The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer

Have you lost the art of reading for pleasure? Are there books you know you should read but haven’t because they seem too daunting? In her previous book, The Well-Trained Mind, the author provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to homeschool their children. That book is now the premier resource for homeschoolers. In this new book, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them for adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading.

The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres — fiction, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry — accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The anotated lists at the end of each chapter — ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich — preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing.

The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there’s no reason you can’t read and enjoy Shakespeare’s sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the “Great Books” without a guide and a plan.

The Well-Educated Mind will show you:

how to allocate time to reading on a regular basis

how to master a difficult argument

how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read

how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre — what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary? — and also between genres Followed carefully, the advice in The Well-Educated Mind will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.