This week in the Great Books List

Nineteen Eighty-Four . George Orwell. 1949

Eric Blair, better known under his pen name George Orwell, is considered by many the foremost British writer of the 20th Century. A journalist, political writer and novelist he is famous for two influential and iconic novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
These two works, published mid-century, railed against totalitarianism and political oppression and the latter gave us nightmarish images still referenced today.. Read more here.

Book of the week

Disquiet by Julia Leigh

A battered mother of two returns to the family chateau that she left a dozen years years earlier. Olivia arrives, injured as the result of a battering, with her two interesting children. Yet the return is upstaged by the arrival of Olivia's brother with his wife and the wrapped body of his lifeless newborn. Australian Julia Leigh's new novel Disquiet is not for the squeamish. Mining the depths of family conflict, rage and dispair, Leigh's second novel is reviewed here.

Articles of note

The Great Dictators of the Great Books

Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins thought they could preserve democracy by prescribing a heavy dose of culture for the common man. According to Matthew Price in his review of a new  history of the Great Books, the canon of great books is one part myth, another part wishful-thinking. At once self-limiting and ever expanding, the western literary and philosophical tradition has grown by means organic and totally artificial. Classics, after all, were once new; but only posterity decides which works survive to be handed down from generation to generation, and which vanish into obscurity. Few would deny that the likes of Aristotle, Cervantes and Shakespeare are central figures in the western canon. But what, exactly, do we mean when we speak of literary greatness? The very notion is enshrouded in a kind of hoary mysticism. Read more here.