May & June '24 Books
Books on tap for June and a recap of my reading during May.
June 2024 Reading List
I’m in the final month of my Spring Semester reading through the Great Books. This year is my Big Fat Greek Reading List and I’ve focused heavily on the Greek Tragedy writers this year. I decided to take a slight break from Sophocles and read The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. I’m 100 pages in and it is so good. I read Herodotus’ Histories last year and was completely enraptured. It’s fun comparing Thucydides and Herodotus.
I’m hoping to finish Thucydides around the middle of June and then I’ll read the other four Sophoclean tragedies (Ajax, Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes). I spent most of May focused on Sophocles’ Theban Plays and I look forward to reading his others. I so thoroughly enjoyed the Paul Woodruff introduction to the Theban Plays that I decided to use his version of the four other tragedies put out by Hackett.
After Sophocles, I’ll read Euripides. I’ve chosen these three versions that include all of his surviving works. Whatever I don’t finish in June will move to August. July is my summer break month where I read through books on my to-be-read pile.
May 2024 Recap
I finished Aeschylus’ works early in May and then moved on to Sophocles and spent 3+ weeks reading the Theban Plays. They were amazing. I also joined a Catherine Project online reading group where we spent three sessions covering the three Theban Plays. That was so much fun and the timing was perfect as it occurred at the exact time I was reading the plays. I closed out the month reading a more modern rendition of Antigone written by Jean Anouilh in 1942. It was first performed in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1944 and had a run of over 500 performances.
I really enjoyed the four additional Aeschylus plays (Prometheus Bound, The Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes, and The Persians). In April, I read The Oresteia (multiple times) and then finished these other four (we just have 7 surviving works for both Aeschylus & Sophocles). Here is my podcast episode about these works by Aeschylus:
I covered the two Sophocles’ plays about Oedipus in a podcast episode:
And then recorded a separate episode for the incredible Antigone play:
What’s Next?
To add variety, I structure each reading year in the following way: 8 months are devoted to Great Books, 2 months for a complete Bible reading, and the final 2 months to catch up on my ever-growing to-be-read pile. This is how it plays out month by month:
January - February - the Bible (different translation each year)
March - June - Spring Semester of The Great Books
July - Summer Break (TBR Pile that I’ll be announcing soon)
August - November - Fall Semester of The Great Books
December - Winter Break (TBR Pile)
I plan to follow this schedule for the next 10 or so years as I make my way through 200 of The Great Books. I find that it keeps me connected to modern books during July & December while focusing on the Great Books during the other months. It also provides regular breaks from the demanding works of The Great Books.