Talk:Great Books

I've always had the feeling that the phrase "critical thinking" is somewhat abused. How many of these books actually contain a direct critique? As much as I like Don Quixote, it's really more of a comedy. Fictional books aren't usually critiques in and of themselves, and literary devices like allegory are much closer to propaganda than critique. Thinking critically and speaking/writing critically are one and the same. It seems to me that a serious, dialectic critique is a very uncommon thing indeed. Though I'm sure many exist and I could cite a few of them, they do not seem as conspicuous as other works. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 20:27, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

The Books

It may be worth mentioning somewhere on the page that "Great Books of the Western World," a collection of books compiled by Mortimer J Adler (via Encyclopaedia Britannica), is publicly available on the Internet Archive. I just started poking through it, and it looks to be in very good condition!

It might also worth noting that his list in How To Read a Book is presented in roughly chronological order for a reason - that reading them in such a way helps one understand the conversation that our culture was having with itself across time. The order of the books in the sample list is somewhat chaotically ordered. Keyless15 (discuss • contribs) 01:49, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

The Online Books Page

Mention The Online Books Page as an alternative soruce of books. Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 13:35, 27 October 2024 (UTC)