Reading Selections for 2005

NORTHWEST GREAT BOOKS INSTITUTE

 

Antigone, Sophocles

The universal confrontations between men and women, age and youth, living and dead, men and their gods, society and the individual—all are compressed into this great tragedy.  After defeating The Seven Against Thebes expedition, Creon, now king of Thebes, in defiance of rites due the dead, decrees that the body of Polyneices (one of the Seven) shall lie unburied.  Antigone, Polyneices’sister—soon to marry Creon’s son—defies the king’s decree.  The powerful story that evolves has endured for 2,500 years.

 

Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud

In this short book, Freud explores our ways of coping with the stresses and anxieties that beset us in the modern world.  As he sees it, the striving for happiness, for pleasure—the “pleasure principle”—that dominates our mental apparatus “is at loggerheads with the whole world” and has “no possibility at all of . . . being carried through. . . . We are threatened with suffering from three directions, from our own body, from the external world . . . and . . . “from our relations to other men.” How should we cope?  His analysis of coping explores religion, the arts, working, drugs, hermitism, and love (sexual and otherwise).  He has no final answers.  But he diagnoses the problem; and that’s a beginning. 

 

The Giver, Lois Lowry

It is the future.  A utopian society—no war, no hunger, no pain. In The Community, no one wants for anything. Every facet of life is provided for.  The Committee of Elders makes all of life’s decisions, and they never make a mistake.  This is Utopia—or is it?   No one knows of the  past except The Giver, the one person in each generation who learns and passes on to the next Giver the memory of what life used to be.  Jonas, a 12-year old boy, is selected to learn from his predecessor and carry forward the memory of the past.  He learns what long ago, in the name of perfection, had been discarded—something vital, huge.  And he sets out on a hazardous adventure to restore what was left behind.  The New York Times describes The Giver as “a powerful and provocative novel.”

 

Billy Budd, Foretopman, Herman Melville

Posthumously published in 1924, this short novel represents the final flowering of Melville the symbolist, his last statement on the collision of good and evil.  Snatched from a safe berth to staff a warship, Billy, the archetypical innocent, confronts a force he does not comprehend.  Ranked among the 100 best novels of the 20th century, Billy Budd raises issues that concern us all. 

 

 

#    #    #