New Books to Try

Don’t you love new books? That is my favorite part of starting a new school year.

I homeschool my kids in a classical style but as they grew older we have focused into a sort of literature and original source method. This week is the start of our school year. We homeschool year-round so I had to draw the line between school years somewhere and chose August.

As my kids enter their second year of high school, we are leaving a lot of subjects by the wayside and focusing on some of those last few areas I really wanted to teach them before this wonderful homeschool adventure comes to an end. And so we are starting a whole pile of new subjects and books that I wanted to share with you.

New books can include the great books, even for you!

The great books are top of my list, but most of those are in the past for us. Sadly those wonderful moments spent reading the Aeneid, Dante, Canterbury Tales, Macbeth, and The Faerie Queene with my children are over. But did you know that Roman Roads Media is hosting their annual Parents Challenge? This is a fantastic opportunity for you to take the challenge and work through one of their fantastic programs that work through Western Culture, one year at a time, with Wesley Callihan. The reward? A free Western Culture course, your choice of which. I did the challenge a couple of years ago. In fact the mom that David mentions in his video describing the challenge is, well, me.

What do you do after you have taught all those great books to your kids?

Expand their world with books that teach areas they might never think to read about once they are grown. Make your choices together with your kids. No matter how old they are, having a voice in what you learn, choosing to study your interests, all lead to developing passions.

And so here is our core (non-elective) new book list:

U.S. History/Civics:

• Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man
• The Roots of American Order by Russell Kirk
• The Discover of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane
• A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind by Martin van Creveld
• The Collected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett
• The Complete Works of Frederick Douglas
• Democracy in America (volumes 1-4) by Alexis de Tocquville

World History & Geography:

• The First World War by John Keegan
• The Second World War by John Keegan
• The Lost Centuries, The Empire of the Arabs, and The Course of Empire by John Bagot Glubb
• A History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity to the Present by Elizabeth Isichei
• August 1914 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• Essential Writings on Church History, AD30 to the Present from Generations Passing on the Faith
• Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs by Douglas Smith

English:

• Dante’s La Vita Nuova
• The Mabinogion
• The Song of Roland
• The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton
• Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
• Myths and Folktales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and the Magyars by Jeremiah Curtin

Rhetoric:

• Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric
• Farnsworth’s Classical English Metaphor

What are you planning for the coming year?