The Civilized Reader

Edited by William and Amy Fahey, The Civilized Reader joyfully reviews classic, good books — books that will enrich the life of your family and the minds of your children.

November 12, 2012

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

by Mitchell Kalpakgian

A miser gains but never gives. A moneylender gives in order to receive. A friend gives generously and gladly but never charges interest. A lover gives without calculating the cost, takes a risk without any guarantees, and gives without any…

October 29, 2012

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

by Mitchell Kalpakgian

Human problems lend themselves to many solutions, some of them with an oppressive heavy-hand and others with a gentle touch. Gravity easily oppresses and complicates problems whereas lightheartedness simplifies the complex and applies a magical gentleness that Shakespeare compares to…

October 25, 2012

Savage Danger, Virgin Serenity: An Introduction to the Leatherstocking Tales

by Therese Conte

Two woodsmen emerge from the thick overgrowth of wood, and wend their way to the edge of a pristine, shimmering lake. The beautiful Glimmerglass, as this water is known, resplendent in its virgin serenity, belies the savage danger that awaits…

October 12, 2012

What Should Children Read?

by Russell Kirk

In recommending books to be read by young people from the age of seven to the age of twelve, this critic’s problem is not paucity, but plenitude. For the number of good books for young people is large, and it…

October 1, 2012

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men

by Mitchell Kalpakgian

To use the phrase of St. Thomas Aquinas, farming and education belong to the category of “cooperative arts.” The farmer does not himself produce the harvest, but provides the cultivation of the soil, the sowing of the seed, the tending…

September 24, 2012

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

by Mitchell Kalpakgian

Stowe’s great American novel, a bestseller in 1852, exposes the dehumanizing evil of slavery for the vicious crime and sin it is—the evil of reducing human beings to animals and objects. In the novel she introduces a host of characters…

September 10, 2012

Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales

by Mitchell Kalpakgian

Proverbs, folk tales, and fairy tales provide a great source of the world’s accumulated wisdom and perennial philosophy. To read Andersen’s fairy tales is to rediscover the adventure of the human story, to experience the sweet taste of goodness, and…

August 30, 2012

Melville’s Billy Budd

by Mitchell Kalpakgian

Evil assumes many forms and shapes and changes its wardrobe from age to age. In classical mythology it assumes the shape of the Gorgon’s Head, the repulsive head of Medusa with the locks of serpents—evil so loathsome that men who…

August 16, 2012

Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

by Mitchell Kalpakgian

Jane Austen’s genius comprehends the subject of marriage and the book of love in all its intricacy, practicality, goodness, and mystery. Her novels center on the importance of marriage as one of life’s most important choices and life’s greatest source…

August 6, 2012

Henry Gilbert’s Robin Hood

by Giuseppe Butera

“‘Methinks this is no common man, this Robin Hood. Almost it seems that he doth right in spite of the laws, and that they be wrong indeed if they have forced him to flee to the greenwood and become outside…

July 23, 2012

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

by Mitchell Kalpakgian

With imaginative power and biting satire Swift exposes the madness and folly of learning divorced from morals and of reason devoid of feeling and charity—the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment. In “a Voyage to Lilliput” six-inch creatures, not only tiny…

July 2, 2012

Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days

by Mitchell Kalpakgian

“After all, what would life be like without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is…

June 18, 2012

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden

by Mitchell Kalpakgian

“But if you stay in a room you never see things.” Something magical occurs when a child who remains indoors goes outside to play. Something amazing happens when a lonely child discovers a friend and delights in companionship. Something great…

May 19, 2012

Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio

by Mitchell Kalpakgian

How does a wooden puppet become a real boy? How does one tame a wild boy full of spirit? When does a boy become a man? What is the art of educating the young to become refined and civilized? Pinocchio…

May 10, 2012

The Arabian Nights

by Giuseppe Butera

“Be sure that you wake me an hour before the dawn, and speak to me in these words: ‘My sister, if you are not asleep, I beg you, before the sun rises, to tell me one of your charming stories.’…

May 3, 2012

Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses

by Mitchell Kalpakgian

“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” In this one of his most famous lines, Robert Louis Stevenson presents us with a metaphor of the child as…

April 26, 2012

A Tuscan Childhood

by Kathleen Blum

If our children are ever to fight the deracination of modern life by being builders of Catholic culture, they must first be romanced by it, must learn what it can look like and feel like and, yes, especially after another long Lent, even taste like.

April 19, 2012

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book

by Mitchell Kalpakgian

“They are three very strange old ladies,” said Quicksilver, laughing. “They have but one eye among them, and only one tooth. Moreover, you must find them out by starlight, or in the dusk of evening; for they never show themselves…

April 12, 2012

All Happy Trails Lead West

by Michael Platt

A lot of good books have come out of the West. They have been written by men and by women and may be read by girls and by boys. It is no wonder that so many appear on John Senior’s…

April 2, 2012

A Poet of the Passion of Christ

by Christopher O. Blum

To T. S. Eliot, the poet’s function is a kind of mediation between experience and language. In great poetry, he suggested, “there is always the communication of some new experience, or some fresh understanding of the familiar, or the experience…

March 29, 2012

Hilaire Belloc, Cautionary Tales and Bad Child’s Book of Beasts

I remember the first time I read John Senior’s Death of Christian Culture. That it ended with a reading list was, well, something of a surprise. There was everyone you would expect—Dickens and Scott, Austen and Wister—and some I had…

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