s immense influence. What followed was a growing discomfort with how fully his ideas have saturated modern thought. Freud offers a powerful explanatory sys...

Week 45 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List brought me fully into the early 20th century—and, to my surprise, it wasn’t an easy transition. I don’t dislike these works, but I find myself missing the older books and trying to name what feels absent. The shadow of World War I certainly looms, but there’s something more elusive at work.

This week’s readings were Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of...

Week 44 takes us firmly into the 20th century, with a strong Irish lineup: James Joyce’s “The Dead" from The Dubliners, the opening of Ulysses, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Joyce surprised me—in the very best way. “The Dead” is rich, intimate, and beautifully written, capturing married love, memory, and Dublin itself as if the city were another character. The opening of Ulysses was stranger and more dreamlike, but not imp...

This week’s reading was heavy—emotionally and intellectually. We paired Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass(1845) with W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and the contrast was striking.

Douglass’ firsthand account of slavery is harrowing, beautifully written, and unforgettable. From his stolen childhood to his carefully guarded escape, his story exposes not only the cruelty of slavery but its spiritual damage to e...

This week’s readings on Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List felt unexpectedly thin and disjointed. We stepped backward in time to Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire, which made me keenly aware of how much I’ve come to rely on the list’s chronological momentum. I also continue to struggle with “selections,” especially in poetry, where I suspect I shortchange the material when time and energy are limited.

Flaubert’s short story...

Stepping inside an Impressionist painting? Yes, please.

Week 41 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities Course made me realize something startling: these books weren't picked for my enjoyment--and yet I loved them anyway. This week’s readings, Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton and the “Overture” to Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, carry us right into the early twentieth century.

I approached James with dread, expecting a slo...

Week 40 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities Course brings together three demanding—and deeply philosophical—works: Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. But before we get started, I offer a short primer on reading Russian lit. The names can be a real challenge!

Tolstoy’s novella, written after his spiritual “conversion,” is a devastating med...

Week 39 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities Course takes on nineteenth-century American literature—and to my surprise, it became one of the most enjoyable weeks so far. I went in dreading familiar names and old high-school resentments, but came out newly energized. 

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (chapters 1–6) was funny, humane, and immediately engaging. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and “Th...

We take a little break from our reading list this week for some holiday cheer: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens!

I thought I knew this one inside out, which was ridiculous because I had never actually read it. (When will I learn?!) This is a punchy little novel, and you can read it aloud over the course of less than a week with your kids. I hope with this episode to offer a little reassurance and inspiration: You can do this, a...