HOW MANY GREAT BOOKS ARE THERE? I think Adler’s list was too short, and it was a

HOW MANY GREAT BOOKS ARE THERE?

I think Adler’s list was too short, and it was an apologia for democracy. The aristocratic list I’ve been keeping is somewhere around 200, but it has a broader range of interest and it requires more books to alter the direction of the enlightenment than to confirm it with selected confirmation biases.

But lets say that the list requires 250 books, just to pick a number. And lets say that every 15 points of IQ requires a DIFFERENT book in order to communicate the basic principles to each audience. You’d need say, 5 books total, or perhaps 6 including the original idea. So, that’s a library of 1500 books.

Now, I’m talking non-fiction here. And you can add fiction to that list, and I have, and I was surprised how few survived scrutiny.

Any given person would need to read 250 books targeted to his or her reading level, and then the great literature in order to ‘taste’ every time period. (without the narrative it is very difficult to grasp the past in any meaningful way.)

Even if you only read one book a month that would only take twenty years. If you read two books a month, that would take you only ten years. If we taught reading, writing, math and basic physics through age seven, and then the great books, I’m not really sure there is a lot of wiggle room in education.