The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

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.

Bauer (American literature, College of William and Mary) offers advice on strategies and skills of reading for adults wishing to give themselves a classical liberal arts education. Introductory chapters discuss the act of reading itself, describing ways to transform oneself into a skilled and dedicated reader. The latter half of the text is dedicated to describes strategies to gain the most of novels, autobiographies, histories, drama, and poetry through critical reading. Many of the strategies are drawn from her earlier , which was aimed at parents involved in home-schooling their children.
Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

An engaging, accessible guide to educating yourself in the classical tradition.

Surrounded by more books than ever, readers today are daunted by the classics they have left unread. "The Well-Educated Mind" is a wonderful resource for anyone wishing to explore and develop the mind's capacity to read and comprehend the "greatest hits."

An engaging, accessible guide to educating yourself in the classical tradition. Surrounded by more books than ever, readers today are frequently daunted by the classics they have left unread. The Well-Educated Mind, debunking our own inferiority complexes, is a wonderful resource for anyone wishing to explore and develop the mind's capacity to read and comprehend the "greatest hits" in fiction, autobiography, history, poetry, and drama. Far from tossing readers into the swarming sea of classics and demanding that they swim, this book offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres, accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the close of each chapter—ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Paul Gilroy—preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing. Based on the same classical method as Bauer's terrifically successful The Well-Trained Mind, The Well-Educated Mind provides not only a thorough grounding in the classics but also a widely applicable foundation for self-education.

Susan Wise Bauer is the best-selling author of the Story of the World series for elementary students, author of The Well-Educated Mind, The History of the Ancient World and The History of the Medieval World, and the co-author of The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home. She is a faculty member in English at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, where she teaches writing and literature.