The following is my reading list for 2023, during which I will be discussing one reading per week. The dates given are the dates on which I plan to have uploaded an episode of "Canonball" discussing the reading. Scheduling a podcast about books comes with a difficulty. Podcasts ought to be done at some regular interval, but the lengths of books and readings are not at all regular. I did not want to pick books based on what I thought I could read in a week. That cuts out not only longer books, but also shorter worthwhile texts. What I have done is order the readings roughly from shortest to longest as the year goes on. The first reading, Boule de Suif, is a single short story, while printings of the last one, Le Morte d'Arthur, regularly weigh in at around 1,000 pages. My plan is not to allocate the same amount of reading time to both of these, but to get ahead of schedule in the beginning of the year so I have more time to spend on the longer books like The Last Man, The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, The Persian Wars, and Le Morte D'Arthur toward the end of the year. I hope you will join me in reading some of these great books this year.
January 6 - Boule de Suif by Guy de Maupassant
January 13 - Life of Alfred the Great by Asser
January 20 - Works and Days, Theogony by Hesiod
January 27 - Poetics by Aristotle
February 3 - Odes by Horace
February 10 - On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
February 17 - Rhetoric by Aristotle
February 24 - Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone by Sophocles
March 3 - Oresteia by Aeschylus
March 10 - Songs Of Innocence And Experience by William Blake
March 17 - A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge by George Berkeley
March 24 - Skepticism by Sextus Empiricus
March 31 - A Philosophical Enquiry Into The Sublime And Beautiful by Edmund Burke
April 7 - New Organon by Francis Bacon
April 14 - Discourse On The Method by Renee Descartes
April 21 - Room With A View by Edward Morgan Forster
April 28 - Principle Speeches by Demosthenes
May 5 - Micromegas, Candide, and Zadig by Voltaire
May 12 - Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer
May 19 - This Side of Paradise by F Scott Fitzgerald
May 26 - Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
June 2 - On The Nature Of Things by Lucretius
June 9 - Six Plays by Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Moliere
June 16 - Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle
June 23 - Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
June 30 - The Prince, The Art Of War by Niccolo Machiavelli
July 7 - The Origin And Deeds of the Goths by Jordanes
July 14 - Of Plymoth Plantation by William Bradford
July 21 - On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle
July 28 - Mabinogion by Unknown
August 4 - Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
August 11 - Thoughts by Blaise Pascal
August 18 - Talisman by Sir Walter Scott
August 25 - The Ecclesiastical history of the English People by Bede
September 1 - Njal's Saga by Unknown
September 8 - House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
September 15 - Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott
September 22 - Tess Of The Dubervilles by Thomas Hardy
September 29 - Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes
October 6 - Metamorphoses by Ovid
October 13 - The Bostonians to be discussed on Henry James
October 20 - Divine Comedy by Dante Alighierei
October 27 - An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation by Jeremy Bentham
November 3 - Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott
November 10 - Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach
November 17 - Original Folk And Fairy Tales by Brother's Grimm
November 24 - Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
December 1 - Last Man by Mary Wallstonecraft Shelley
December 8 - Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
December 15 - The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
December 22 - The Persian Wars by Herodotus
December 29 - Le Morte D'Arthur by Thomas Malory