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 - Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot
March 3 - On Crimes And Punishments by Cesare Beccaria
March 10 - A Sportsman's Notebook by Ivan Turgenev
March 17 - The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing by John Milton
March 24 - Skepticism by Sextus Empiricus
March 31 - A Philosophical Enquiry Into The Sublime And Beautiful by Edmund Burke
April 7 - Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson
April 14 - Discourse On The Method by Renee Descartes
April 21 - Song of Roland by Unknown.
April 28 - Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
May 5 - The Consolation Of Philosophy By Boethius
May 12 - The Red and the Black by Stendhal
May 19 - The Robbers, William Tell, and Love and Intrigue by Friedrich Schiller
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 - The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
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 Plymouth 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 - Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
August 11 - Thoughts by Blaise Pascal
August 18 - Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre
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 - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
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 by 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 - Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery
November 10 - Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach
November 17 - Original Folk And Fairy Tales by the Brothers 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