Slight self promotion, but Standard Ebooks has a few of the classics, and a few more of the classic fiction available as nicely formatted and accessible PD ebooks (epub, Kobo variant epub, and Kindle formats for each):
These are nearly always taken from the Gutenberg source transcriptions, but tidied up typographically and marked up using modern technologies. If you notice any problems with any of these we’ll happily take PRs!
At the risk of looking a gift horse in the mouth, the ePub versions I tried are rather unreadable, at least for me. Too many erroneously omitted spaces between words, odd hyphens breaking a word up in the middle of a paragraph, and mis-spellings.
If you have low quality source, eg OCRed scans, then you’ll never get a high quality ePub. It needs manual intervention and proofing to keep quality up. Not to say that archive.org isn’t useful - I’ve produced a collection of Keats poetry[1] as an ePub from their OCRed source in the past - but it’s not really consumable as is.
Yeah, I came here just to say that. I downloaded and unzipped the archive, then opened a few. The ones I looked at were badly formatted and had no TOC as well.
For anyone that wants to download the books, I strongly recommend downloading the PDF archive on Archive.org because the image scans within the PDFs are of much higher quality. https://archive.org/details/Harvard-Classics
Excellent form! I would LOVE to see more of this type of posting in HN. We're supposed to hack everything!
There was a really neat post the other day I think you might like about how someone made a shell script that performed a job like 200x quicker than hadoop. You'd probably enjoy it.
It is great that these books are available for download. However, the quality of a translation is hugely important. Even translations that were considered great at the time may be turgid and off-putting to a contemporary ear. And the problem is that you might try, for example, Dante from this list, hate it, and miss out on what may have been a life-altering reading experience. My advice, if you want to read some of the great classics, is to (a) look at reviews; and (b) compare paragraphs from different translations.
Whenever this subject comes up, I feel the need to point out St. John's College's undergraduate liberal arts program:
https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs
Yes. The undergraduate 'great books' program used at St. John's came from the University of Chicago (Mortimer Adler and others) through Stringfellow Barr. The University of Chicago based their program on Charles Eliot's work (i.e., the Harvard University Classics).
I was also pointing out that it's (anecdotally) beneficial to read the Harvard Classics and other foundational works, but if you're looking for some sort of academic purity, there you go.
They are pointing out that it’s based on Great Books, the Western Canon. There will be some disagreement on which minor works are part of the canon but very little on major works. Plato, Homer, Augustine, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Cicero, Goethe, Dante, Shakespeare
So how does one go about reading such classics? Any tips? I often get distracted by the arcane language of many translations and go for a modern translation, preferably annotated. Even when the English seems pretty readable (say, Shakespeare) it's obvious I miss quite a lot in comprehension.
Reading the books chronologically also helps. You'll understand more of the references and see how the books build on each other (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Conversation) e.g. Homer (Ilad) -> Virgil (Aeneid) -> Dante (Divine Comedy).
Open the first page, and continue through the rest. This might seem like a flippant answer, but I've always hated companion texts which try to read specific meanings into primary texts. I much prefer just to engage with the original, and make what I can of it. I figure I might miss some things, but I can also have my own perspective.
I understand where you're coming from, but for most people the brute force approach to reading original texts without sufficient background deprives them of many layers of understanding that makes a text rewarding to read.
And because most readers are centuries removed form the original context of the text, a direct reading also skews their interpretation significantly because most will read it through their own 21st century lens (this is how chronological bias seeps in).
Companion texts (or commentaries) might seem like crutches or training wheels because they only present one interpretive option (which could reflect a commentary author's biases).
The remedy is use more than one commentary, not necessarily to discard all commentaries. Critical thinkers do this instinctively anyway -- for instance, we click on multiple Google News links to figure out what's going on.
Commentaries help a modern reader to get to speed on the historical context and thinking that was present during that era, which in turn helps them to formulate their own (more informed) thoughts. One could try to piece together this material by inferring stuff from the text, but chances are one would be wrong about the details and one would have to consult secondary or tertiary materials anyway.
In Chaim Potok's "The Chosen" (fiction), there's a Hasidic character named Danny Saunders who was a prodigy, praised by all for his intelligence. He had an eidetic memory and great ability for analysis, but found himself stumped when reading original texts in psychology. He studies German in order to read Freud, but he gets stuck on the fact German words can be understood in many different ways, when he only wants to find the ONE way.
He has a breakthrough when he realizes that Freud's works need to be studied, not read. His epiphany led to him studying Freud using Talmudic methods (with multiple commentaries), arguing with it, etc. and finally, the text yields to him.
TLDR: when a text stumps you, try reading it with multiple commentaries.
What you are describing is what must be done when one embarks on a project of literary study.
If you just want a story, which is what almost all readers actually read for, just read it as it is, and if doesn't make any sense you are perfectly entitled to think it was a shitty book.
Frankly I think a (fiction) book must always be able to be read as-is, unsupported by outside means, else it is no longer a book.
(You hear that Greg Egan?! You wrote a really bad text book or a pretty good fiction book with pointless homework included every now and then.)
In 500 years, Star Trek will require a watcher's guide and come with a bundle of commentaries. Footnotes about 20th century culture will crawl across the bottom of the screen like subtitles. There will be a saying that, "by the time you are experienced enough to play Wesley you will be too old for him." Children will be expected to bubble in standardized Star Trek tests.
There are many ways to start. One way is to follow a favorite subject (for nonfiction classics). If you don't know much about a particular work, skim the book. Don't expect to or worry about getting "everything" from a book. The classics are eminently re-readable. If after 50 or 100 pages it's not "working" for you, set it aside; maybe things will go better later.
Reading groups are a great help. Even one other person to ask questions with, read passages to, and discuss--can help encourage you and add a lot of enjoyment.
Find a pace that works for you and your book. Too slow and one can lose the big picture. Too fast and one can miss key details. Some works work well when read aloud; Shakespeare's like that.
At the bottom is the Reading list .pdf . It has a suggested reading for every day of the year, at about 10 pages of reading per day. I'd just open that up and go to it. For May 27th it is:
Lessing's Courageous Stand for Toleration:
To advance freedom of thought, Lessing published an essay of one hundred paragraphs outlining the history of religion. The wrath of orthodox churchmen was hurled at his head, and Lessing was left alone to defend his daring theories.
Read from The Education of the Human Race Vol. 32, pp. 185-195
You have to be aware of the age of these books, and esp. the comments, written in 1910. The books itself did age quite properly, but the lectures and comments not so. E.g. they are in todays standard extremely racist, unscientific and religious, all over in praise of the Aryan race, the superiority of Christianism and mixed in the Jews.
E.g. Vol 51, p22: "The Germans were crude and military; the Latins were subtle and peaceful".
A modern canon would be much be better, such as we learn it in todays schools.
go for a modern translation, preferably annotated.
That's a perfectly sensible way to go, in most cases. You also don't have to start with the wankiest things just because they used to beat this stuff into 10 year olds in original. Anabasis is a lot easier than History of the Peloponnesian War
When I was a kid we had the whole set. I assume that it was something tied together with Britannica -- we had an early 60's set. I tried to read them but the font faces were so small that they were terrible reading copies. If memory serves, I remember really, really trying to read Moby Dick and Darwin (are they both on the list?) but the tiny type and terrible formatting defeated me.
More than 45 years later, I've read maybe 70% of the books in the list (maybe more), but all in different, more readable editions. Today almost everything I read is in epub, and pdf for technical and scientific papers.
Most readable one is also the one most mystifying included: Two Years before the Mast.
I actually bought this collection on ebay years ago for like 10 dollars. It's really a great example of not being able to buy the time along with the books. They mostly collect dust. "Mmm, Sacred Writings..."
Yes, but hopefully you have a larger device and can scale the PDF but as others have pointed out, there are ePub versions about.
I sort of prefer PDFs though, when an ePub is allowed to reflow the content ... it often leaves some off widows and orphans. (Never mind the problems when there are also illustrations or drop caps.)
Epub is a great format if you're not just embedding images. It's pretty braindead, so generating it is easy, as is converting it to any other standard you need. Most ereaders can parse it.
However, if you have the LaTeX source, then you can both convert to whatever, and have no information loss. But you do usually have to render it to something else.
I downloaded them, unzipped, and opened a few. They're pretty badly formatted, especially the title pages. And none of the volumes I looked at had any table of contents.
I have been experimenting with the idea of reading some classics in the languages they were written in - Greek, Latin, French, etc., and I am still wondering if the experience is worth the effort (of learning a language), especially given the availability of many excellent English translations.
The difficulty is that your language ability needs to be at such a high level that you'd lose more nuance from a translation than you would from lack of vocabulary etc when reading the original. In my opinion it's worth it for poetry but prose less so.
Hard to say if it's worth the effort, but I've taught myself enough French to read classics (e.g. Hugo, Déscartes, Tocqueville), and it really is an immense pleasure. I imagine I'll get a kick out of it for the rest of my life.
This is fantastic. My only gripe here is that I don't see Herodotus or Thucydides listed, which I would consider very important prerequisites to some of the other books, especially Plutarch.
I guess it depends on how 'complete' a list you're looking for, but the Loeb Classics library included Aurelius in 1916 and Epictetus in 1925. They were not in any way forgotten or thought of as minor.
My parent's got a set of these in the 60's, leather bound with gold leaf printing on the covers and page trims. I had them assessed a few years ago, and they are worth a small mint. Then my evil sister got them and they are gone.
Here [1] is a list (extracted from volume 50 apparently) of suggested excerpts. Supposedly, if you spend just 15 minutes a day reading these, you will become well educated in just a year. Note: I have not tried this.
I tried to read through this once. I couldn't get beyond: "Volume 1 - Benjamin Franklin" because I found Benny Frank to be an insufferable nerd hah. It sort of ruined the perception that grade school gave me of him.
EDIT: added Project Gutenberg link.