36 Books That Changed The World by The Great Courses (audiobook)

As a bibliophile, is there any wonder I felt I needed to listen to this course? It's a very interesting look at several books written throughout history that had a profound impact one the world. I've read very few of them, but most of them are on my "to read at some point in my life" list. Here's the breakdown and the lecturer(s) on each:

1. The Epic of Gilgamesh by Grant L. Voth
2. Homer's The Odyssey by John M. Bowers
3. The Bhagavad Gita by Grant Hardy
4. Sun Tsu 's The Art of War by Andrew R. Wilson
5. Confucius's The Analects by Mark W. Muesse
6. Herodotus' Histories by Elizabeth Vandiver
7. Plato's The Republic by Dennis Dalton
8. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics by Robert C. Bartlett
9. Ovid's Metamorphoses by Elizabeth Vandiver
10. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations by Luke Timothy Johnson
11. St. Augustine's Confessions by William R. Cook & Ronald B. Herzman
12. The Koran by Grant Hardy
13. Fibonacci's The Liber Abaci by Dorsey Armstrong
14. Dante's The Divine Comedy by John M. Bowers
15. Machiavelli's The Prince by William R. Cook
16. Copernicus' On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs by Lawrence M. Principe
17. Shakespeare's Hamlet by John M. Bowers
18. Cervantes' Don Quixote by Ronald B. Herzman
19. The King James Bible by John Sutherland
20. Francis Bacon's The New Organum by Alan Charles Kors
21.  Denis Diderot's & Jean le Rond d'Alembert's The Encyclopedie by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
22. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language by Seth Lerer
23. Thomas Paine's Common Sense by Peter Conn
24. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations by Jerry Z. Muller
25. Madison's, Hamilton's, & Jay's The Federalist Papers by Daniel N. Robinson
26. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Arnold Weinstein
27. Mary Wolstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by John Sutherland
28. Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America by William R. Cook
29. Marx's & Engel's The Communist Manifesto by Jerry Z. Muller
30. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin by Arnold Weinstein
31. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
32. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty by Jay L. Garfield
33. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle by Peter Conn
34. Martin Heidegger's Being and Time by Lawrence Cahoone
35. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Irwin Weil
36. Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique by Patrick N. Allitt

Of the books listed above, I've only read seven. These lecture's though, have really intrigued me about many of these texts. I was particularly interested in the one on the Koran, as I know less than nothing about Islam, and considering the state of the world, it might be useful to know the truth from the fiction about Muslim's and their faith. That understanding might not be returned, but understanding is always a good thing. Some of these books I will probably never read - I tried reading the Ramayana many years ago and I don't think I understood a word, so the Bhagavad Gita is probably out. But reading some of these alongside these lectures would help to show why they are as influential as the are. I learned a great deal and that is, of course, the point.

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